Hey fellow martial herders!

More than a week ago Togglesword Games attended the Hero Fest 2019 in Bern, Switzerland. We had the chance to exhibit HIRT in the Indie Game Arena they had set up and we also gave talk about the systemic gameplay approach we follow in order to design HIRT. Furthermore, we were invited to have a „couch-talk“ with fellow multiplayer devs on the stage, where the other podium attendees played our sheep brawler and we chatted about the game.

The time in the Indie Game Arena proved to be super valuable to us, as we made recent changes to HIRT. During the three days of the Hero Fest, we could observe a lot of new, fresh players and how they played our game and what the new features (below) brought to the gameplay. We also had some experienced sheep brawler players come by, who knew us from earlier exhibitions all around Switzerland (like the Fantasy Basel, Zurich Game Show and the Geek Days in Zofingen). Another group of four players helped us track down a specific bug and were able to show us how to reproduce said error, which is extremly valuable to us developers.

For the Hero Fest 2019, we fixed some smaller things in HIRT (see previous post) but we also created some new sheep attack behaviours. Before, a sheep tossed by a shepherd would always attack the player closest to its position. This is still the case, but the older versions of HIRT left no chance to the victim shepherd. As the sheep would constantly aim towards the doomed player, there was no chance of escaping the hit. Now, the ability of the animal of aiming towards the player is limited and as soon as it is ramming forward, players can out-run and jump over the impending attack.

Moreover, we also created a new start screen with better-upped looks for our HIRT game. The new looks consist of more accurately selected colors and a finer grade of detail in the environments, to achieve a more polished overall aesthetic.