Nothing Ever Works on Lab Machines...

The prototypes are coming along nicely.

The one I'm working on (Fighting/Deckbuilding) looks like this:

It used to look like this:

But sometimes that made it look like this:

on testing machines. Right now I'm inclined to blame the hardware, although I don't have anything like the time to debug an issue in a throwaway prototype that only appears on machines I need to take a bus to access, so I just took out the GPU particles. Now it looks lame, but it's testable, which is a better place to be. The GPU particles aren't me, I'm using TCParticles, by Tiny Cube Studio. It's a very cool piece of tech, they're worth taking a look at if you have anything in Unity that requires particles that actually look good. ( http://tcparticles.tinycubestudio.com/ )

I'll try to stabilize the particle version if we decide to move forward with this prototype, on PC, with an art style that fits this sort of aesthetic. I don't want to spend the time chasing that bug right now, given the very real possibility that we'll go forward with Moles, or try to put this on OUYA, or choose an art style that doesn't work well with tons of shiny particles everywhere.

I still don't want to go forward with Moles, by the way. I've figured out what worries me about it so much. Fighting/Deckbuilding has two core systems (Fighting, drafting) and every other thing interacts more or less only with those two systems. Essentially, programming time scales linearly with features added to the game. Moles has half a dozen smaller systems (Voxels, Fog of War, simple AI, powerups, traps, a whole bunch of hazards that follow their own rules) that all interact with each other. None of these systems on its own is particularly intimidating, but each new feature has to interact with more or less every existing system, which means that programming time scales quadratically with features added to the game. Adding this to the fact that that design is still in a place where meaningful features are being added on a regular basis, and that it is already pushing what I think I can do in ten weeks, I really don't think Moles is feasible.