Towns begging for water is working. But I haven’t added a way to save them yet (that’s working). MWAHAHAH. demo here.

Presenting my RTS so far:

(picture of my workers building something. Sorry I don’t have any better screenshots)

Basically, it’s a Dwarf-Fortress styled RTS.

It involves lots of work on micromanagement, which leads to a lot of work in macromanagement too.

See here for more info. – Most of my updates will be there or on my blog

I just got back from a holiday. I have worked on the game 2-ish days prior to make up for the lost time.
Good luck to all the other participants.

HeroesGrave

So we didn’t get to post an update yesterday because we were trying to rifle through our asset lists and nail down our final design decisions.   I also managed to get our unit selection working so that you can single select, drag a bounding box to multi-select, and double click a unit to “select by type”.  Lastly – I wrote a mouse-based camera controller.  Also – I’m Matt.  Hi there.

Today was met with some drama when Unity’s built in navigation solution proved to be wildly unacceptable for our needs.  We scrapped it and went with Aron Granberg’s A* solution – which is working awesome and only took about an hour to get hooked up.  Todd and Ryan have been cranking out models and textures rapid-fire style while I finish up some path finding and other basic mechanical stuff.

I’ve started working on some AI for units and once that is working we’ll start designing some maps!

I made a functional AI! It’s still not great at the game, but it at least makes it playable for now. The other cool thing about the design of the game/AI is that is very scalable, so most games I’m playing have 3 factions. I might expirement some tomorrow with much higher numbers. Anyway, all of my features at least exist now, even if they’re a little rough around the edges.

Today wasn’t as difficult as yesterday, at least on my end. I got some preliminary planning done, as well as fixing some bugs. I feel today was a lot more productive than Day 1. I personally was streaming for most of the day. Sebastian’s stream however was only for about 30 minutes before it fell apart completely.

What I accomplished on Day 2 of #7DRTS

7/23:

• Fixed some issues with the ranged weaponry, although I still have a lot to fix that I am planning to do on Day 3. Namely, the problem with the PC controls being inverse, and the 360 controls refusing to work at all.
• I replaced the jump sound effect to something less annoying.
• I designed the tutorial level, but I still need to add the dialogue, enemies, heroes, towers, and everything else.
• I added melee combat, and that is perfectly working on everything but Windows Phone. I will do the Windows Phone implementation post- ludum dare. I just need to implement the animations Sebastian will be working on tomorrow.

Tomorrow I plan on finishing the split screen, the map editor, and beginning the networking. I will face a huge host of issued tomorrow doing all of that, and I won’t even have the whole day to do it, as I have to spend a large amount of the day at the dentist.

With the split screen my challenges will be making it an option to have the game but with split screen, if you click “Start Local.” I will also have to create a Player 2 class, but that shouldn’t be as difficult.

With the map editor, I just need to implement the sprites Sebastian does, and keep that updated.

With the networking I will have to deal with learning how to actually do it, implementing the lidgren libraries, and the same issue with making it an option called “Start Online”

Those are the challenges I will be facing Day 2. I really hope we can get the game playable in time for the end of the competition, but I am starting to worry we may not finish it in time. Even worse, the exhaustion is starting to set in. The work gets harder and harder as time goes on. Oh well. Hopefully I can make it playable by the end of Day 6, and leave Day 7 to fix things.

If you want to follow this developer blog easier, then go to www.kerinova.blogspot.com I will be posting these blogs there, in addition to here.

Today was all about foundations.

• Setting up a sprite system in Unity, with debug text to name each sprite until the gfx are ready
• A camera that follows whatever object is in focus
• Scrolling battlefield
• A controller that lets you switch active objects and send them commands. This should make implementing AI easier, as well as implementing controllers, etc.
• A base that drops out “heroes”
• Heroes that fly and move within a set of boundaries
• An object pool for bullets (so I don’t get unexpected FPS drops when everything is going full-bore)
• Collision using rigidbodies and setting up layers for each player’s team

Next up: adding foundations to support two teams, win / loss conditions, economy, upgrades, and fixed emplacements (each team gets a base and two defense towers).

Huh. I guess that isn’t too bad for a few hours of work after working all day on Chess Heroes. It sure feels better writing it all down like that!

So the second day of MiniLD #44 draws to a close, and I have made some good progress today.

First, I added a lot of art to the game, though it is still pretty fugly.  I also tested out an equally fugly random music system I had lying around somewhere.  We’ll see what comes of that.

On the gameplay side, I implemented combat and an enemy faction, space stations, and the fundamentals for resources (no spending or gathering yet, just numbers, functions for changing those numbers, and interface elements), and the fundamentals for collision detection, though for now the only meaningful uses of that are 1) tracking where shots fall, and 2) scanning for nearby enemies.

Tomorrow, my goals are to get trade routes, production, and resource collection up and running, and maybe implement some rudimentary enemy AI (i.e. enemy player AI, not enemy ship AI, which already exists).  If I have the time, implementing placeholder sounds for things like weapons fire and ship explosions might be nice, as well as implementing the graphics for ship explosions.

Good night, and see you all tomorrow!

Cross-posted on my blog.

Tags: MiniLD #44, RTS

Second week learning Unity3D and I figured I would join the competition to get over the learning curve. This is my first Ludum Dare & first game jam. Really enjoying the challenges of trying to make a RTS game.

Features so far(All terrible and in progress):

Selection (Single, Shift Click, Drag & Select)
Camera (WASD,  space or middle mouse button + mouse , mouse wheel)
Unit Navigation (pathfinding & collisions)
MiniMap (Not much of one…)

Check out the web demo Here.

basic mechanics of my rts

Tags: #7DRTS

This article is copied from my personal blog.

opengameart.org has been very good to me. I think this will be my new go-to game dev art supply. So far I’ve found everything I’ve wanted on that site, except for a meteor sprite. Maybe I’ll make one and contribute back.

Michael made a lazer sound and a ship thrusting sound, and I added the sound effects to the game. In addition to that, I made a ton of progress today:

• 3pm – draw flags only if selected
• 5pm – add another class of ship
• 8pm – found out I was using t * a ^ 2 + t * v for acceleration instead of a ^ 2 * t + v * t. I fixed all the math and made ships arriving at gather points nice and smooth.
• 9pm – added team colors overlayed on ships
• 10pm – gave the Militia ship an electric melee attack
• 11pm – gave Militia ships smart attacking AI
• 12am – made Ranger ships pursue targets
• 2am – added TurretShip and FlagShip
• 3am – added support for ships with backwards thrusters
• 3am – added move & engage command
• 3am – improved ship selection capabilities
• 5am – added title screen, credits screen, and game over screen. I made it possible to win and lose the game.
• 5am – added title screen and credits screen

Here’s the title screen:

Here’s a screenshot of a battle underway:

Battles can get hectic and chaotic, but it is fun to watch it play out. Here’s a video of me demoing a battle:

YouTube Video

Again, you can playtest this game in your browser right now using the same url as Day 1. Feel free to give me feedback or advice.

I came up with some ideas on what bigger picture gameplay will look like which I am pretty pleased with. There will be a bunch of different classes of ships, for example:

There will be some obvious deficiencies with the ships targeting systems and AI. These can be helped with upgrades, such as:

• Targeting
  • Target the first enemy found (default)
  • Target the closest enemy.
  • Communicate with others to divide up the targets evenly.
• Ranger
  • Upgrade range.
  • Update bullet count to 3.
  • Evasive maneuvers 1.
  • Evasive maneuvers 2.
  • Smarter aiming.
  • Backwards thrusters.
• Militia
  • Evade lazers.
  • Backwards thrusters.
  • Smarter aiming.

