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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsPLOXMONS Cardgame (Playtest now available!)
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PloxDev
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« on: June 30, 2019, 01:30:22 AM »

Ploxmons
- a fast paced Monster Card Game with a unique PvPvE battle system.






Who are we?

We are Kylro (Gamedeveloper), Michiil (Game & Graphic Design) and Adrian (PR).
Nice to meet you! We are three students from the technical University of Ilmenau in Germany.
We started working on Ploxmons in august 2018 out of passion for games Wink
This is our first big indie project and we hope you like it!


What is Ploxmons?

Two players compete against eachother to defeat powerful boss monsters (the Ploxmons).
But only the one who manages to land the final deadly hit against the bosses is the winner and earns the loot!

To fight the boss monsters, the players each send their team of selected monsters into the fight
and try to survive or manipulate the attacks of the bosses.

Manipulate the boss, strengthen your monster team and sabotage your opponent's team!
Ploxmons offers a new, unique gaming experience with a variety of different strategies and play styles!
Can you outwit the boss monsters and the opposing player to earn the valuable loot?


Overview of game features:
 
• Over 30 bosses with unique abilities
• Collect over 100 monster cards
• Rare "Shiny" versions for all monster cards
• Over 30 Ploxpowers (unique deck-enhancing abilities for your team!)
• Over 130 avatars to collect
• Card Shop

• Global chat system
• Guild system
• Ranking Games (Ranked Play)
• Coop game mode
• Numerous titles and achievements to unlock
• New card frames to unlock
• Global drop rate blessings (allows you and other players to temporarily increase the drop rate of items)
 




The game is in the development phase. The release is scheduled for 2019 for mobile devices and PC!
A playable early acces version will be released soon!
 
 
You want Gamedev updates and insights on the game?
 
Join us on our Discord or follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to receive frequent updates about the development of Ploxmons.
We'd love to hear your feedback as well! Thanks so much!  Smiley
 
Website: http://ploxmons.com/
« Last Edit: September 17, 2019, 01:50:14 PM by PloxDev » Logged

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« Reply #1 on: June 30, 2019, 01:41:22 AM »

Screenshots



Ingame screen




Another Ingame screen




Current iteration of the card shop. If you open rare shiny cards like this middle one, the global chat will congrat (or hate Grin) you as everyone gets informed about it  Wink




Current iteration of the card collection. Your deck list is on the right.


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« Reply #2 on: June 30, 2019, 08:25:18 PM »

So it's pokemon.
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« Reply #3 on: July 03, 2019, 02:25:01 AM »

Here is clip of a typical turn in Ploxmons





The game features a unique Tribute System:
Each turn you play cards to the right (see Fowlet here)
which is your tribute to the Boss monster in the center (Cosmorock).
If your tributed card is stronger than your opponent's card,
the Boss does more damage to opponent's.
(Here the enemy purple bug receives more damage than your blue sea serpent)

This way you can manipulate the attacks of the boss monsters!





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« Reply #4 on: July 27, 2019, 06:05:50 AM »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=sW48r0Nx3bk

Here is a shader animation for the login screen.
We tried to make it look like snow storm that the monster in the middle summoned.

We are currently redesigning all the interfaces of the game.
I am quite happy with the result of the login but I'd appreciate any feedback!
The main menu is next up on our to do list.
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« Reply #5 on: July 29, 2019, 01:59:52 PM »

Ploxmons DevLog #1

Hello guys. I decided to start a dev log
to keep you guys updated about the current status of the game.

Last weekend I was finally able to spend most of the time
for further development of the game.


Rework of the ability system

For many months now the ability system has been working but yet been a bit strange for us.
With many different abilities and moments when they will trigger the execution oder
of those abilities is an important aspect for the feeling of the game.




Which abilitiy should trigger first? What happens if multiple abilities
should trigger at the same time? There has been a solution for this ability system in
the past however it didn't statisfy us. For this reason we decided to think about
the ability system one more time and define a clear and new order of ability execution.

The new order of execution required a lot of time to implement.
The old system needed to be reworked and replaced by the new.
Especially testing of the new system has been a though task and is not yet finished.
There are so many abilities and so many interactions that should be tested.
However, first tests looks promising.


