Short week on the blog, as I had been letting things slip such that I was blogging on Wednesdays rather than the usual Sunday evening. It’s another week where I don’t seem to have ticked off a whole lot of features. At least I was fully focused on the game this week, putting in the past a period of aimlessness while I was struggling with ADHD-related medical issues.
One theme of this week seemed to be finally closing off some very old bugs that had persisted for months and I had put off dealing with. One of these was in the PvE opponent generation code, which had occasionally been producing players with 0 or -1 stars. Another was in the card ranking code, where I was finally able to get the List page to put duplicate and mergeable cards first, labelled appropriately. Still another was in the gacha code, so that region coin packs actually restrict their card pools to players from those regions. Then there was a little bug that stopped Members rewards from being delivered. And I even figured out how to get rid of most of the npm audit errors from dependencies, apart from the one below which has been an industry-wide bugbear among Firebase users for years now. Boring but necessary stuff.
The main new achievement of the week was in item balancing, specifically in the Campaign match mode. I plan on maintaining my own wiki on ticklemonster.com.au with dynamically-updated database outputs from the actual MySQL database tables from which I generate the JSON files used in-game. A screenshot from this is included below, in its own beta state.
I used Star Trek Timelines‘ item system as a starting point for Mr Football, but simplified and streamlined it to suit my own needs. I have set aside STT’s intricate system of combining different items to form a differently-named omnibus item. MrF centres on merging items to increase their star rating, using the game-ubiquitous and football-native ratio of six to one.
The idea of shifting between STT’s combinational approach to one based on merging is unrelated to the current craze for merge games. It came from my experience as a STT dolphin, where players like me had no other option but to grind with massive amounts of tickets chasing a single low-percentage drop of a highly-rated item. There is still some of that in MrF, but there is also the possibility to focus more on stockpiling lower-grade items and merging them to produce the needed maguffin.
I can not claim to have been particularly fastidious in how I have balanced each item so far, as the process has been based on optical table-checking rather than spreadsheets. There will be time to fine-tune item costs once the Season 1 player database is finalised. For now, my focus is on building the back-end systems to visualise and totalise item balances for the first time.
I have been talking a bit recently about how I was wasting time coding new QoL features when I really should be laser-focused on locking everything down for the coming open beta, but there was one QoL item that I just had to write from scratch. RPGs tend to include a lot of inventory management, and hero collector RPGs are no different. Coaches in Mr Football will spend a bit of time in the Property screen, and I was already finding it tiresome in my playtesting to merge each item individually. Implementing a “merge all” button before the beta even started would prevent what would be an inevitable and early feature request. There will not be much reason not to merge all items when they reach six in total.
My nine-year-old boy has been keeping me updated in his playthrough of EA FC, which in a small way is a contemporary of Mr Football and a competitor for Australian sports enthusiasts’ time about which I need to be aware. He gave me a good suggestion this week: to allow for trading of “trash” cards of the same star rating to get a random higher-rated card, similar to the Exchange feature in EA FC. Of course, EA weren’t the first to do an exchange feature, as it has been a regular feature in hero collector RPGs for many years. While many mobile RPGs use a shard or fragment mechanic (as in Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes), MrF is going with STT’s star system instead which requires merging duplicates. I see no insurmountable balancing problem with eventually building a Trade screen where you can trade six 3-stars for a 4-star, or even six 4-stars for a 5-star. I’m not reinventing the wheel here by any stretch, this trope is a mainstay of such games.
However, I won’t allow coaches to buy any player they like on an open market as in EA FC. That works for association football as it is realistic to that sport, but not for Australian rules football. Even though Mr Football is set in an alternate timeline, it is against the ethos of the sport at the highest level to enable open slather on player trades. Now, if I am ever in a position to make a Mr Cricket game…
Things must be getting serious, because I have now blocked users from going into negative currency amounts. The word “beta” in software implies some ruggedness in functionality and economic stability, so I have to lift my game… literally!