You will start with only a flagship, and as you progress throughout the campaign, you will start to build up a convoy that gets ever bigger and more powerful. You’ll need it to be bigger and more powerful to get through later levels, in fact.

Here’s what’s next on the TODO list:

• Build simpler level 1 where you only have to navigate your flag ship around meteors.
• Give the player some cash and let them choose to build Ranger ships or Militia ships using the Flagship.
• Create level 2 where you have to destroy the enemy flagship and then fly your flagship through the created portal.

I’m at a pretty good checkpoint right now. I’m calling it a night.

HeroesGrave

Only under the hood stuff changes today.

Over the course of doing this so many times, I think I’ve ended up with a really good façade class for my units.

It pays well to name and design your functions in the problem domain! Thinking in terms of FaceOtherUnit() is easier than RotateToTargetDirection(). Abstract those low level details with your façade!

Preview of my Behaviour Tree plugin, currently codenamed “INTLord”

I’m doing some quick work to bring my half-baked Behaviour Tree plugin into the game. Should get something up within the day.

Man, it feels good to refactor some code.

Oh yeah…

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 24th, 2013 at 6:54 am and is filed under MiniLD #44 / 7dRTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Hi,
This is my first LD and though I’ve started making a few video games I’m really trying to push to have this be the first one I finish.

since I have game maker I decided to use that and try to keep it simple…

I started today, the rts theme seems much harder then I was hoping for. I was really trying to make it as simple one objective with one mechanic as possible. But RTS in nature are huge… so I’m trying to make it close to real time. try to defeat the enemy ship before they can reload there cannons.

Finished:
title screen (spent about two hours on the art, temp titles etc made it in Vue 11.5 with the new rain particles, and I use modo for my modeling), it was more for me to wrap my head around what I was wanting to make, but probably a waste of time.

learned how to make some basic 2d pirate sprites and coded there death upon getting hit by random cannon balls.

I also worked on a “fog of war” but not sure I like it as it only works when your troops are in that arrea…

game design:
pretty much just a real time version of the old board game “Broadsides and boarding parties”  Your ship has been hit by the enemy’s cannons command your crew to fire back and or attack/defend as the enemy boards your ship.

Tomorrow hope to work on basic click command controls and pathing?

Newspaperts

…is a game about a beginner shopkeeper working to build the best newspaper stand in town.

Juggle with deliveries, resources and hirelings as you unlock upgrades to boost sales.

Playable here.

Click on NPCs that approach the stand to sell newspapers, click on shopkeeper to restock newspapers (newspaper icon) or convert currency (dollar stack icon).

Still very much a work in progress.

Rough log of events:

Day 1:

– Formulated basic idea

– Stacking system for newspapers / money

– Character system & Wandering NPCs

Day 2:

– Further refined stand

– Added character actions

– Re-stocking newspapers using shopkeeper menu & stand money

Day 3:

– Different currencies/resources (rocks, bottle caps, cigarettes, dollars)

– Settled on a style and did an art pass

Day 4:

– Some more art tweaking.

– Y-axis & depth sorting for wandering NPCs

– NPCs will now approach the stand when they want to buy a newspaper

Day 5:

– Added thieves

– Added floating texts

Day 6:

– Added time of day & ambient fx

– Added stashing

Day 7:

– Added dealers

– Added upgrades

– Added variable NPC count depending on time of the day

I’ve always liked action adventures over turn-based adventures, and so I like Zelda games more than Final Fantasy, at least in terms of gameplay.  So I thought, why couldn’t you have an RPG that was more Zelda-like?  Perhaps sort of like Final Fantasy Legend 2 for Gameboy.  And then I thought, you always have a party of 4 or so in an RPG, but could that be made, how you say, REAL TIME?  And such was born the idea for the Zelda RTS.

You have your party of 4 characters or so, and you control one of them like in a normal Zelda game, but control the others more like RTS units.  You press a key and time freezes, sort of like in Mass Effect’s menu thingy, and you can give commands to your units (or maybe time doesn’t freeze, or maybe that could be a difficulty level setting), such as telling the mage to cast heal, or the archer to target a guy.  And then you the swordsman can battle like in any 2D Zelda game.

This is what I’m shooting for this week.  Yesterday I accomplished:

• Resized the tiles to better fit the game
• Got moving from screen to screen working, would like to add a transition effect at some point
• Figured out how to deploy the game (I’m using ImpactJS)
• Attacking units and killing them (though no death animations yet)
• The beginnings of the dialog system
• A good start on a state system and swappable AI
• Tinkering with weapons and finding some of what works and doesn’t

I found that setting a timer and working until I hit 8 hours really helped me to get stuff done.  I clocked in at 8 hours and 46 minutes yesterday.  I’m going for the same today, and will be streaming a good deal of that on my channel at http://twitch.tv/dvcolgan.

And some screenshots:

I’m hoping for an Earthbound-esque feel.

Day two has already passed?! I need to hurry!

I still have a long way to go, but fortunately my friend Ralph has joined me! He’ll be doing the graphics for the game. This helps me focus more on the gameplay and code.

Struggling a bit here and there. But that usually happens when I’m not familiar with something new. So far you can move the unit you see on screen to a certain position. You can also pan the camera with the cursor keys.

You can play the work in progress via my website.

Now let’s get back to work!

Tags: Dim Wars

24/07:
Fixed that minimap issue.
Added enemies. Enough visual stuff. Onto combat and unit types.
RPG section can sit as it is for now.

…later…

Tired of doing visual stuff. Onto more enjoyable things like combat design.
Very basic combat at first. (Fight to the death) No real AI stuff yet.
Lot stuff I want to add if I get time or after the challenge.

We have combat! Combat is functioning. No one can die yet, but it’s there.
Have a bit of redesign to do in the morning.
Tomorrow evening, there should be a great deal of stuff done.
Looking good & on schedule at this rate. Started writing some music and narrative (which is a rather large component.)
A few tweaks today have also removed some things I wasn’t sure about before so that results in less work!

Progress GIF: Doesn’t look too different from yesterday but proof of combat “working”?

//My working
So, these updates may seem a bit odd.
This is due to me getting a couple of hours free to code in the morning and a few at night. Most of the day is gone.
I really get about 4 – 5 hours of time to code my entry a day.

Song of the day:Riding Cats Like a Boss by Jeff Ball

My game build is Oscar Mike! Okay. Sorry, I’ll stop the modern war talk. Yesterday I made some nice progress on the game. I have a basic win/lose loop.

Rockets Attack the bomber mobs, the timer countdowns to 0

I decided to make the game work on a timer. The player has a set amount of time to get his bomber mobs to the target. I made the bomber mobs automatically spawn, and go to their target. To defend itself, the computer has towers that shoot homing rockets. If I add more than 3 turrets, the bombers have no shot.

Now I work on the strategy part. I’m going to give the player units to fight the turrets, and give the bombers more of a fighting chance.

After, I’m going to create enemy fighter mobs to defend their turrets. I’m trying to set the game up as a rock v scissors interaction. The strategy is in how soon/when you deploy your mobs. If you deploy your fighters too soon, they may not be able to defend the bomber waves. I may expand the game with rounds.

For now, I’m trying to start small, and work outward. Usually my projects suffer from mental feature creep. Game jams tend to enhance my usual bad game design habits; so I’m happy that I’ve made it this far with this approach.

