We’re starting to wind down on major new features being added to the game. At this point most of the work being done is to make the game more user-friendly and add some polish and balancing. There was one major new element added to the game last month, so let’s take a look at that, as well as some smaller things that been been worked on.
Scouting
The way that scouting for new wrestlers works in Championship Wrestling Promoter has changed substantially. The original vision was that you would hire individual scouts all over the globe, who would find wrestlers in the region where they lived based on the scout’s statistics. However, I was never really happy with how this worked. There were a lot of fiddly numbers in the background, and as a player it just wasn’t very fun, because you would hire a scout and then they’d do some opaque things in the background that you had no control over.
So last month I threw out all the old scouting gameplay and created something that I think is more fun to play. Now you set up scouting “networks” around the globe, deciding which regions you want to look in and what kinds of wrestlers you want to focus on finding. For example, you can tell your scouts to look for younger wrestlers, who will have lower statistics but could turn into stars down the road, or scouts can look for veterans who can help fill out your roster. Here’s what the scouting network screen looks like:
In that screenshot you can also see a bit of a new look for the info bar at the top of the screen, which now contains a bit more information. Your place in the TV ratings war is now the first thing you’ll see. Winning the TV ratings war is the goal of the game, so it should be easy to see at a glance how you’re doing. There’s also now a minimum roster size, so you can quickly see how many wrestlers you have under contract. The idea is to put some of the main details you’ll want to know on the screen no matter what you’re doing in the game.
Polish and balance
Right now Championship Wrestling Promoter is, in my opinion, a pretty fun game to play. All the core features work, and I think it’s fun to manage a wrestling company in the game. However, there are a ton of things that I think could work better in order to make the game a smoother experience, and right now that’s where most of the development time is focused.
I’ve got a list of a couple hundred things that need to be fixed, improved, or balanced, and I’m rapidly crossing things off that list. Each one individually only has a very small impact on the game, but once they’re all done it will make the game a lot more fun to play.
A lot of attention right now is going into the financial model of the game. Managing your company’s finances isn’t the most important part of the game, but it helps hold some of the other parts of the game together, and it provides other goals aside from having the highest rated TV show. It’s important for the game not to give you too much money, but also to make it so you can’t wind up in a spiral of losing money, so balancing how much revenue you earn and how much money it costs to run the company is critical.
Aside from that there have been a big pile of bugs fixed, and a lot of little changes to how screens look and function. That’s largely what remains to work on before the closed beta launches later this summer.