Well, it’s been a week.

This was my second ludum dare, and it was fun. I took a much more ambitious game design this time than I did for my first one, and it made things interesting in I think a good way. Although there are loads of ideas and features that I never got around to implementing, my game is playable and looks a lot better than I expected it to.

The good:

I made an RTS in 48 hours. Also, it’s kind of fun.

The random island generation looks cool and saved me the time to create a map editor and a bunch of interesting maps.

The AI is actually pretty cool. All of the “essential” features are in (fire, selection, training, movement, pathfinding, combat, fire).

The art actually looks pretty neat. I had images for all of the units, particle effects for the fire, circles for the ripple effect that doesn’t entirely make sense and a neat lots of trees effect to hide the fact that the map is tilebased.

The bad:

The fire is currently “if hp < maxhp then BIG FIRE ON UNIT end”.

I really wanted the size of the fire to depend on the size of the unit and how hurt the unit is, but I was just so rushed for time. I also wanted units to heal over time, but never got around to it, so if a unit is hurt even once it will remain on fire until it dies.

The AI is kind of random and doesn’t really protect it’s main base very well. It also never acts offensively; if it attacks you it’s because you’re too close to its merchants.

The map generator has a habit of creating inland cities. It also has a slight chance of spawning capitals directly adjacent to each other, and a hopefully slighter chance of locking up during the map generation process in which case the program would need to be restarted.

The game never says YOU WIN or YOU LOSE even if you destroy every enemy or an enemy destroys every one of you.

The selection mechanics were a bit clunky. If multiple units are in front of your mouse ,which one is selected is random. It is impossible to double click on a unit to select all of that type of unit, which is annoying because selecting all war ships without selecting any of your merchants is something you will want to do often.

Merchants will occasionally stop what they are doing and become idle. This happens often when the AI tries to order a merchant to trade with an inland colony.

Some undeveloped features are obvious, like the fact that you can “capture” colonies, yet their ownership is meaningless.

Due to the lack of variety in game elements, the strategy is somewhat flat.

There is a total lack of sound/music.

And there are a bunch of other minor bugs that managed to persist due to a lack of playtesting.

more thoughts:

I’m very pleased with the game that I managed to create, and have been enjoying the positive feedback.

It’s been a week, and I’ve mostly been busy, but I have started on a postcompo version.

I’ll probably change the white player to a more contrasting color

So, as you can see in the cropped screenshot, there is some variation in the size of fires according to how hurt the unit is. You can also see  some aesthetic changes (like the shores), and an area of influence for buildings under a player’s control that provides healing to that player’s units. Also, there are no inland colonies.

[EDIT http://www.mediafire.com/file/ozfezytzyzv/TinyArmada1.1.zip]

Tags: post-mortem, screenshot