Forgot to mention, my inspiration is kind of a mash up between Flight Control and Clash of Clans.

In 2009, I imagined Air Command as a more war like version of Flight control

I’m a recovering Clash of Clans addict. I really liked the game’s GUI unit deployment battle system. I’m going for something like that with Air Command I wish they made a non iap version.

So, here’s a screenshot of our progress so far. The game will be a survival rts set on a randomly generated planet. Your ship has crashed and you must collect resources in order to repair it and escape the planet. During the night, hordes of mutated cyborgs attack you in waves.

http://imgur.com/z0KAGih.jpg

Got a little stuff done last night. Discovered the art I’m going to use; I mentioned it a long time ago on my blog but it’s worth a repeat: Oryx’s Lo-Fi Fantasy Sprites. Here’s a taste.

Aren’t they precious? They were originally made for a game competition called Assemblee about four years ago; since then they’ve become mainstays of the indie scene. Oryx sells an expanded commercial set so I contacted him and asked him if it were okay to use these for a non-commercial project; fortunately he was fine with that.

But I didn’t have time to get them integrated, so what you’re getting today is Colored Squaresville:

To come – um…everything. I’ve got the design nailed and it’s simple enough to do in the time allotted. I have the graphics I want. I’ve got the skillz from writing my bigger game, Planitia. Let’s get it done.

And by let’s, I mean me. I have to get it done.

In researching this compo the criticism of RTS’ is that they are more like Real Time Tactics — a faster mouse-clicker and better micro-manager wins the prize. There’s merit to that, but real-life involves strategizing over the long-term, not seeing immediate results, making very few simple commands in response to changing conditions.

Strategy involves long-term planning and a divorcing of oneself from the various tactical outcomes. In business and the military, a chain of command is established so the top-level General or CEO can implement their strategy through use of simplistic commands to complicated people. George W. Bush said “let’s go get Iraq!” and the generals said to their sub-commanders: “ok, mobilize our infantry and artillery to the southern regions”, and so on, all the way down to the soldiers who need to pack their toothbrush.

This is more the scale I’m interested in, and what becomes apparent is how much I don’t want to click on things. “Guh, just go get Iraq!” I want to say.

I’d make it a .gif but this is the actual framerate

My goal is to free the player from micro-managing units and simply get on with the strategy of winning. I love in Majesty how you have indirect control by planting Quest Flags with reward money, which is collected by any units that feel it’s worth the money to take up the task.

But there’s downsides to all-strategy-plus-autonomous-AI: I remember a big criticism of Dungeon Siege was that the game pretty much plays itself. With a handful of characters that’s not really fun…you want to feel challenged. But with 80 units? That’s more Homeworld territory, and ideally I’d judge my success on how few mouse-clicks and keystrokes you need to win.

Current progress on “Counterstrike RTS” milestone:

• AI decision tree on all units: Idle vs. Hunt states, all units attack closest on sight
• LOS for AI based on world collision, enter Hunt state on acquiring target
• Fog of War LOS: Can only see enemies on screen that 1 or more friendlies can see
• Order issuing: “Go go go” and “Hold this position” — individual or group

Hi guys !

I’m Lo-X, I’m a french programmer that try to make some small video games on my free time.

For the first time, I decided to try the next Ludum Dare (#27). The challenge for me is to have something playable within the 48hours.

For the next jam I’ll use C++ and SFML, wich is a great library built on top of OpenGL. You can find more information about it on SFML website.

I’ll also use my own “framework”, just a bunch of tools using SFML in C++. It’s not complete yet but not far from being it. Anyone who wants to use it is welcome to do so. Here is the GitHub link. I’ll update it in some days.

I’ll perhaps make a livestream too, but I never did that so I don’t even know if I have a right internet connection, plus I don’t speak english very well, but I still would like to do it…

If you want, you can find more information about me on my website (french), or on my GitHub account.

See you !

Tags: #27, C++, french, Ludum Dare, sfml

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 24th, 2013 at 12:40 pm and is filed under LD #27. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

This whole physics thing is harder than I thought it was going to be, at the moment the green player box can float around with the force of gravity pulling it down, and the platforms stopping it.

I’m hoping to finish movement soon, so I can actually add in RTS elements.

Multiplayer is now working! You can host a game and connect to somebody over the internet, as confirmed just now on IRC. Hooray!

As for the game itself, it’s still really basic. You can wander about, and you have one item: an inexhaustible fireball scroll. In the actual game you’ll have to find and construct your own weapons (hence the whole strategy part) but for now, have fun shooting each other.

If you’ve got Firefox 23 you can play it at http://foon.co.uk/forest-feud

It’s upcoming only in a month’s time, and I’m shaking even now. I don’t know where to start! I’d love to prepare by using sfxr and making spritesheets in Paint.NET, but the rules say I can’t until the 48 hours start. I understand Game Maker. I know how it’s just like coding but put in a simpler way. But I’d like to challenge myself, and go more versatile with using C# or Java. I’d use ActionScript with flash, but flash’s amtlib.dll isn’t working, and I understand Java and C# better. Programming would be a LOT easier if it was put in a simpler way. It’s like learning a new language, you know the translation but you have to learn the language. I’ve dreamed of doing something like the Ludum Dare, but I need more training! Can anyone bring me to something that’ll help me prepare?

Ontop of all that, what should I use to program it? I have Netbeans, Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Express, Gamemaker 8 Pro, and (I haven’t used this in a LOONG time) Unity.

Thank you.

Networking is functioning pretty well.  Implemented most of the game rules.  Finished all of the tile art.  Why is this going so smoothly?  Could it be that after 30-odd failed games it starts to get easier?

Ready for a castle assault.

Still to come…  Public demo.  Ability to regain lost units.  Sounds and maybe music?  Lots of bug fixing.

I enjoy RTS games so i thought this would be a fun first mini dare to do. The concept is the whole traditional RTS idea remade to this theme of cherry warfare. The resources are obtained before battle [Figure 1] and things are more simplified to attempt to reach a more broad audience into the RTS community.

The end of the Day 3 for me. The base is implemented but a lot of thing needs to be done.

Test : http://aylab.p.ht/web/ld/minild44/7DRTS/0_0_6/

We can build bases!  Hoorah!  So – to go along with that, the game now manages what buildings you are able to build and presents a correct menu when you select a worker (that drone looking guy you see there).  Buildings rise out of the ground Command and Conquer: Generals style for the duration of their designated build time and update our graphs so that units can path find around them correctly.  Todd and Ryan continue their tradition of doing awesome art things.

The goal for tomorrow is to hook up production buildings so they can make units and then getting some resource gathering together.

For some reason the last post was blank sorry for the repost

Hi guys Faisal(Team Leader/Designer) here again to show you our progress for day 3 bit of a slow day for some os us but getting there.

Character Art

so far Jurgita has been working hard and managed to create our enemy units and is currently working on animating all the units.

Environment Art

Stu has been Stu and whipped up the last of the tile assets so now we have almost all the environment done, hes now moving on to finishing up objects around the edges and the User Interface

   
UI

Currently i have been working on the sound interface, which has been painful but now we have a music slider that will change the volume of the music. The current place holder for the music is the Theme from the  1990 Ducktales game for Nintendo.

Code

Currently Zac has managed to finish adding the main environment tiles and program the path-finding along each path though only 1 is currently visible in the prototype.