Rework of the global chat and friend system

The global chat has always been an important aspect for us.
Chatting with other players while gaming is a key feature in our opinion.
Most of the work on the chat has already been done in the past.
However there were some changes necessary to finalize this system.

The friend system (friendlist + sending friendrequests + private chats with friends)
has been quite unfinished in the past. There has been a really provisional friendlist
with most of the core functions implemented. However it was not possible to send private
messages to the friends yet. With a completely new design of Michiil (our Graphic Designer)
I was finally able to implement those missing features and make the friendlist look beautiful.




The most important change of those system is the ability to comfortably chat with multiple people
at the same time. This required a lot of work in the game client since the implementation
there has been quite temporary in the past. With some small changes on the server one can now see
the current status of their friends (in game, in queue, idle, ..) as well as
some additional information like their currently selected avatar.

There are some open tasks on the friend system like adapting the UI
to enable sending and receiving new friendrequests.
However most of the work has been done.


Shaders Shader Shaders

Shaders really brighten and improve the looking of the game alot.
For this reason I am still working on a better understanding of the math behind shader coding.




A lot of progress has been made and I was able to implement some nice shaders for a few of our bosses.
This will make the fights with those bosses a lot more epic and dramatic than before.
A good example of one of the shaders can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=sW48r0Nx3bk (LoginScreen Animation).
I will probably post some more shaders at some point to give you guys an impression on how things are going.


Rework of the UI for some of the menus

In the course of Michiils redesign of the menus
I was able to completely update some of the screens like the main menu and cardpack opening
that greately improved the feeling of the game. Since UI work in the Unity engine
is always an extensive task this required a lot more time than it should have.
However while updating the UI, I was able to clean up some code
and improve the performance of the UI.

The result is a nice looking and smooth UI so I guess the time has been well spent  Wink



New UI design for the main menu. In the center is plenty of space for potential news.




New UI design for the deck builder. Here you create a deck of monster cards.


This is it for the first devlog.
Over all a big step in direction of releasing the game has been made.
Extensive tasks like UI work are finally getting less.
The game feels alot more final now than before  Smiley

If you guys have some questions feel free to ask anything.
Thanks for reading!



More Insights and Dev Updates?


Join us on our Discord where we are very active!
We also have fun mini games there with our very own "PloxBot"!
Or follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook!
We'd love to hear your feedback as well! Thanks so much!  Smiley
 
Website: http://ploxmons.com/

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« Reply #6 on: August 13, 2019, 02:34:50 AM »

Ploxmons DevLog #2
- A new ingame UI & more

Hello guys, another week has passed and I want to share the progress that has been made in the game.


New UI

Most of the week has been spent with updating more of the menus.
Currently I am working on upgrading the ingame scene to the new design.
This does always take a lot of time since many UI elements have to be placed,
correctly positioned (that's basically the most annoying job) and connected with the code.
The optimisation of the UI takes a lot of time too since in Unity you can very easily
build ineffecient UI that will just perform very badly especially on slower computers.
Since I am partly an optimisation guy performance is a very important aspect for me
and I spend a lot of time tuning them as far as I can.



The new ingame UI. This is the battlefield of our cardgame.


Resolution Tuning

Unfortunately you can't just load images/sprites into the game engine and expect
everything to worksmooth and clean. That's on hard lesson I had to learn over the weekend.
For a lot of time the UI always looked a bit blurry especially the text elements.
I always scheduled this problem to a later point since there were more important things to do.
However over the weekend the time has come where I had to fix this issues since the game
looked just very badly despite of the clean UI and design.

Somehow Unity is very bad at displaying text that is scaled down a lot.
This is basically everywhere the case in our game since text is always kind of small.
I was able to fix this issue by replacing the Unity text elements with a better system
that immediately improved the visual look a lot. However this was a very tough change
since I had to replace every text element in the game (and we have ALOT of text elements).

