Good day all and welcome to another dev blog by me, your friendly neighborhood Stunlocker Christian. In this Dev Blog we will speak in short about some of the things Stunlock will be focusing on in the remaining time before the Free-To-Play release. And no, I can’t give you any news on that date quite yet, but we’ll be sure to tell you as soon as we can! This post is a bit shorter than normal as there are still details being worked out that I can’t divulge, but hopefully it will still be at least slightly interesting.
But first I’d like to address the Dev Blog as a whole a bit. As I mentioned last week, I and most of the people involved with the Dev Blog will be away for a bit during July. As such there won’t be a weekly Dev Blog for a while. There might be some smaller “Dev Blog Lites” but don’t expect something to show up weekly. Anyway, let’s get going!
UI 2.0
We know we’ve been talking about the new UI for quite some time now, but redesigning and creating new underlying systems from scratch is no small feat. A lot of work has gone into it thus far and there is still a lot of work to be done. At this point a lot of the layout designs are closing in on being ready for proper (smaller scale) testing and implementation has begun in earnest.
What’s pictured above is the part of the UI that will replace the current “Chests” tab. “Collection” will work as a general shop where you’ll be able to buy everything available in one place. It will also function as a place to simply browse everything you are able to collect in Battlerite, whether you own it or not.
The UI has come a long way but will continue to be refined and worked on for a while yet. There’s always a lot of unforeseen things that come up when working with UI and the possibility tree for how every little interaction can work with all possible states is surprisingly large. Getting a robust system into place has been, and still is, a challenge. Especially since one of the goals we had was to have it compatible with several platforms if the need arose to spare us from having to create two separate UIs. In hindsight it turned out to be a good decision.
Brawls
Like I mentioned last week, the Rocket Balloon Brawl had gotten a very positive reception. We’d like to get some more statistics on it though so if you haven’t done so we’d greatly appreciate it if you could take the time to fill out our survey on it. Thanks in advance!
The Rocket Balloon Brawl was in large iterated and worked on by our Summer Workers (formerly our interns) who built a lot of the foundation with guidance from the rest of Stunlock. Of course when we prepared the game mode for release we stepped in and helped push it the final stretch to make it ready. After launch we looked into it for a bit and decided to clean up how it’s made and separating parts of it into clear components. Unless you’ve got a bit of programming knowledge this might not mean much to you, but basically this would involve, for example, making the Rocket Balloon function as its own individual thing rather than a piece of the game mode that only works with the game mode. Now why would we be doing this? The answer is to allow the components to be quickly and easily reused for potential future game modes. By doing this we could drastically cut down the time required for creating other types of brawls that use elements of what is currently Rocket Balloon Brawl in them. You could call it an investment into the future.
In General
Other than the above I have a few little tidbits to share. It might not come as a huge surprise but yes, there are more champions planned for F2P and beyond. I can’t give you any specific dates here either, but they will arrive and they will be awesome.
Related to Champions, work will continue to make sure all existing Champions receive their visual updates and Legendary Outfits. Like the new champions, these too will be awesome and I’m sure you will be excited to get your hands on them when they arrive.
Finally, I’ve gone on record before saying, in regards to champion picking, that Blind Pick has never been the end goal of League play. This holds true until this day and we have been taking some more time recently to discuss how we’d like a draft system to work. The time frame for when this would arrive though is a bit more unclear as we may need to prioritize other areas over it. This means it won’t necessarily make its way to the game before F2P but it is something we will be taking a closer look at.
And that is all I have for you this week. Actually, you won’t be hearing from me for a while now so it’s all I have for you guys for a while yet. Anyway, as previously mentioned, there may be some smaller Dev Blog Lites coming up here so keep an eye out, but don’t hold your breath.
Thank you for reading!
/Christian