Gladiator Trials II - Making Of

Gladiator Trials I continued
Early 2005 - June 2005

The final GUI design is displayed next, the GUI was actually created by a new artist I managed to get interested. He created a fair amount of the GUI before departing and I had the nasty job of editing what was done to produce a complete GUI. It taught me a lot about 2d graphics manipulation, but took away weeks of work that would have been spent on the code or gameplay.

To finish up we are left with the arena. It wasn't always turn-based, in the original game it was actually done in real-time with minimal input required from the player. I wanted the game to concentrate on managing your gladiators, so the only option you had during the arena was being able to select a gladiator's target when you paused the game.

You never took your gladiator's through an enchanted forest, or through the capitol. The arena was split up into 4 different classes, each represented a different sword that was won as a reward on completion of the class. The classes were always the same for each scenario, but early scenarios restricted the player's choice of arena classes.

There's quite a big difference between Gladiator Trials 1 and 2. Some other differences include:

•There was only a weaponsmith, creating only swords from level 1 to 4
•There wasn't any mana, mages simply cast a spell based on their level every few seconds
•Gladiators couldn't heal fully at the camp, they required a visit to a hospital to recover
•Slaves didn't carry on from previous scenarios (I couldn't find a way to balance this yet)
•Gladiators killed in combat would appear as skeletons back at the camp
•Skeletons would spread disease to nearby slaves, who would spread disease to other slaves
•Gladiators didn't have different skin or tunic colors

After the intial release of Gladiator Trials, I had a lot of bugs pop up and for the next two months released several patches to get the game in a more playable state. When I first started codename Gladiator, I figured it would be my last ever game. But the desire to create was still burning within me, and it didn't take long until I found myself planing new projects...