More over that not only the text elements looked blurry in the beginning
also the images where either blurry or pixelated - just not smooth as they should.
After some researches I found the root of the problem: Resolution.
Naturally you create game images and sprites in a really high resolution so they look
good on big displays as well. However since Unity isn't able to scale down big images
smoothely they appeared either blurry or pixelated despite and especially because
of their orginal big resolution. The solution I came up with was just pre-scaling the images
to a resolution that fits the target resolution.
With this fix Unity doesn't need to scale down the images at runtime that much.

The pros: Smooth looking images/sprites.
The cons: More effort since for each target resolution (FULL HD 1920x1080, HD 1280x720, ...)
pre-scaled images must be created. Also the client has to choose the correct images based
on the selected resolution which will be some effort the implement.
However since this change improves the visual look a lot it is definitely worth it.


Game Queue

After all the annoying UI stuff I was finally able to spend some time on game related stuff.
Since you will be able to battle against other players there should be some kind of queue system
to match one player to another. This has been implemented many months ago.
However this system was not 100% done and needed some tweaks to support more than one game mode.


The play UI so far in which you queue up.

Also it was a very important feature for me to allow the players to browser through the menus,
edit their deck, switch their avatars, ... WHILE they are in the queue waiting for a match.
Some similar games (like Hearthstone) doesn't allow such freedom for a good reason: it's more complicated.
The solution for this problem is an game-invite-system.
After you queued up you are basically waiting for an entry to the game.
If another player has been found (based on some match making algorithms) you will receive
an invitation to join the game. You can now either accept or decline the invitation
(and for example save your just edited deck before joining).

Pro: Much more freedom, no locking the player to one menu screen while waiting
Cons: More effort serverside, more effort clientside

Over all I am now very happy with this feature since it feels alot more clean now for the player.


Outlook

This week I will finish upgrading the ingame scene to the new UI design.
While doing this some small new features will be implemented like a nice transition from menu to ingame.
After the ingame scene has been polished I will probably start working on some of the monster/boss
abilities again. There are still some abilities left to implement. Also more bug testing should be done.

Overall the list of Todos before we are able to release an early access version of the game is getting smaller.
There are still many things to do however most of the annoying and complex tasks are almost about to be completed.

Personally my goal is to release an early access version this month
and I am very confident that this will be possible.


More Insights and Dev Updates?

Join us on our Discord where we are very active!
We also have fun mini games there with our very own "PloxBot"!
Or follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook!
We'd love to hear your feedback as well! Thanks so much! Smiley
Website: http://ploxmons.com/
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« Reply #7 on: August 24, 2019, 09:14:47 AM »

Ploxmons DevLog #3
- More UI Updates and Shaders

Hello guys, time flies and as it flies another week has passed.


More UI Updates

Again most of the week has been spent with more updating of the menus.
UI stuff is always very time consuming since there are many elements to place and functions to implement.
Especially the card collection menu where the player can browse through his cards was a lot of work
since there are many functions available to the user (searching for cards, filtering, switching between shiny -
non shiny and many more ...). However after a long weekend I was able to finish most of the UI screens.
This includes the ingame screen, the card collection, avatar collection, ploxpower collection,
the deck library, and deck builder. Browsing through the menus feels very nice now - feels very close to final.
There are most likely many bugs left to discover and little tweaks to do but besides this most of the UI stuff is now finally finished.



Collection Overview




Card Collection UI


Shaders

To avoid getting crazy with all the UI stuff I spent a decent amount of time implementing new shaders
for some of the bosses. This is a very fun but time consuming task since it includes a lot of try-and-error.
Also it is a though job to create an epic boss shader that fits into the ingame screen and doesn't completely
overlapp or absorb all the other ingame stuff like the players monsters or the interface.
Many trade-offs have to be made between epicness and usability and of course - performance.
However in the end I was able to come up with some decent shaders that you guys will see in action
on early access of the game




Sandstorm and fur movement shader animation for Artilla


Outlook

This week will most probably used to further polish the game.
This includes small tweaking of the UI and battle system as well as finalizing
of the monster and boss battle abilities.
If this takes surprisingly less time than I expect I will continue working on the coop-game-mode
that I would love to have in the game when releasing an early access version.
Also I should finally start bugtesting the battle system since a lot of changes have been made
since the last stable version. Overall a lot of progress has been made
and the list of tasks is getting smaller with each day.
I am very excited for the early access and would love to reach this as soon as possible.

