A Little Bit of Everything
Studio Update: A Little Bit of Everything
Not a lot has happened around SquigglyFrog Studios lately.
Except...
Actually, quite a lot has happened.
It's just been one of those stretches where there hasn't been one giant shiny new feature to point at. Instead, there have been a hundred little things happening across the website, the business, the office, and of course, Threefold: The Last Stand.
So, time for another general studio update.
A Little Website Work
The SquigglyFrog Studios website got another round of updates.
Most of this was backend stuff designed to give me more control over how things are displayed and managed.
The header has been redone to make better use of available screen space, post counts have been added, the FAQs got another update, and a bunch of little things behind the scenes have been cleaned up.
The In the Works section also isn't quite as dynamic anymore.
That sounds like a downgrade.
It isn't.
The old version tried to be clever about how everything was displayed. The new version lets me control it more directly and make it look the way I actually want it to look.
Exciting stuff?
Probably not to anyone except me.
But I like building this stuff.
SquigglyFrog Is Officially Official
There was also a little bit of actual business news.
SquigglyFrog Studios is now a legal assumed business name of Willow Peak Digital, LLC.
For anyone following the studio, absolutely nothing really changes.
SquigglyFrog Studios is still SquigglyFrog Studios.
Willow Peak Digital is simply my LLC and is now officially the owner of the SquigglyFrog Studios brand, with SquigglyFrog recognized as an assumed business name.
Which means I now get to do all the fun little follow-up jobs like updating bank accounts and various other business records.
Joy!
The Office Got a New Toy Too
The office also has a shiny new printer courtesy of Epson ReadyPrint.
It's a subscription printer, which normally wouldn't be particularly exciting, but this one solves two things I really don't want to think about:
Print limits and buying ink.
I don't have to worry about how many pages I'm printing, and when the printer starts running low on ink, more ink magically appears in the mailbox.
That's pretty much how I want printers to work.
I print.
It prints.
Ink appears.
I don't think about it.
Perfect.
Meanwhile, Threefold Is Getting Prettier
Most of the game-development work has continued to focus on Threefold: The Last Stand.
The underlying game has been working for a while, so we're starting to add some of the visual feedback that makes it actually feel like a finished game instead of pieces moving around a board.
Piece selection now has proper visual effects.
Select one of your pieces and it glows.
Enemy pieces that it can capture also glow, which helps solve one of the problems I've mentioned before: remembering the fantasy version of the Rock-Paper-Scissors relationship.
It's much easier when the game simply communicates:
Yes. You can kill that one.
There's another warning now too.
If one of your pieces is within striking distance of an enemy, a pair of crossed swords appears above it.
It's a simple addition, but it makes the state of the battlefield considerably easier to read at a glance.
We're Actually Fighting Now
Capturing pieces has also gotten considerably more interesting.
The different classes are beginning to get their own combat animations.
Rangers attack from a distance.
When a Ranger captures something, it fires an arrow across the battlefield into its target.
Paladins do things a little more personally.
They close the distance and attack their target directly.
And when a piece is defeated, it doesn't simply vanish from the board anymore.
It falls to the ground.
Its soul rises out of the body.
Then the body dissolves away.
Cheerful little fantasy board game.
There are still plenty of effects left to add, particularly for the Priest's various spells, but these little touches are starting to give the game considerably more personality.
Teaching the AI to Stop Staring at Itself
We've also been doing a lot of AI testing.
The AI now has different behavioral tendencies, including things like passive and aggressive demeanors, which influence how it approaches a match.
And the AI-vs-AI testing system has been extremely useful for figuring out where those behaviors need adjustment.
There was one fairly obvious problem.
Two AIs really liked to stalemate each other.
A lot.
At one point, more than 75% of AI-vs-AI matches were ending in draws.
That's not particularly useful.
So we've been tweaking how the AI evaluates positions, how willing it is to take risks, and how its behavior changes as a match develops.
Those changes have made a pretty dramatic difference.
We're now seeing something closer to 25% of AI-vs-AI matches ending in draws.
That's still higher than I ultimately want, but it's a huge improvement.
Of course, nobody is actually going to buy Threefold so they can sit around watching two computers play each other.
AI-vs-AI exists entirely as a testing and balancing tool.
But if the computer can play thousands of games for me and expose problems before a human player ever sees them, I'm certainly going to let it.
It Looks More Like a Game Now Too
The battlefield is also starting to look less like a development test scene.
We've added some basic background scenery, so we're no longer staring at a board and a GUI floating in nothingness.
It's still early, and the environment will continue to evolve, but even a relatively simple backdrop makes an enormous difference in how the game feels.
The GUI has also had a fairly significant overhaul.
It's still nowhere remotely close to final, but I've replaced more of the placeholder interface with a proper GUI asset pack and started establishing something closer to the visual direction I want.
More importantly, the interface has been adjusted to behave better across different screen shapes.
Thin displays.
Wide displays.
Traditional phones.
Foldables.
They all need to remain playable without important information disappearing or the interface turning into a giant pile of overlapping buttons.
Having a Fold 8 Ultra sitting on my desk now certainly doesn't hurt when testing that.
Lots of Little Things
So that's pretty much where things stand.
No single massive announcement.
Just a lot of little things.
The website is better.
The business paperwork is becoming more official.
The office has a printer that feeds itself ink and a motorized paper tray that opens and closes on its own, meaning if you leave a stack of papers printed and turn it off, it dumps them.. conveniently into the garbage can sitting right below it.
Threefold has better AI.
The interface is improving.
The battlefield is getting scenery.
Pieces glow, swords warn you when you're about to get smacked, Rangers fire arrows, Paladins charge into combat, and dead warriors now have their souls ripped from their bodies before they dissolve into nothingness.
You know...
Little things.
Back to work!