Regency Solitaire II Dev Diary #10

It feels as though we've really got a lot of momentum going at the moment with our developement of Regency Solitaire II. We are at that satisfying stage where our plans come to fruition and various systems in the game are brought to life.

Shop screen

This is our shop screen in Regency Solitaire II. Bella gradually acquires more items either for her garden or her costume, with the items granting either active power ups or passive abilities.

Since our last update we have exported all shop screen items. In terms of placing them in the scene, we have noted centre coordinates for a 'purchased' particle effect, trimmed all items and noted the top left coordinates for drawing.

item purchased effect

In terms of the code base, which has been evolving through Shadowhand and Ancient Enemy since it was first developed for Regency Solitaire, Jake disabled a lot of the Ancient Enemy inventory system code. Then reenabled the original Regency Solitaire shop code, and copied missing bits in from the original source code. Then there was some code refactoring. Altogether, this was a big task.

Next, it was a case of making everything in the shop work:     

•     Configuring all the shop items (29 in total) in code

•     Loading in all the shop items, drawing the purchased background items (sometimes replacing default items e.g. hedge with Topiary).     
•     Showing a scrolling list of shop items with arrow buttons on each end.

•     Creating a purchase dialog with item details and cost.    

•     Showing the correct Gold panel and Done button.

The next task was to enable and scale up the purchased particle effect (and sound effect) and test it on all items. Jake needed to add two effects for some items that spanned the screen e.g. peonies and ballustrade.

He also made sure all shop items are stored in the save data and load in properly, and forced the player to get the first free item so that a tutorial for it works properly.

Finessing the design

We had a meeting to finalise the shop item introduction order/chapters. Some items were already mapped onto specific chapters (e.g. you find a hat at the milliners, we weren't going to alter that one.) But others had some flexibility as to when they were introduced, so we had a think about their relative power in-game, the game economy, player experience, etc.

Having then implemented this, we tested that all items unlock properly after each chapter.

Text

There is a bunch of informational and flavour text to go with each shop item. Helen wrote all the shop item text and we tested/edited it together.

In addition to the shop item text for each item, there is also a dialog at the end of each chapter when the player goes to the shop screen. This is an opportunity to make brief plot- or history-relevant comments about some of the items. The comments are made mainly by our garden designer, Maplethorpe Green, who is at the top of each dialog:

We realised that there were just a couple of items that were culinary and had nothing to do with the garden designer - so we made a special case dialog for these items in the same style, featuring the cook, instead.

Helen then wrote all the gardener/cook shop dialog text and we tested/edited it together.

Further functionality

What Jake did next:     

•     Set tooltip zones for the gold panel and done button.     
•     Made sure powerups are enabled by shop purchases and tested their upgraded functionality.     
•     Made some new cheat keys for us to test out the shop. Imagine it was as easy as pressing a single key to get 50,000 gold in real life!   
•     Made sure that the passive shop items (not powerups) affect the correct parts of the game (see this Patreon post about being a producer that has a list Jake used to code/test them).     
•     Tutorial arrow pointing at first free item.

Bella paper doll

Next was exporting all of Bella's wearable shop screen items:

For each one, Jake:     

•     Trimmed them.     
•     Noted drawing coords and centre coords for the purchased particle effect.     
•     Updated the code and made them draw.

There are some special cases like hiding the grass in front of her legs when the Patio is purchased, and making sure various default items are replaced when shop items are bought. Also the left/right gloves needed to be drawn on separate layers so that the fans could be drawn in between. Then this all needed testing!

Jake then tested the whole thing in Debug mode to look for anomalies. Luckily there were none - but it's a good safety check.

In summary the shop screen was a lot of work. But is a key part of the game and good to have done. It looks great and we are excited for people to see it in action.

Marketing:

We also did a bunch of marketing stuff:     

•     Made RS2 webpage on Grey Alien Games.     
•     Made RS2 itch.io page.     
•     Posted some more images to Steam.     
•     Ongoing marketing via Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky.

- We now have over 2700 wishlists. We think 3000 should be easy to hit by launch and maybe 4000 if our final marketing push goes well. We think this wishlists will convert quite well as that normally happens for our solitaire games due to our fans knowing what to expect.

Odds and Ends:     

•     Add map screen tooltip graphics. It's the same size as the Choose Mode dialog tooltip we added recently.     
•     Fixed bug with map dot unlocked particles still showing frozen on title screen.     
•     Integrated some recent story edits from Helen.     
•     Stored the Collector's Edition story and game text files that Helen has finished ready to add later.     
•     Added Collector's Edition character names to main game text file.     
•     Replaced Bella on BellaHenry and BellaMarietta pair images with one with white dress only, no other items. This is so we can save the full outfit for the final chapter.     
•     Updated the Powerups code so that relevant powerups can either have two levels of functionality based on shop items purchased, or charge quicker.     
•     Added in and tested the final story item text on 9 chapters.     
•     Had a meeting to finalise what mechanics will be introduced/reused on each level. We added some new ones for this game and want to add them to levels where they make sense based on the background/story.     
•     Worked on character biographies/backstory for the Collector's Edition.

Whew! We'll have another update soon...