September saw the introduction of two big new features. The first is scouting. It’s now possible to build a team of scouts who will scour the globe for the next big thing, or maybe to find some great independent workers to flesh out your roster. The second new feature is the long-awaited introduction of the Trait system, which I’m pretty excited about. Scouting is pretty straight-forward, so I’ll start with a quick rundown of what that entails and then jump into Traits.
SCOUTING
You can now hire scouts, who will scour the globe for new talent to add to your roster. Each scout is good at finding one specific type of wrestler, and each wrestling style tends to excel at different statistics, so for example if you’re looking for good workers you’ll want scouts who specialise in Technical wrestlers, but on the other hand if you want to find more wrestlers who cut good promos you may want to scout for Brawlers.
Scouts are only necessary to find new, unknown wrestlers. Any wrestler who works for one of the other wrestling promotions that you’re competing with who has their contract expire will show up on the free agent list automatically. You can think of it like hockey, where every team knows all the players on all the other teams, but if they want to know which junior players are going to be the next big thing, they have to scout them.
TRAITS
Traits are one aspect of the game I’ve been excited about from the beginning, but it wasn’t possible to make them work in the game until most of the other core systems were available, since the traits modify how wrestlers interact with all the other systems. If you’ve ever played a strategy game like Total War or Crusader Kings you’ll be familiar with the idea that each character has specific traits that grant unique bonuses and set them apart from other characters in the game, so that even randomly generated characters feel like they’ve got a bit of history. I’ve not done a very good job of communicating this so far, but many things in Championship Wrestling Promoter are randomly generated, including every wrestler in the game. Here’s an example from the recent Total War: Three Kingdoms.
You can see that this character has three traits: Kind, Scholarly, and Understanding, and that being Kind grants a number of bonuses that go along with that.
Here’s an example of a trait in Championship Wrestling Promoter:
Traits that modify how wrestlers perform in special match types are one of many different trait types available. To give you some examples of how flexible the system is, here are some other traits that currently exist in the game:
Safe Worker - opponent injury chance reduced by 50%
Big Ego - wrestler demands more screen time each month
Natural Draw - 20% bonus to ticket sales this wrestler generates
Go Away Heat - 20% penalty to ticket sales this wrestler generates
There are currently 34 of these “standard” trait types in the game. The goal is to get to at least double that by the time the game is finished next year.
In addition to the standard trait types that affect a character permanently, there will also be temporary traits that can be triggered by things that happen to a character during a match, or through random events. The most common type of temporary trait is injuries.
(As an aside, the statistic called “Over” has been changed to “Popularity” because I thought it was confusing having Over and Overall mean different things.)
It will be possible to turn injuries off if you’d prefer to remove that element of randomness from the game, but I think they add a fun way to keep players on their toes and generate stories. Championship Wrestling Promoter is being designed first and foremost as a well balanced and moderately challenging strategy game, but like all simulation games it’s also a story generator, and I think injuries or other random elements that force the player to adjust their plans help make for more fun stories.
One final note that isn’t related to traits: later this month we’re going to start implementing the real, final art work into the game, so this should be the last development log that has my generic programmer wrestler art. The character art is looking great in the internal demos we’ve been working on, and by this time next month they should be implemented in all the game screens where you can see the wrestlers. Very soon you’ll start to see what the game is really supposed to look like!