Through a combined effort we have also managed to combine the 2 different code together.

map routes and UI

I made some quick adjustments to my AI that I thought of during the work day, and the computer is now decently challenging! Especially as you add factions (not really a great idea with such a small play space). Anyway, here’s another screenshot of what 6 factions looks like

I decided I’ll work on the dimension mechanic now I’ve got units floating around the map.

So as I explained in my first dev-log, the unit which is located in another dimension will see a different map. So on the screen, you’ll be able to see different tiles around this unit. So I started out with making three different coloured maps representing the dimensions. And then there is the portal which is the cyan-coloured circle. It doesn’t do much at this moment, but it will be a doorway to a certain dimension.

Tomorrow I hope to put a new version online with which you can mess around.

Good night! (to wherever it is nighttime atm)

Tags: Dim Wars

Hey Everyone,

I’ll be streaming 7dRTS stuffs right now, go on over to multitwitch.tv/0creds/gasquake to watch both my stream and my partner’s stream at the same time.

Hope to see you there,

– 0Creds

After wrestling with Git subtree commands overnight, I’ve integrated my AI system into the game. Not much right now though, just the dummy units following you.

I took this time to add a new unit and re-enable an old one.

The shielder is a tank unit that can’t attack. However, it is the only unit that can push units by just moving through them.

Since the zweihander guy moves so slow, you can actually use shielders to push him and move faster!

The shooter is actually from the old SloweRTS experiment. It will be replaced with the sorcerer: a ranged unit whose projectiles are homing.

I took this time to integrate NGUI into the project as well. The box on the lower right will serve as a context-sensitive quick help. The art assets are a combination of the free Necromancer GUI in the Unity Asset Store, and the Moderna Graphical Interface from OpenGameArt.org.

Web Demo WIP

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity

See here for more info

HeroesGrave

Well, progress has definitely been slow on my end. The hardest part of this is to find a game that I can make in this limited amount of time with my limited amount of knowledge. In short, I’m a noob in this type of challenge, especially since this is my first miniLD.

To keep me from being deterred, I press on. For the sake of scope, I decided to do a sort of real time tactics instead of a traditional real time strategy. This should fit the challenge enough to complete a competitive entry, and I should be able to finish as well. So far, the idea for my game revolves around a French trapper who must trap animal s to upgrade his gear. It will have to have the process of building in the game to truly have the element of a real time tactics game. I thought about the name Frontier: Quebec for the name of the entry. I think I’ll stick with this name for now.

I have coded most of my scripts for the Unity engine for the sake of the game, but most of it is on paper at the moment. Hopefully I’ll have time to type it (hilarious, right?). Anywho, the only other thing that I have been doing is listening to “Farewell to Nova Scotia” by Gordon Bok to get me in the mood for the game development that I have later.

I’ll update later, and good luck to my fellow developers.

Tags: javascript, journal, unity3d

So I decided to slightly tweak the theme of my game.  Only slightly.  Now, it’s not just “public approval” you are gunning for; that public approval is reflected in the revenue pulled in by the crowdfunding campaign you are running to fund the rebellion.  Correspondingly, it is no longer called Insurrection, but rather Jumpstarter.

Otherwise, today has been a productive day, but sadly not as productive as I would have hoped.  I managed to get trade routes and resource gathering up and running, tweaked combat code a bit, and I’ve started implementing the interface structure for unit construction, but I haven’t actually started implementing unit construction yet, which is a big deal.  I was hoping to at least get started with that.

Still, there are 4 days left in which to implement production and enemy AI before getting to the more unique stuff, as well as possibly polish (though frankly, I don’t think I’ll have time for much of that).  Tomorrow will be ugly, because I have a really full day of classes, but I’m sure I’ll find a few hours to work on the problem, and starting Friday things are calmer.

Cross-posted on my personal blog.

Tags: MiniLD #44, RTS

Last time I showed off my 162-unit RTS at a stunning 5 seconds per frame. Not FPS, that’s SPF. And that ain’t good.

Clearly it’s not scaling well as I crank up the units. What we’ve got here is your classic O(n^2) problem between entities. There’s a bevy of literature out there regarding space-division in a proper manner for these types of issues, but I had an idea.

The game literature out there deals with LOS for terrain but not for dynamic entities. I decided to roll my own: introducing the Visibility Matrix(tm):

Anybody there? “None.” Seems legit, Bob you’re on point.

You’re blue, the enemy is red but hidden (left the text on to show their position). I turned off the world so it can read better, but remember there’s a slab in the middle of the world blocking each other’s view. Each cell refers to the visibility between the two actors. The “oo”‘s mean “can see”…the “–“‘s mean “can’t see”.

Good ol’ Bob. Never complained about recon.

Visibility between Blue:7 and Red:0-5 has been established in the Visibility Matrix, and the units can query these values rather than generate it on their own expensively.

What makes this faster is these vis checks are time-sliced, i.e. only a few of them are updated every frame instead of the O(n^2) nightmare from the last post. To achieve this we simply walk through the matrix left->right, top->bottom, updating each cell with a fresh LOS.

How many cells do we update each frame? Well if there’s n units, then the Visibility Matrix only needs n * (n – 1) / 2 cells, as visibility is commutative and we assume each actor can see themselves. Best of all we  guarantee that no enemy can see you before you see them, so no ambushes just a little lag.

Finally if we demand a maximum response time for the unit in frames, then the number of checks performed each frame to guarantee an update = max frames / # cells. At 60fps and a 1 second response time your calls are spread out over 60 frames.

Here’s the same 162 units rocking it out at a smoking 9fps. I’m calling it 10fps, that’s a 50x framerate increase.

Where this really takes off is I can store more than just vis data in there — distance calculations, health differential, whose turn it is to do the dishes, whatever I’d normally have to generate at runtime about information for each pair of actors.

Once I move all these calculations to the server I hope to throttle up a gear in terms of units. But maybe I should make a game first…

Yes.. I have so many pending things to do in real life… but anyway…

This is a very simple game: you are the blue army, your enemy is the red one, neutral cities are white.

Select your city and any other one to send part of  your army.

This is the first early-alpha-don’t-show-it version

First screenshot

Got a little bit of work done today, I was able to implement the electricity system. Here you can see an image of a small town

And here is that same town but with the power overlay.

Any powered building that gets connected to a building without power will then power that building. Or you can connect a generator to a power source and it will power all buildings in a radius.

Ill leave you with this.

The town of Eden, a trade hub for the poor.

First a big thanks to all the guys that stream. even if our games are really different its great to see how you guys are doing it and I always learn something.

RTS has become a big challenge for me

worked on:
click to select unit/units
units move to location clicked with really basic pathing.
canons shoot canon balls and kill your units
enemy ai…. they randomly move and will fire at which ever of your units is closest.
instead of fog of war you only “see” what your units “see” walls block units line of sight.

not working:
I tried to make a click drag bounding box thing that didn’t work at all…
not sure if game maker was well suited for rts…

This article is copied from my personal blog.

Today Michael gave me the first music track he composed for the game and I am impressed. I am excited to have professional sounding music for a change.

That being said, the first thing I did after inserting the music into the game was program a mute button so that I could keep listening to techno while I coded.

Michael also delivered an electric explosion sound effect that works perfectly.

I mentioned yesterday that I could not find a meteor graphic to use on opengameart.org. I actually did end up finding art that works really well by searching for “rock”.

You can see the three rock types in the current spritesheet for the game which is autogenerated by chem:

The first thing I did today was create a electrical disintegration animation, and I’m pretty pleased with the result:

I wonder if this is considered good enough to submit to opengameart.org.

