After a slow month in May, June flew by, and there’s a lot of cool new stuff that’s in the game now. With the match and promo simulation engine largely complete, development for the rest of the summer is going to be primarily focused on building out the financial engine. And there’s a lot done now on that front, so let’s dive in.
Seeking A 2D Artist
CWP Development Update, June 2021
The primary thing that I worked on over the past month was the new Championship Wrestling Promoter demo, which you can play right now if you haven’t already. Now that the demo is out, I’ve started work on the financial management aspect of the game. Up until now it’s been possible to book shows, but not to make any money from them. Since running the financial side of your promotion is intended to be a pretty big part of the final game, it’s going to be fun to start to get that stuff all in the game.
But there isn’t much new content to show at the moment, since I’m still working out how a lot of the financial components will look and work, so this month I’m going to talk about the game from a more game design-y, philosophical standpoint. In particular, I’m going to talk about one of the main design pillars for the game, which is that all of the info that you need should be easy to find, and require as few clicks as possible.
CWP Development Update, May 2021
April was an important month in the development of Championship Wrestling Promoter. For the moment I’ve stopped adding new features and work is now entirely focused on adding some polish, balance, and most importantly - new content. This means there isn’t as much to show off visually as there has been in some previous months, but the game is now much better to play than it was a month or two ago. This leads into the big announcement for this month - I’ll be releasing a new demo soon.
CWP Development Update, April 2021
Not a lot to say this month, as pretty much everything I’ve been working on is code in the back-end that doesn’t have any new associated visuals. Most of the month was spent adding in new content; most of the special match types are in the game. There are a few that will need a bunch of unique code that aren’t there yet (iron man matches, battle royals, etc.), but there’s a lot more variety now to the kinds of 1v1 matches you can book. Promos have been reworked so they’re in the same style as matches are. The main thing left to do there is just write all the speech/text that promos will be made up of, but the code to make them work properly is all there. I also spent a bunch of time working on getting the game some better balance. Math and spreadsheets are an important part of game development but they don’t always make for a very interesting blog post. Hopefully next month I’ll have some more interesting new features to show off.
CWP Development Update, March 2021
This month’s update will be a bit shorter than other months because I spent a bunch of time working on some new art, and since I’m not a professional artist it takes a while to get anything done. Even though I’m only adding placeholder art until I bring a professional artist onboard for the project, I think it makes the game look better, and it helps a lot with designing the screen layouts. Other than that, a lot of what I’ve been working on has been changes on the back-end that are harder to show off, but make the game more fun to play.
CWP Development Update, February 2021
It’s been a while with no development updates. Unfortunately due to an unusual confluence of factors (my desktop PC failed, local stores were closed due to Covid, and mail was delayed due to the Christmas rush), I ended up not being able to do any new coding for over a month. But the game remains under active development and I’ve got lots to share this month.
The bulk of the changes are to the way matches play out. This includes a completely new match screen, a new formula for determining how well the wrestlers are entertaining the audience, some new pre- and post-match screens, and, for the first time ever, some graphics. Let’s dive into the specific changes in more detail.
CWP Development Update, October 2020
I’m hoping to have a second demo of Championship Wrestling Promoter ready to go sometime around the end of the year. This new demo will be much expanded with the new features I’ve been working on such as promos (a critical part of any wrestling show) and special match types. To that end, I’m not spending a lot of time adding new features at the moment, so much as adding content and improving the general user experience. Most of what I’ve spent the past month working on is adding new types of promos and special matches (called Stipulations in CWP), so let’s take a look.
PROMOS
Last month I showed off the first 1v1 promo type, which is two wrestlers standing in the ring exchanging words. That’s probably the most common type of promo that wrestling fans think of. I’ve added some new promo types since then. One fun one is a backstage brawl, where one wrestler does a sneak attack on another (as I’ve mentioned before “Mr. Microphone” is a name that will be user-editable).
CWP Development Update, September 2020
September saw a lot of work on the traditional things that go on behind the scenes to make the game better but aren’t necessarily visible: UI improvements and game balance issues.
But there were two big new features added to the game that I can show off: opposed promos and special match types.
Promos
The first is that you can now book promos where two wrestlers face off and exchange barbs.
CWP Development Update, August 2020
Releasing the demo of the match simulation engine of Championship Wrestler Promoter last month was a big relief. After working on the game without really sharing anything about it for 6-7 months, it was nice to finally be able to give people a glimpse of how the game is shaping up, even if it was just a fraction of what will be in the final game.
There’s one big new addition that I’ve since made to the game, and quite a few smaller upgrades to the look and interface that make CWP better to play.