Want more Insights and Dev Updates?

Join us on our Discord where we are very active!
We also have fun mini games there with our very own "PloxBot"!
Or follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook!
We'd love to hear your feedback as well! Thanks so much! Smiley
Website: Ploxmons.com
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« Reply #8 on: September 03, 2019, 04:33:14 AM »

Ploxmons DevLog #4
- Menu-Ingame Transition & Drop Rates

Time for another Dev Log.


Menu-Ingame Transition & UI Polish


This week a lot of time has been spent on polishing the UI. This includes tweaking the card pack opening to make it more exciting as well as the card/avatar collection to make it more smooth. Furthermore a nice transition between menu and ingame scene has been implemented. This includes the entrance of the bosses.

For a long time now the bosses just appeared from nowhere without any animation. This was exchanged by a more feasible entrance animation. This is still WIP, however it feels a lot more interesting and alive now. I will work more on this entrance animation in the next weeks however I am relatively happy with the progress so far.





Battle System

Fixing the battle system is like the last big task that hasn't been completed yet. This task includes fixing some minor bugs in the current implemented abilities, adding new missing abilities and completely reworking the ploxpower abilities.

The ploxpowers have been not-working for a long time now since a lot of things have been changed in the ability system that led to outdated ploxpower abilities. Reminder: By defeating bosses (Ploxmons) you will be able to drop special ploxpower abilities that can be used to enhance the deck with a unique ability. Example: Buffing your red mons on play. This abilities differ a lot from the abilities of the bosses and mons and need to be implemented separately.

In the last week I was able to fix a few minor bugs in the current ability implementation. The next big task will be the implementation of the ploxpowers since this will require a decent amount of time. This task includes checking which of the old implemented ploxpowers can be reused - how they need to be adapted to the new ability system as well as implementing missing ploxpowers from scratch.


Stats/Rates

Currently the rates which determine the amount of gold that is dropped, the chance of getting rare cards from a card pack and the chance of dropping an avatar or ploxpower from the bosses are quite experimental. We need to rethink this rates and adapt them to create a balanced game experience that is neither to unappreciative nor to rewarding. However since early access is some kind of test phase we will adapt the rates most likely in favor of the players. Wink


Packs include 3 random cards, at least one of them is rare.


Outlook

A busy week is going to start. A lot of small tweaks that haven't been listed above need to be done. While browsing through the game there are basically a million small things I need to change/fix. However this is quite usual since the game consists of so many (and complex) elements now that it's basically impossible for one dev to fix them all in time. But since the early access phase is some kind of test phase small bugs are very usual and won't stop us from releasing the game.

Overall a lot of things have been done again and early access is coming closer and closer. We are really excited and can't wait to finally release the early access version of the game. That's it for this week.


Want more Insights and Dev Updates?

Join us on our Discord where we are very active!
We also have fun mini games there with our very own "PloxBot"!
Discord Members have the chance to PLAYTEST an early game version soon!

Or follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook!
We'd love to hear your feedback as well! Thanks so much! Smiley
Website: Ploxmons.com
« Last Edit: September 04, 2019, 01:47:06 AM by PloxDev » Logged

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« Reply #9 on: September 09, 2019, 06:43:39 AM »

Ploxmons DevLog #5
- The Ability System

Hello guys, as in the previous weeks I want to share with you the progress that was made during the last days.


Ability System

Last week I was finally able to finish implementing all current boss, monster and ploxpower abilities. This has been in my head for a very long time and after finishing them there was alot of relief for sure. This task took a lot of time and basically the mayor part of the week.


From left to right: Boss monster, Ploxpower, Monstercard. Each of these units can have abilities.

Expecially complex was the task of implementing the ploxpower abilities since the ploxpowers differ alot from the monster and boss abilities. Reminder: Ploxpowers are powers that enchant your whole deck. For example "Stone Body" gives your monsters Armor.

