Dev Update 2016-07-21

Recently I was lucky enough to have some people try out Flashcard Clash at the Melbourne IGDA meetup. From that I saw two main gameplay issues that I've been working on.

Firstly when entering battle, the game recieves 10 cards from the server and they are all you get for the battle. The problem with this is that when you are getting brand new cards, you should have to answer them a few times in short succession to help drill it in, and the logic to do this is on the server. But with the existing system, you'd have to finish the battle to send your result to the server snd have the card ready for review. So you'd just work through each card in order, taking on new cards even if you should be reviewing older cards first.

I've updated the game to now download one card from the server at a time, so you can answer a card during battle, and then have it come back for review in the same battle. The trade off is that the game now makes a server connection every time you attack, as opposed to once at the start and end of battle. Since I'm the only one playing right now that's not a big issue, but we'll see how that goes once we get some active players. This also updates the counters at the top of the screen in real time which is neat too.

The second change i've made is to the Endless mode. It was all a bit confusing and allowed the player to jump straight to the boss before they were ready. I've changed it now that the player has to proceed through several substages before the boss unlocks. Previously the player was also able to go back to previous dungeons, but later in the game, this leads to a giant menu of every dungeon the player has visited. Now once the player defeats the boss, they move to the next area and are not able to return.

I've also updated the svg rendering to crop backgrounds to what is actually visible on screen. This is a good speed boost on iPhone where almost half of the background is not visible.