Whew, so that was an insane update. Thanks everyone for your patience! First the actual update:
- Added support for steam cloud saves (I haven't tested this with mac yet as I don't have 2 so someone else will need to confirm that this actually works).
- The game will now log stats to an online server located at: http://justinwang123.pythonanywhere.com/ You can also access this with the 'online records' button in game.
Stat Tracking:
So this took freaking forever, mainly due to the fact that I didn't really know anything about building a web server and had to learn it all as I went along. Its very basic at the moment but it should at least work enough to let us start getting some data that may be relevant to balancing various classes and zones in the game.
I'll be slowly building this thing up over the course of EA, adding more features, more stats to track and more pages to view the stats. I'll also start to incorporate the actual stats more and more into the game itself. My vision is that the webpage itself can have just a ton of features and ways to view and sort statistics while the in game display can be left a lot simpler.
This thing is extremely rudimentary at the moment so expect a lot of changes to it throughout EA. Furthermore, the stats themselves will be subject to multiple wipes before we get to full release since I may need to significantly rewrite parts of it so don't get to attached to your stats.
Some stuff I'd like to get done in the future on it:
- A ranked game type separate from standard games that will be the primary way to compete on leaderboards. This will need to use a different stat than raw win% otherwise winning a single game and never playing again would give you a 100% win rate. So ranked will likely use some sort of SR system where you gain 'points' for wins and lose 'points' for losses. In this way the scores at the top of the board should represent both a high win % and a high number of total wins. Ranked will likely use random class/race like the daily challenge in order to truly test our abilities over the scope of the entire game.
- Daily Challenge win % shown in game. This is something I wanted to do as soon as I added the daily challenge. Since its a shared seed, I'd like to be able to see when you hover over it what the win % is of the current days challenge. This just acts as a rough indicator of how challenging the seed is.
- More stats in general, stuff like average win times, win streaks, number of turns taken etc.
Next Updates:
I'm finally emerging from my programmer mole cave so I'll be back and active on discord and the forums as I start working on the next updates. Next updates should start coming fast and furious again with a big emphasis on actual new content since we've been in a bit of a slow period lately. Obviously I'll also be tackling the various bugs and crashes that have accumulated.
I'll be fixing anything broken with the current stat server but will otherwise leave it as it is for a little while and focus on the game for the next few weeks. I'll likely return to it periodically to give it a nice boost. Like pretty much everything in this crazy project, its subject to many iterations before we finally get to full release.
Once again thanks everyone for your patience, I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of regular development!