In the past the ability system was divided into three separate systems: The monster abilities, the boss abilities and the ploxpwer abilities. Separating was the first idea that came into my mind back then since each ability type has different attributes. Expecially ploxpowers are really different since their abilities usually affect other monsters or even the boss on the field and not only theirself unlike monster abilities that were orginially only able to affect the monster that is triggering the ability. Separating sounds like a good idea right. Well the problem with that is that there are abilities that might occur as a monster ability, a boss ability and even as a ploxpower ability like the simple boosting ability (Boost your mon, Boost the boss, Boost your team, etc..). This results in duplicated code since I was forced to implement the same ability three times - for monsters, for bosses and for ploxpowers - which is of course really bad.

After fusing the monster and boss abilities together a few weeks ago I finally decided in the last week to also fuse the ploxpower abilities into one big ability system. This is a very flexible solution since we are now able to assign every ability that is implemented either to monsters, to bosses or even to ploxpowers. However flexibility has its price: complexity. Since I don't want to implement an own ability for each monster (80!) or boss/ploxpower there are some parameters to configure the ability that was assigned.

To allow maximal flexibility there must be alot of parameters for configuration.



Example: The stat boosting ability-> Which targets should be hit, which amount should be boosted (power+1? speed + 1?), should the boost be temporary or permanent, under which conditions should the boost happen, etc...

The more flexibility we want the more parameters are required. By fusing the ploxpowers into this ability system the complexity and amount of parameters reached another level for sure. Internally there is a big evil excel table that defines the abilities for each monster/boss/ploxpower. The abilities are definied by a sequence of numbers and symbols that define which ability ID is assigned with which parameters. In the past this sequences were kind of readable and clear.

Example 1: The monster "Levitron" has the ability Armor 2 that blocks 2 damage on hit.
This ability is defined by the sequence: 6,19,2. 6 is the ID of the armor ability.
19 is the ID of the trigger when the ability should trigger in this case: when the mon takes damage.
2 is the parameter that defines the amount of damage that is blocked - in this case 2.
Easy right? Fair enough this one is an easy one since there are no further conditions or targets except the monster that triggered the ability. However after fusing all ability systems together a lot of new parameters has been introduced. Many of them optional but still a ton of configuration material.

Example 2: The ploxpower "Green Thumb" increases the value of your healing and regeneration abilities by 2 (sweeet). This ability is defined by the good readable and clear sequence: 16,16,5_0_26_0&9_0_2_1_26:27:2:1:2:26#16,16,5_0_26_0&9_0_20_1_26:27:20:1:2:26.
I will skip explaining every parameter in detail right now .. for reasons.

Three points to notice:
1) This sequences are written by hand. One does really easily lose track of which parameter means what. Basically instant brain damage Cheesy
2) The readability is kind of bad like really bad. Expecially when abilities should be adjusted one has to think through the whole ability and its parameters again to be able to adjust the parameter one is looking for (This is not the parameter you are looking for). Again: brain damage.
3) This sequences are parsed in the code and translated into the correct abilities, trigger, conditions and parameters. Code is complex as hell as you can imagin to support all of those different parameters. Also basically instant brain damage!

Overall even though this sequences are complex as hell they offer a really flexible way of defining abilities for monsters without the need for me to adjust something in code. A ton of parameters and conditions and triggers allow for a wide variety of abilities. If we had a bigger team or more time I would create an web-tool to visually configure the abilities. However since this takes a lot of time that I don't have we have to live with defining abilities by hand.

After implementing all missing abilities we are now in the testing phase of the ability system. There are already a ton of bugs that I need to fix. One can imagin that the more flexible the abilities get the more potential for bugs is created since there are a lot of interactions that can be weird or wrong configured parameters or just bugs in the code .. However a lot of bugs were already fixed and the amount of problems are getting less and less :D


UI for Invites

Yesterday I started implementing most of the missing parts of the UI: The window that allows you to invite friends to a game, a list of all game invites you received and an option to send new friend requests. Progress has been good so far. However still a lot to do since UI is always time expensive to implement.



