Time for another update!

First up, I wanted to thank 'Andre La Barre' for giving a +1 almost every one of my Battlesuit posts on Google Plus. Really appreciate it man.

Not a heck of a lot in the way of direct progress on the game, today was the monthly Auckland Game Developer's Meetup so I got an opportunity to evangelise the game there. A couple of really talented Artists expressed interest, so hopefully we'll have some more team members on the project soon.

Most of the changes made on the project tonight were directly in response to feedback from the meeting. First up, Josh pointed out that it wasn't easy to gauge the Mech's attack range (specifically, he couldn't see why he couldn't attack with the SHINOBI unit he had chosen at the start of the game, since it was too far away to target any particular enemy Mech). So I added a simple range circle. It's not pretty but it'll do for now.

Secondly, Jonathan from Grinding Gear Games (someone admittedly much more familiar with the ins-and-outs of turn based strategy than I am!) gave some useful advice, such as making it so that units forfeit the rest of their move points when they fire. I've done that now and I definitely think it adds more of an element of risk to the game (since it's harder to retreat from a failed attack etc).

Finally, I did some tweaking to the percentage mechanics. In particular I made it so that the random "dice rolls" of an attack were based on a variable both from the Mech and Pilot (some of them were Pilot or Mech only, which negated some of the uniqueness of the Unit's Pilot-Mech combo). I think it subjectively feels a bit more "balanced" and a bit more intense, though I think there's still too much chance involved as many of the strikes hover around a 50% hit rate (And it might feel as though you're just flipping a coin).

Amongst other things, I might arbitrarily inflate the percentages (so a 51% would end up being closer to 60%, and a 49% chance would end up being closer to 40% etc) so that gameplay relies more on tactics and less on randomness.

Play it on my dropbox.