Michiel here again! The design for the flyer is done. Only a few tweaks from the first version, but this is how it went to the printing company. We should get them delivered on Tuesday! If you want a physical copy, come look us up. Unless you're my mom. Mom, I'll bring you one on Thursday :)

The paper kind that is, not "flying units". You can't have flying units, the death lasers would shoot them!

Anyway, hi all, Michiel here! Since we'll be showing off Powargrid at the Dutch Game Garden and Indievelopment events soon, and our only handouts are our old business cards with the old logo, we figured we should design something new. Turns out you can get full colour, double sided flyers printed pretty cheaply these days, so that's what I've been designing today. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, if I may say so myself!

No technical details or pretty pictures this time, we've just spent an evening discussing our marketing plans (i.e. we should make some) and incorporating (i.e. we are totally a legit company, man!)

March 2nd we'll be visiting the Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht again, to demo our game and chat to other folks involved in making and marketing games.

Lacking a good screenshot to show you, let me present you with a purple blobbie with a monocle and a top hat:

We're in the process of cleaning up the dialogues for the second to last campaign mission. Part of that is making sure that the dialogues trigger at the appropriate moments, so this involves playing the mission a couple of times (ok, we could call it testing, but we enjoy our own game so much we don't actually call it that). We then noticed a small thing: the AI overcharged a specific power plant in this mission, which it shouldn't do. The mission's AI script needed a tweak to prevent this overcharge. Only one problem: the AI script was nowhere to be found.

​The first thought was that the script had ended up somewhere else between our assets, but a search didn't turn it up. It simply wasn't there, which meant the mission was still running only the base version of our AI. It puts up a good fight, as it should, that late in the campaign. It was a pleasant surprise to see our AI holds up that well without mission specific tweaks.

So we added an AI subclass to the mission and disabled overcharge. For that one power plant to be precise, so don't think it won't surprise you with a sudden overcharge :). Of course, this got us thinking about which other mission specific things this AI should do. We gave the AI:

• Smarter defensive moves. The base AI isn't good at claiming territory and taking advantage of the lay of the land. Instead it 'brute forces' its defences by building power lines on all tiles from where its power plants can be hit. While claiming territory turned out to be difficult to code in a generic sense, it's trivial when you know what the game grid looks like. The AI behaviour hasn't changed much, but since it blocks off territory now, it looks a lot smarter :).

​As you may have surmised, we find building and testing AI behaviour to be fun. So much fun that we often get caught up playing our game instead of just testing. And even though we should spend our time on coding, building and writing, we think it's a good sign that we can still get so immersed in our game even after years of development :).

PS: For more on how we built our AI, see these articles:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3