Most of the day however was spent implementing the friend-game-invite-system on the server. This was also a really complex task since there are a lot of special cases that should be handled. Also client-server interaction is always really annoying since for each command that is sent from client to server the server has to response if this command was valid. Meanwhile the client has to wait for response of the server and react depending on the response. This means that there are alot of exchanges of commands and signals that has to be implemented. For a simple game invite there are for example 6 client-server-exchanges required each with an own command and code that handles each command. Stuff is getting complex really fast. However I was able to finish this implementation and need to finish the UI now to be able to test it(Bearbeitet)


Outlook

By finishing the ability system a huge step in the direction of early access has been made. There are many bugs left to detect for sure however small bugs are pretty usual for early access versions so I am not very worried that we won't be able to find all bugs in time. After the UI I am working on is finished there are really less UI tasks left until we can release the game. Almost all important menus have been implemented already. Still pending: Configuration of the server droprates, ..., small tweaks of the UI and animations. Also there are a good amount of shaders left to create. However this has really little priority and won't prevent us from releasing the version. Overall a lot of progress has been made. There is actually not thaat mutch left to do until we can release the early access version. It will still take like 1-2 weeks approximately until we reach a point where we can release it in good conscience. However its getting closer and closer Smiley Thanks for your motivating support in the last weeks. We are glad to have you with us Smiley


Want more Insights and Dev Updates?

Join us on our Discord where we are very active!
We also have fun mini games there with our very own "PloxBot"!
Or follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook!
We'd love to hear your feedback as well! Thanks so much! Smiley
Website: Ploxmons.com
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« Reply #10 on: September 13, 2019, 05:52:20 PM »

Ploxmons DevLog #6
- The Ploxmons Patcher


Friendsystem


A good amount of the time has been spent with implementing and finishing the friendsystem. Most of the stuff server-side was already finished many weeks ago however there were a few changes left to complete it. Also the UI for friendinvites and friendlist was finally finished. This took a lot of time - as expected - to implement and connect it to the server-communication. However now we are finally able to send new friendrequests to users and view all of our friends Smiley

Patcher


So for the future we definetely need a patch-system that automatically patches the game to the recent version. This is important since in online games usually many changes / patches / balance updates occur. The user shouldn't be forced to download the new game client by his own every time. Since I expect bugfixes and balance updates to occur even in the early access phase (expecially there since this is a test phase) I decided to spend the weekend to implement a game patcher. The player has to download and install the Ploxmon Launcher that will check the current version on start and automatically download and install the most recent version. Also there is some option to repair a broken game installation.

Having a patcher feels really good already and makes patching the game really easy for me. Also since our game is quite small the patch progress is really fast and takes at the moment only half a minute (depending on your internet connection).

This is the current look of the patcher:




Optimizing the game size

While testing my patcher implementation I wondered why the game size was so huge. Downloading and processing the patch took a lot of time (like 2minutes). After some researches I found a way to decrease the game size by manually adapting the textures we use. By resizing them to a decent resolution that matches some conditions I was able to reduce game size significantly. This was a very anoying task on the one hand since I had to check almost every texture (and we have a lot of textures) but on the other hand this was really rewarding since every change led to a smaller game size. In the end I was able to reduce the game size from almost 1 GB to 340MB - which is basically only a third. Also a few more tweaks can be done after the last part of the UI has been finished since there are a lot of unoptimized textures at the moment that I will change when the design for it is finished.

I expect to be able to reduce the final size to around 300 MB which is a really good deal considering the amount of monster/boss/UI images we use. (Notice: For mobile release I will further reduce the game size by optimizing textures for mobile devices).


Outlook

Again alot of progress has been made in the last week. Regarding the UI there is only one more screen left to implement - the after game screen that shows the rewards the players received. I will probably start with this task this evening and hope to finish it within 2 days. When this is finished all UI stuff for early access is done which is really nice and a big relieve. Smiley After the UI I will start fixing some battle issues that have occured in our recent play tests. This will take some time since there are many interactios that should be tested. However I won't be able to detect every bug in the game which is totally fine for an early test phase. Wink Thanks alot for staying by. We are very excited to see you all playing our game which we worked on for so long.


EARLY PLAYTESTING PHASE begins Sept 15th!