After I finished that animation, I worked hard and had a productive day:

• 3pm – Finished electrical disintegration animation and added sound effect to game.
• 3pm – Added in Michael’s background music and made it so you can toggle it with M key.
• 5pm – Added meteors with collision detection.
• 5pm – Fixed “ships rotating for no reason” bug.
• 6pm – Inserted a new Level 1 – meteor field that you have to navigate through.
• 7pm – Created a spastic portal graphic and added it to the level.
• 7pm – Fixed navigation bug for ships equipped with backwards thrusters.
• 9pm – Fixed scrolling when manual overriding.
• 11pm – Added a UI pane when ships are selected.
• 12am – Added a mini-map.
• 1am – Made it so you can send ships into a portal.
• 3am – Made it so selected portal shows what’s inside it.
• 4am – Added ability to send ships out of a portal.
• 5am – Added announcement support.
• 6am – Made your convoy show up on the level complete screen.
• 6am – Added stats to the level complete screen.
• 8am – Finished level complete screen so that you can get to the next level.

The source tree has grown quite a bit since last time I checked, up to 2,704 lines:

   49 src/bullet.js
 77 src/credits_screen.js
 43 src/flag_ship.js
 30 src/fx.js
 73 src/game.js
 34 src/game_over_screen.js
 178 src/level_complete_screen.js
 20 src/main.js
 81 src/meteor.js
 58 src/militia_ship.js
 91 src/physics_object.js
 82 src/portal.js
 60 src/ranger_ship.js
 37 src/sfx.js
 449 src/ship_ai.js
 177 src/ship.js
 7 src/ship_types.js
 57 src/squad.js
 933 src/state.js
 23 src/team.js
 105 src/title_screen.js
 35 src/turret_ship.js
 5 src/uuid.js
 2704 total

I actually feel pretty good about the code organization right now. I have only had to pause progress and refactor 2-3 times and each time it was mostly painless.

Enough of the technical stuff. Let’s see some screenshots.

Here’s one of the meteor field level you start out in:

Here’s what it looks like when you finish the level:

And here’s me giving a walkthrough of the progress made today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL-C7-h34qM

My TODO list is getting a bit unruly. I’ve divided it into “next steps” and “nice-to-have”s:

Next steps:

• Add text instructions in Level 1 to explain the controls and how to beat the level.
• Make it so that you start out the next level with the same fleet that you exited with.
• Show your cash in the UI
• Allow you to create ships that you unlock by spending cash.
• Insert a level between 1 and 2 with some attackers. You’ll have to build some Ranger ships to defend your Flagship.

Nice-to-haves:

• Figure out why the game slows to a crawl when many ships are added and then deleted.
• Experiment with speed cap on ships. (I’m reluctant to do this one – I like the idea of high-velocity dogfighting.)
• If Ranger is in range, don’t accelerate toward target.
• Fix the thruster sound glitchiness
• Each command should draw something on the screen to indicate that something is commanded. (Some commands do this already.)
• When forming a squad, don’t assume all ships have the same radius.

And now I must rest. I am exhausted.

We’ve got a map, units, and scrolling. The units even have two frames of animation!

Which you can’t see, of course, because it’s a static image.

Now I need a map and the GUI that will allow you to make units based on your ichor.

I’m really starting to like that word “ichor”. It’s fun to say.

25/07:
Redesigned unit system. I was starting to go down a boolean filled hole, switched to states. All problems averted. We now even have ranged combat.
More back end things that have no visual change but make a huge difference.

..later..

Umm, I got some bad news so that slowed some more stuff down.
But I still managed to get resources working in a very basic capacity.
The mouse and sidebar now work together with command issuing.
Basic layout stuff for stats and whatnot.
If I added more friendly and enemy units, you could actually have a playable game here!

Have a screenshot:

Tomorrow is the day I don’t get much time at all to work on this so…things may slow down.
Sunday may be a bit crunchy…

//Challenges
I started designing this while keeping in mind that I want to stick with an MVC model.
It sort of is one, I break it a couple of times for laziness reasons but it’s still pretty on track.
That being said, I made some terrible flaws early on.

Song of the day: Black Holy by 小松未可子

Respawn is working and so is basic account creation.  So that means a public test is possible!

Play here!

No king yet…

Still to do:

• unit experience
• sound fx
• show fighting somehow
• improve the map
• intelligent target selection during fighting
• music?
• chat?

Hello !

I’m making an RTS based on Draughts and Bunnies ! The game will be playable on Windows, Mac, Linux, Web and Android !

Here’s the current web version : https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15979011/bunnies/war/index.html

Goal :

• Have more bunnies in purple side than purple bunnies in your side

How to play :

• You play blue bunnies
• You can select a one bunny at a time every 3 seconds
• You can’t move a bunny forward

Rules :

• Bunnies move forward by themselves
• Bunnies fight each other if they are face to face
• Bunnies can jump over an enemy if he’s at his diagonal

Enjoy it and please, give me feedbacks.

By LadybugRiders

So this is the first time I’ve ever decided to do one of these things so I’m completely new to how this all works, but hey, all part of the process I guess.

Anyway the RTS I’m making so far I’m calling Rogue-TS because it will contain random-generation as well as permadeath (both commonly found in roguelikes). Basically the idea is that this is a sidescrolling RTS where your base is mobile and is built vertically on a modular basis. It’s a bit hard to see what that might entail by the screenshot below but hopefully by tomorrow there will be enough to content to at least have a play of the game. As with the usual RTS stuff you will build units and harvest resources and whatnot. I’m thinking of adding elements like power distribution of the modules of the overall base, as well as restrictions of what ‘building’ module can go where (eg. a structure that produces attack jets can only be built at a certain height).

Basically what I want to end up happening is crazy, and wacky looking mobile tower bases. So far I have a physics system, (very) early random terrain generation, unit movement (if I spawn 10 of these bases it all works correctly), unit selection, etc. I’m a one man team, and I’m using Flash CC and Flash Develop (for all my actionscript editing needs, its WAY better than Flash’s standard script editor) and I’m hoping to learn a hell of a lot and do some neat brainstorming and prototyping during this challenge!

In my adventure of trying to understand game physics and programming for this competition,  found this website. (Thanks r/gamedev)

It gets down and dirty with all things math and game programming, and explains them with great detail. I don’t understand 80% of the website, but that’s why I’m reading it. Its old, but that doesn’t make it worse or better.

Hope it helps everyone trying to learn about collision, physics, and other hard to understand stuff!

We have done some visual improvements and as well we developed the basic mechanics, you can hire units can battle the enemies units, the enemy has a basic AI but acceptable for it’s stage in development, it has units for attacking, for defending, and they vary on the tower’s hp.

Every Unit can level up and they all have stats (str,def,spd,acc) that upgrade randomly upon leveling up. Units start at Lv.0 and can reach a max Lv.5.

*Technical Info About Controls and Mechanics*

The selection was a pain for this is my first time doing anything close to an RTS but the controls are a bit unique, maybe a bit tricky but work when you know them well. They are still simple, you can use left click to select individual units and holding the left shift key allows multi selection. Whenever units are selected left click becomes the movement guide, at any time you can press right click to unselect your units. The units will attack opposing units within a certain radius of eachother, same with attacking the enemy tower. This allows easy protection of the base and unit self defense. The game starts in a misleading fashion that will throw off any RTS gamer. You start by collecting cherries that fall off trees into your basket. Innocent right? NO! WRONG! YOU ARE PREPARING FOR WAR! The more cherries you collect the higher advantage you have over your enemy, cherries are vital resources in war. So take that part seriously.

