The Vindication Women's title screen

CWL Commissioner – the update the update

Adam Courtney

Look at that, it’s June! When did that happen? I have many game update things to share! 🙂

Android!

Yes! Finally! 🙂 Android builds have been confirmed to work on more than just my telephone! No extra setup, no faffing, just opening the APK and running. I couldn’t have done it without the work of Piotr Gwiazdowski and the wonderful Better Streaming Assets code. It is the backbone of the packs system – seriously, I owe them a great deal. 🙂

Boring details:

  • Game starts, checks if the persistent data path* has the CWL pack (This just ensures there’s at least 1 working pack, even if the user adds more)
  • It checks if the files are all there – if so, it happily continues quietly
  • If not… we harness the power of streaming assets to copy the missing stuff from inside the installed game, over to persistent data path. There are two perks to copying the files instead of reading them. Firstly mod support can extend into the main game instead of just extra packs, secondly the code now can now load packs off the one path, no having to choose if this is a special CWL pack or not.
  • On PC, the game has the files stored in DataPath because PC is much cooler and that’s a nice place to put mods.

Things are getting Itchy!

The builds for this game have been stored rather badly in an archaic Google Drive. I’ve been unhappy about this, but I couldn’t think of another way to make the game findable by everyone. Then it came to me… itch.io doesn’t charge for making an account, and in fact the page was already there for final release! 🙂

One password later and we have a slightly hidden CWL Commissioner page with downloads for each platform. I can even upload the builds using script, it’s great. And now that the weird packs problems are behind me, the build preparation is as simple as clicking build! Itch even has patching support! 🙂 I did a 5kb update the other week!

I’ve taken the step of making the link to this really early build available through the CWL Discord as a thank you thing for them. It also makes sure I’ve got a chance to answer questions etc. Feel free to hop aboard if you’re interested!

Features Added

  • Titles! So shiny, so editable, so defendable, so much title history!

The Vindication Women's title screen - that Selena Adams is holding the title, having won it from Sarah Price in week 5.

  • Injuries!

A profile picture for Amber Arcade. Her injury status says Elbow Fracture Severe: 5 Weeks.

  • Preset titles – no more having to recreate the Vindication Heavyweight Title every time. It even tries to get the images for the title.
  • Localisation! Primitive localisation for English and Spanish at the moment. I’m not a native speaker, so it’s very… fuelled by Google translate and any kind corrections I receive. The system is nice and robust, so I’m excited to add more. Next battle will be finding fonts that support characters in these new languages. Thai has been requested, so that’s a big one for me to work out, it would be great to offer this!

A Unity Editor window showing the localisation system for CWL Commissioner

  • Matches are riggable – that is to say that optionally you can force a wrestler to win/lose a match – good if you want to keep track of real world CWL Shows, or real life wrestling.

A match card - the two wrestlers names have red and green rings around them to show who has been set to win the match.

  • News! I kept this as a sneaky extra for this version – game events are reported in the news inside CWL Commissioner, and it offers you a window into what’s going on with the other player’s show.

The news - everyone is injured

What’s next?

  • I’m not sure, I’m mostly pottering around adding localisation.
  • For the next build I’ve added a cool calendar, as a way to show match history, and see who has faced who recently

A basic calendar showing that Vindication is on a Monday, and Nemesis is on a Thursday.

  • I like adding events and emails to make the game more interesting, I feel the breathing world aspect is important to lean into.
  • Stipulations – e.g. loser leaves the show (where the losing player is automatically fired to up the stakes on the match)
  • I want to give us the chance to play against AI eventually, but that’s by far one of the more “out there” things for me, I’ve not done that in any depth.
  • Polishing and bug fixing! Always bugs!
  • As you can see in this build, there’s also a lot of missing wrestler images as I’ve updated the roster to 2022! 🙂 Speaking of which…
  • Cutscenes, non-copyright challenging renders for CWL Wrestlers…those bits and bobs.

In all honesty, the game is shaping up nicely. I need to refocus and get to grips with what the next phase is, as I’m a mostly pottering around adding localisation entries, nibbling around the edges.

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