Our Discord members can PLAYTEST an early game version soon!
So join us on our Discord now! Smiley We also have fun mini games there with our very own "PloxBot"!

Follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for more dev insights and updates!
We'd love to hear your feedback as well! Thanks so much! Smiley
Website: Ploxmons.com
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Join the Ploxcommunity: https://discord.gg/kAStaps
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« Reply #11 on: September 14, 2019, 03:29:54 AM »

Ploxmons DevLog #7
- Preparing Playtest Phase

A small DevLog before we are launching our Playtest Phase on Sept 15th


Bug Fixes

Basically the whole week after has been spent with bugfixing and tweaking of the UI. Most of the time was used to fix bugs in the battle system. We are currently still in the process of playtesting to detect more issues in the ability system however its looking good and quite stable so far. Also a lot of issues in the UI have been fixed as well as some tweaks to increase usability. Furthermore I have started to implement the account registration system so that you all can create an account for early access and receive your card packs depending on your rank in our discord bot game.


Card Hover Tooltips

Also I implemented one missing UI feature - the ingame tooltip option to show more information about the played Mons. When you hover a monster, you can see the full card and ability of that monster.

Additionally we now have a display for the remaining time a player has for his turn. Moreover some work on new shaders were done so hopefully on release there will be some more new Boss shaders.

Outlook

This weekend I will spend most of the time with more bug fixing. Also there are some more tweaks in the UI I plan to implement before we can release the early access version. Overall the progress has been very good so far and the game is quite stable. The early access version will most probably be released this sunday so I got to hurry. Wink However since this is a test version there are still a lot of unfinished things - which is quite ok since this is basically the idea of an early access version.

Also since we finally have a patch-system I will be able to release patches of urgend bug fixes after the early access version has been released. Another important thing to do is the setup of the production server as well as finishing the account registration system. All in all I am very excited for this week. That's it from myside. I am looking forward to challenge all of you to a battle on coming weekend Smiley


EARLY PLAYTESTING PHASE begins Sept 15th!

Our Discord members can PLAYTEST an early game version soon (Windows version)!
So join us on our Discord now! Smiley We also have fun mini games there with our very own "PloxBot"!

Follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for more dev insights and updates!
We'd love to hear your feedback as well! Thanks so much! Smiley
Website: Ploxmons.com
« Last Edit: September 16, 2019, 02:56:31 PM by PloxDev » Logged

Developing Ploxmons, a digital monster card game with cute monsters and big boss battles! Smiley
Join the Ploxcommunity: https://discord.gg/kAStaps
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« Reply #12 on: September 17, 2019, 01:49:10 PM »

Ploxmons Playtest Phase just started!

The game is available on our Discord right now!

Here you can find the download link as well as install instructions and rough gameplay guide!
Any Feedback and Bug reports are highly appreciated!




What is Ploxmons?

The Ploxmons Cardgame offers a unique battle system involving two players and one central boss(the Ploxmon)
who fight in an epic PvPvE combat! Both players compete against each other in order to score the final hit
on the Ploxmon. Since only the player who kills the Ploxmon will receive its valuable loot,
both players will try to trouble each other - involving damaging, slowing or manipulating each others Mons
in order to execute the deciding hit.

Be careful though: The other player (the Rival) not the only threat!
The extremely powerful Ploxmon will try to kill ALL Mons in play!

Here is a videoclip of some gameplay footage:





Check out the first Ploxmons Stream by Akirax01!


See the first impression of twitch affiliate and indie game lover Akirax01
as he played the game for the first time!

Click here to see the VOD!





How far is the game in development?

The game is between alpha and beta but really close to beta.
You can read our DevLogs in my previous posts in this thread.
Most of the core features are implemented but there are still some important ones missing.
The game is in development for a year now.
We are 3 students working on this out of passion for games.
Also we like cool monsters :

See how the game changed over the course of 1 year in this clip:






We estimate the Playtest Phase will be accessable for 2 weeks.
We hope that all of you will have lots of fun playing the game
for which we worked really hard in the last year. Thanks for reading!

-PloxDev
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Join the Ploxcommunity: https://discord.gg/kAStaps
Website: http://ploxmons.com
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