Live right now on http://twitch.tv/dvcolgan for your viewing pleasure.

Tags: #7DRTS

Hey Everyone,

I’m going to be streaming Day 4 of the 7dRTS here: twitch.tv/0Creds

Hope to see you there,

– 0Creds

So, it’s a game – a fast paced survival RTS where you harvest loot drops & build towers and tanks and stuff all under an increasing onslaught of enemy creeps…it’s in some grey area between RTS and Tower Defense, I guess. I’m going to start working on the look soon and welcome feedback on my ideas: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.577301005642203.1073741829.393963410642631&type=1

I’m going to start streaming my Day 4 work presently (http://twitch.tv/happionlabs) – but I’m sure you’re all too busy with your own games to watch.

Some of the stuff in this thread looks awesome! I’m intimidated.

I lost much of yesterday to a migraine, and what time was left to the far more insidious beast of fiddling with procedural generation parameters.

I’m now wildly behind schedule, but I do have it consistently generating landscapes that I feel pleased with. It may be a little presumptuous to say but I think it does a good job of not looking too much like generic procedural landscape. Mainly thanks to a little hydraulic erosion simulation that produces neat cliff features, and some free mixing of mountainous and rolling hills terrain. I’m also really pleased with how the colouring and shading have turned out. Other progress is in creating nice chunk of heightmap processing code and smarter vertex buffer updating to my library, but that doesn’t show up so well in screenshots. Tomorrow I’ll implement water and I promise that will look nice in [animated] screenshots.

I’ve developed a much better idea of where the game’s headed with its mechanics and theme, even if it is at best skirting along the borders of the People’s Republic of Real Time Strategy. Originally the concept was that the player is the spirit of the landscape guiding a settlement in its growth and war through their use of various abilities to morph the landscape and control weather (‘sup, Populous). But I think there’s probably enough games about killing people, so I’m moving the focus towards the nurturing aspects that can be found buried deep in base building RTS games. Caring for the tiny people as they scamper about: smoothing over a mountain to make way for crops here, channel a river somewhere useful, that kind of thing.

I’m a little apprehensive as the spectre of traditional game design keeps telling me the player needs a clear goal with a direction they can take towards the win state. And for there to be a win state. I shall offer up some appeasement through having abilities unlocked by completing tasks in the game. For instance having a certain amount of crops growing will unlock the ability to raise new mountains. Although what the player must do to unlock each ability will not be shown, I aim to provide good feedback on when they’re making progress towards an unlock. That should create an impetus in the player to both care for their people so the population grows (which is sure to unlock something), and to experiment with their abilities in novel ways to find how to unlock more. Kind of like achievements, but without being bullshit extrinsic rewards.

That sounds like a lot of stuff for a game that’s meant to be finished in four days’ time. So it’s not quite a real time strategy game, and it’s very unlikely to be done in seven days. But other than that 7dRTS is going great for me.

We are developing a hacking RTS game.

Create bits, memory units, bombs, Trojans, carriers and much more. To defeat your opponent get you enemies spark and return it to your own base.

I just released my Steering Behaviors package to Github, and an accompanying Gem to Rubygems. Steering Behaviors are utilized to ‘drive’ autonomous game agents in a natural manner, and include such behaviors as predictive pursuit, fleeing, arrival, and wandering. Embellishments and expansions are planned, but this is working software you can use to drive your own game’s characters. (I’m using it in my own game programming.) The Github repo includes working graphical examples. Pull requests are enthusiastically encouraged.

Getting slightly more confident now. Got a bunch of your minions appearing on the screen and tomorrow I’ll work on making them controllable. The weeks gone too fast!! I wish I had more time.

What I’ve done so far:

• Initiating a multiplayer session
• A lobby (servers broadcast themselves so the lobby displays a list of servers)
• Up to 8 player multiplayer
• Random state is synchronized across all clients (I’m carefully writing it so that no floats or doubles are required… ever :P)
• View scrolling
• A secret feature which you’ll have to play to see (I’m rigging all the future screenshots and this one to hide it)

And left is a whole lot more. But I reckon I can get something playable by the end of tomorrow. Player movement next, then tile placement. Wish me luck!

Sneak peek of our 7DRTS game so far

I’ve made it to day 3. That’s officially two days longer than I’ve done any Ludum Dare style thing hosted on this site. I have the basics of a game now. The player can “Win” if enough of his bombers reach the target. Right now it’s still set to auto spawn, so it kind of plays itself.

BUT……

Two new mobs enter. (Side note, I never understood why people reffered to units as mobs, but it helps as a reference point now) I’m working on three new mobs, which is where the real strategy will come in.

Fighters: The player controls fighter jets. These can be spawned by pressing the GUI Icon marked build (I still need to come up with some type of cooldown, or money/resource use to prevent spamming) These mobs will only attack the enemy fighters.

Enemy Fighters: These are a second enemy of the bombers. They want to hunt them down as soon as possible

Helicopters: Great against ground targets. Absolutely imperative for taking down the turrets.

Turrets will attack the Player’s fighters as well. So far I have two new GUI buttons on the screen. When clicked they spawn the units described.

Player’s jet in all its glory

REAL LIFE Incoming! 

So it will be a stretch to finish this. Despite it being ‘done’ I still want to add polish, and actually replace the art. But, starting tomorrow, I’m doing another local game jam. (Okay that’s not real life) On Wednesday, I took awesome engagement photos with my lovely Fiancee, and Monday, I’m having friends over for a BBQ. All this is exciting and fun, but this 7dayRTS challenge, may turn into the 10dayRTS Challenge. Hopefully, I can still submit something. This is  fun idea, and I definitely want to hear the community’s feedback. I already plan on expanding this post jam. PS. Does anyone know how to make Unity’s GUI less fuzzy? I’m looking for a smoother/crisp font. Any GUI elements I upload, always end up fuzzy. Thanks!

GUI build buttons functioning

Got music and some sound effects in, as well as a few more units and particle effects. Also, the AI is capable of beating me on occasion!! Anyway, here’s a quick screenshot of the aftermath of a battle I had earlier:

Hi guys Faisal(Team Leader/Designer) here again to show you the progress for day 4.

Character Art

Unfortunately Jurgita was ill today so we haven’t made any progress towards the character development side.

Environment Art

Stewart has managed to finish all the tiles for the environment by creating both the home and enemy bases as well as adding some polish to some of the previous environment ones.

UI

Today has involved a lot of work with Stewart on the User Interfaces firstly we worked on the spawn buttons giving them each 3 different images for 3 different states; inactive, mouse is over button, button is pressed.

The money icon has also been updated to a new image that also blinks every time money is added

Following this we then added icons to show the enemy health which is based on the number of commanders that they have left.

This shows the different states that the enemy health can be represented.

The enemy health works by first showing the player 3 closed doors

Once the player has made it to the enemy base they must choose a door in order to fight on of three commander types;  fire,water and nature.

Once a commander has been fought they will appear on the User interface to show the player which

Once a commander has been defeated their Health icon will change to a greyed out image.

Following this Icons and buttons for the menus were updated

Finally the Menus Screens were updated and changed

Audio

a friend of ours (Sean Cairns) has also kindly agreed to supply to some audio for us.

Currently we have 2 different spawn sounds in game, though he has provided us with quite a few.

Code

Finally Zac has been working on the code mostly on some behind the scenes coding and the formulas for attacking and damage though these have not been implemented yet.

