Hi all,
About two months ago I stated my intention to provide a Godot-based version of World Boxing Manager for people on Mac, Linux, and mobile who weren't able to play the game. I'm happy to announce that I've managed to do it! Thanks to all of you for the continued support!
Most of the actual in-game changes are, quite frankly, simple quality of life and balancing changes. This was never meant to be a complete overhaul with entirely new features - I would probably have released an entirely new game with that kind of effort. My first priority was to simply get the game working as it was on a new engine, and I've been able to accomplish it. So without further ado, here are the changes:
Technical Changes
- Now can be played on Mac and Linux, with an Android version soon to follow. iOS will take a bit longer due to the fact that a) I need to find a device to test on besides the simulator, and b) Apple will still need to approve it.
- Resolution is no longer a problem - thanks to the geniuses behind Godot, scaling is handled natively ie. you can just resize the window. Fullscreen is now also an option.
UI Changes
- Players can now cycle between emails, fighters, and students using buttons rather than having to select from a drop-down list.
- Matchmaking screen now filters out empty dates if Undercard or Co-Main events are chosen.
- Players can now view opponents via the Organizations screen, allowing you to check out potential opponents as you browse the rankings.
- Players can also view opponent information from the Inbox screen, allowing you to scout opponents who offer matches.
- Matchmaking, Hire Staff, and Marketing screens now show a preview of how likely they are to accept an offer
- Sparring screen now contains a record of sparring matches between selected fighters.
- Calendar screen no longer has a calendar, which was kind of redundant - event details can now be shown directly from list of upcoming events
- Help popups change depending on what screen the player is currently on, hopefully preventing confusion
- Non-player matches during events in which the user takes part now can be simulated a lot faster. Thanks to Godot, code is a lot easier to decouple, meaning that I can now take the fast version of the match engine that doesn't process text or anything and slot it into player events.
- Gym colors are now selected via a color-chooser, allowing for a greater range of colors (I can't take full credit for this - thanks again to Godot!)
Gameplay Changes
- Swarmers have been buffed so that every attack they use from the pocket has a greater success rate and does more damage to Boxers
- Body attack success rate has been buffed
- Rankings have been reworked so that default rankings make more sense ie. higher reputation fighters near the top, and Unknown/lousy fighters near the bottom.
- Previously, a non-player fighter would reject a match offer if he had fought the player fighter too recently. This is still in the game, but the player fighter's record is looked at instead. This circumvents the problem before of a non-player fighter not fighting frequently enough to allow for rematches. Only the player fighter needs to fight again before a rematch can occur.
- Fights in one world organization now affect rankings in the other two by smaller amounts
- Experience required to level up is now scaled. That is, it takes longer to level up from 15 to 16 than from 5 to 6. Mitigating this is the fact that Equipment upgrade level now has a greater effect.
- Following from the previous point, Sparring gains are now influenced by Gym upgrade level, so both sets of upgrades have more of a point.
- Speaking of sparring, trait gain chances are now influenced by the reputation of the highest-ranked trainer at your gym. Thus, there is now a point to upgrading trainers.
- Trainer and network stats are now influenced by their reputation a lot more, so crappier reputation trainers/networks have crapper stats.
In the interest of full disclosure, there have been a few negative changes, sadly:
- Starting a new game and loading a game now takes a lot longer than before. Whereas it was almost instantaneous before, it now takes a solid minute or so to load. For more technical-minded people out there, this is because classes and data structures were handled natively in save files in C++, but Nodes (Godot's version of classes and data structures) are not. Thus it becomes necessary to read in the save data, create a Node, and load the data in. Done over thousands of fighters, it ends up adding a lot of time.
- Because of the way Godot handles data vs native C++, your old saves won't carry over to the new version.
- Detailed data for non-player fighters can no longer be viewed. Somewhat related to the issue above, the problem was that save files were becoming huge really fast. So I decided to store detailed match data only for player fighters instead.
There are probably a few things I have forgotten to mention because I'm just writing this from memory, but by and large if you liked the original game, you should hopefully still like the new one. If not, I've left the original so you can still play it. Saves, exported fighters, and modded databases for the new version are in the same folders under a new "Godot" sub-folder, so your old data hasn't been nuked. As far as I know the Godot version is feature-complete and stable, but I'm always open for suggestions.
Thanks again for playing!
[ 2017-12-09 07:15:13 CET ] [ Original post ]