He has also managed to plots paths for the enemies to follow towards the players base.

Day 4 prototype

There are a lot of numbers on the left, but most of that is debug stuff while I make sure the enemy AI is working, so it’s not a huge amount to deal with.
Began coding the enemy AI today. So far, all it will do is build a few stone gathering orcs, once it acquires enough stone it builds a barracks which allows it to start spawning wood choppers. Who, of course, chop trees.

So the basic idea is, you control the elves defending the forest, particularly the magical trees that you spawn beside. If they get destroyed, you lose. The orcs cut down the trees for resources which they will use to grow their army and expand their corruption of the land. To defend yourself, you need resources yourself, but you have to balance how you gather these resources – you can gather twigs on the ground, which is slow, but not harmful to the forest, or you can start chopping down trees, which is of course not good for the forest. Too many harmful actions will result in the forest reacting against you >D

So tomorrow is probably going to be spent mostly on the enemy AI again, the wood cutters are a little buggy right now and I need to get attacking working.

So I made some good progress today.  I redid all the art I’d made so far to make it all… worse, actually.

I went with some extremely simple pixrel art because while the other mediocre art looked better it would take me much longer to animate.  If I have to choose between smooth animation and nice graphics I’ll choose the animation every time.  The pixel graphics scale better anyways and look nicer with the “dynamic” camera.

Once I decided to go with the pixel art it was obvious I should write a simple particle system.  So now there are explosions when you decide to shoot something.

Speaking of shooting something, I also implemented the bullet code, so now all the fire that you throw at your opponent actually does something to him.  I lost a lot of time trying to find a bug in the code that caused some bullets to do absolutely nothing when they reached their destination.  Every time I debugged it worked fine, but in play it didn’t.  After beating my head against the wall for a little while I found that I had some left over code when I was playing around with bullets early on that moved them but never checked for hits.  So every bullet that happened to reach the target in the properly implemented code worked great and all the other ones failed.  So that explains the 50% success rate.

And finally, I wrote a quick builder AI who builds and repairs units all over the map to give you something to shoot at.

Up next…

Defensive structures!

Right sized power stations!

A computer opponent that will actually shoot back!

Demo here: JAR file

Instructions here: TXT

Hey Everyone,

I’ve hopped back on Twitch, gonna do some more work on the 7dRTS game! You can check me out here: twitch.tv/0creds

Hope To See You There,

-0Creds

Day 4 is in the bag.  We got a bunch of stuff done today and things are really starting to take shape.  I got some attack units in and moving around and also hooked up production structures so that they can make units.  Todd is getting close to finishing the rest of our building textures and took some time to work on the terrain.  Behold!

I took a break from mechanics to work on some menus and get our networked multiplayer going.  We’re going with a LAN based approach simply because it’s easy to set up in Unity and folks can always use something like Hamachi if they want to play outside their physical proximity.  Ryan is about finished up with the last of our tanky units.

We’re coming along quite well.  Multiplayer by tomorrow or bust!

See Here

HeroesGrave

To clarify the concept of my game, “Frontier: Quebec” is a strategy game that takes place in continental North America during the pre-colonial era. You play the part of a trapper, who must avoid other animals by trapping them at all costs. The goal of the game is to beat previous high scores, which will be in the amount of gold or traps that you are carrying.

Player will be the little guy with the coon-skin hat on. The circular objects below are traps he has laid for his quarry…

After days of delays and some hard work, I have come to the point of taking this screenshot. The following list of objectives has been completed:

•  made a moveable character, who is the trapper
• traps made and functional
• animals can detect trapper in a certain distance from them
• basic obstacles made (in the screenshot, they are rocks; will improve later)

Other varieties of animals need to be added. I also need to limit the amount of traps that the player can hold, since holding infinite traps eliminates the challenge of general gameplay. Sorry for the short update, but I have to go for now. Hopefully, this will not be a late night leading into Day 5.

So today I had very little time to get things done, compared to the rest of the week so far.  I managed to get unit production up and running without much trouble, though, and also implemented planet capturing.  That means that the fundamental ingredients of the RTS game here – unit command, territory control and economic management – are in!  Yay!

Unfortunately, I am going to bed tonight with an unsolved crash related to particle effects.  Hopefully my fresher eyes tomorrow morning will help solve that.  Afterwards, there is some tweaking to be done, particularly to the interface, but the last major feature to add is enemy AI.  I hope to get basic enemy AI implemented tomorrow, as well as interface fixes and improvements; and I hope to get complete AI and basic sound implemented by Saturday night.  Sunday, then, will be a day for adding fun extra features, if all goes well.

I’m really enjoying the #7DRTS so far, but it is a definitely a bit exhausting, and I look forward to a code detox once this is over.  At that point, I think I’ll sit down and play Shadowrun Returns.

Cross-posted on my personal blog.

Tags: MiniLD #44, RTS

Got spawning working although it’s offline for now. Working on network code next.

That minimap isn’t working yet.

Web Demo WIP

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity, unity3d

The game demands I post progress.

A* pathfinding, timesliced just like the LOS calculations, steering behaviours take it on home. It’s quite a thing seeing these mannequins finally hop to life. I’ve left collision on them so it’s a bit of a canadian standoff at the moment. Once flocking behaviours are enabled I’ll be taking off the inter-actor collision in preparation for moving the logic to the server.

After literally days of waiting around, Red Team jumps into action.

Are you sick of that screenshot? Me too. Decided to make the map tileable so I can build small prefabs and sew them together:

Whether it’s an arena-shooter, RTS map or roguelike, I’m fairly confident I can make levels quicker this way. And the best part is that all instances of the same tile share the exact same pathfinding & terrain-LOS data!

Transitions are the pain in this solution though — although AI will traverse one side of the world to the other by using the tiles and pre-generated paths as stepping stones, but LOS edge-cases are keeping me up.

What a ridiculous mess this has become. I love it.

Alright day 5 has begun and today I am going to add buyable and placeable objects to the game. I will be streaming from 9:20 to about 11-12. See my progress so far on twitch with ging3rtoby username.

See ya there.

This article is copied from my personal blog.

It has been wonderful relying only upon circles in this physics engine. The math is simple and beautiful, and it’s easy to write fast code. Who needs polygons anyway?

Today was a good day. Pillagers is now actually a game. What I got done:

• 5pm – Added more of Michael’s sound effects into the game.
• 5pm – Tweaked the physics.
• 5pm – Added some cheats to help speed up testing.
• 6pm – Added text in Level 1 to explain controls.
• 7pm – The game shows how much cash you have.
• 10pm – You keep your same fleet when progressing to the next level.
• 12am – Added a new Level 2.
• 12am – Made unlocking ships work.
• 12am – Made it so you get cash from killing enemy ships.
• 12am – Tweak the money system.
• 1am – Made it so you can scroll and give orders while paused.
• 1am – Fixed some game crashes and bugs.
• 2am – Modified attacking AI to stay within certain speed limits. Makes the game less chaotic.
• 3am – Added ability to skip tutorial levels.
• 4am – Better squad formation.
• 4am – Updated the Move & Engage command to be more effective.
• 6am – Added Civilian ships and plan out Level 4.
• 7am – Add Artillery ship and finish implementing Level 4.
• 8am – Fix the crash which happened at the end of the demo below.

Screenshot:

Screencast demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nJp5Zr4nQw

Bed.

So I’ve gone through a large variety ideas and settled on this one. In it’s current state, it looks like the most ridiculous game I’ve ever made.

Right now, I don’t have any final assets in place, and am just trying to get a feel for the programming and gameplay aspects of the game before the art.

All assets in the game are either horrible looking or taken from a source that I can’t publish from. The link below is just a demo that cannot and will not be officially submitted:

Demo Link

Controls:
Left-Front Tire: Q – Forward, A – Reverse
Right-Front Tire: W – Forward, S – Reverse
Left-Rear Tire: E – Forward, D – Reverse
Right-Rear Tire: R – Forward, F – Reverse

This is just a minor gameplay demo. The finished version will have multiplayer and simpler controls, a car that’s harder to flip over, and oh you know actual RTS elements. No big deal.

Ok basicly the goal is to kill the captin on the enemy ship before they kill yours!
and the game works there’s now a way to win!

added:
basic unit sprites
win and lose screens
captains on each ship
enemy captain shoots at your closest crew (need to limit his range)
death animations
random blood!!
Bigger ships
scroll screen with mouse… (I think I’d rather have a W.A.S.D control I’ll try to add that tomorrow)

Today’s fail:
tried to add some sound to the cannons and it really slowed down the playback to a slide show…

Game play ranged from supper easy to impossible… wish I could find a better balance

I really feel like I’m behind schedule and either I need to drop sound or drop all artwork or both and make the game better balanced! Any advice on where I should be at this point?

Howdy all,

The University of Minnesota’s Video Game Development Club is pleased to announce the development of “Meanwhile, in Space…” for Mini LD 44!

We have sound effects for the battles from BFXR, and we’re recording voice overs for the ship captains right now, but until then, please take a look at our title screen while our programmers are working away!

Not too happy about loosing a day to sorting out third party models and animations. That said there is more of a level + characters now. However Im still WAY behind on implementing the rest of the AI and combat. That comes today.

The game seems to have a direction now, mechanics aside. You will control and build a small army to defend your city from being torn to bits(going to use a simple destruction script to tear the meshes appart into chunky explosions, lots of scripts like these online).

“City Fall”, as I call the prototype,  will be my version of the Kobayashi Maru. I am interested to see what, if anything, can be saved.

Still very little working here in the demo, hoping to really get at it today!

Tags: #7DRTS

Just added the first type of building: a shop where you can trade stuff for other stuff. You can’t build these; they’re scattered randomly around the map when the game starts. If you find a good shop, you’ll want to secure the area so your enemies can’t take advantage of the great deals.

Now to add buildings you can actually build, and finally turn this thing into an RTS.

Ten hours in and we can now select and direct our units. We’ve also got a (really ugly) minimap.

I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done in ten hours. I want the game basically functional at 20-25 hours so I can then polish it up and add content after that. The next two things I need are unit combat and resource collection; if I can get those in before hour 20 I’ll be pretty sure I can finish the game in my 40 hours. But I know I won’t get all the time I need to work on this over the weekend, even if I crunch (which is almost impossible with three kids). So what I submit to #7DRTS isn’t going to be the “final” version of the game. That’s a little sad, but not unexpected. Still happy with where the project is heading.

I have been working on my 7drts for the past 5 (+2) days, and I guess it is time to make a quick blog post about it, so that I have a recent record beyond the git logs.

My intent was to make a micro-dota or dota like type thing. I have also been recently applying a very strict visual limitation to my jam games, in an attempt to stretch a specific type of muscle, and to lower art costs. I spent the last weekend trying to get netplay up and running, and after two days, I packed it in. I have permission from the job to work on this during the day though, so I was able to switch gears on monday and hammer away on the core game. I had something playable by midday tuesday, and had tweaked a bunch of the parameters and behaivors for the rest of that day and wednesday.

You can see two versions of the project below:

One of the big issues was that I was intending to make a 3 player game, and the fact that I only had one other person in the office this week made it such that I couldn’t properly test it. So it was a choice at the end of wednesday of either adding netplay, or hanging up the whole project until I could get a third person around to test it. I decided (probably wisely), to re attempt to get netplay working. By thursday evening (late, late evening) I had it such that you could see the players moving around, and by mid day friday I had something that was playable. Unfortunately it was full of bugs, but I managed to clear all those by end of (work)day friday. After that I got some 3 player matches in, and got really valuable feedback on mechanic changes that could be made to make it more interesting and deep.

I think I will probably take tomorrow to polish the game, make netplay a more enjoyable experience (put in a chat room in front, make the game actually go back to the lobby chat at the end, have player names), add audio, and more pleasant graphics. There is some lore that I want to cram in somewhere, but I am not sure where it wil go. Possibly just on the pre and post game screens.

On sunday, if I am not totally burned out, I will give the mechanic changes a shot and see if anyone from twitter or where ever will be able to test them with me.

If anyone wants to play a build, here it is.

unity webplayer… you will need two friends, it doesn’t work with less players anymore. Find friends to play with on irc or im I guess.

controls are arrows to move and z, which brings up a selection menu that you can choose the state your hero is in.

Tags: #7DRTS

Are you on the sidelines for 7dRTS, wanting to get some time on the field? How does the idea of an Open Game strike you — the Assemblee compo but in reverse?

Last week I mentioned re-skinning of my game as I’ll be defaulting to Oryx’s masterpieces with Ogmo as the level format and the typical FruityLoops/Bfxr accompaniment. Once it’s made, it’s as easy as swapping out the art/sound and yours in, provided you stick to the format. I see musicians offering people their work for credit, but I’m too busy to lurk through soundcloud, let’s do it in reverse.

I figure I let you set the direction based on 3 main concepts:

1. CS Strat: dozens of on-screen units, weapon types, props, level skins, units can level up a la XCOM. Ogmo maps. Can either go serious or make it like “Backyard Sports” — kids running around in the backyard (“I shot you!”…”Uh uh I have Class 4 Armor on”) is a cute idea. Will need a Mom character as a referee. Definitely orange slices at halftime.
2. Raid Commander: Roguelike with dozens of units, like a WoW raid that you control…heroes/enemies/world tiles/props/bosses/projectiles. Still liking a silly theme with this one, I imagine a lot of Leroy Jenkins and Guild Drama, Ninja’ing and PUG-awfulness.
3. Gamedev RTS: I’m dying to make this one…heroes are Artists, Coders, Musicians, Designers…fight off Bugs, Reviewers, Fanboys, Publishers, Pirates, Cloners. Was hoping to make it a 4-player base-building exercise where you build up your game and slay foes for cash…but that’s too ambitious. A roguelike where you start as a solo indie and level up your skills and staff to defeat greater “foes” (projects) sounds more concrete.

It occurred to me this build could be a showpiece for people’s content, selectable in the frontend as a visual or audible “skin” with their name featured. If any of the above game ideas inspire you to reskin the linked sprites or come up with an audio treatment then let me know in the comments.

I plan to do a lot of this in between now and the next LD48 (and beyond!), so there’s no hurry. And I’m not in competition with anyone here (that much is clear, yikes) so why not co-operate in an open and detached fashion? I won’t be waiting around for anyone’s art/sound, but it’s nothing to swap Oryx’s out and yours in.

If you want to practice and 7dRTS has gotten your blood up, here’s your chance! If not, feel free to steal these ideas, that’s all they are.

I think I’m actually done…

I got everything in my bomberman RTS game I wanted to get in. So I’m… finished? But this can’t be! How could I actually “finish” a Ludum Dare game?

…

I think I’m going to think on this for a while…

In the meantime, enjoy a screenshot!

Isn’t she a beauty? <3

Tags: #7DRTS, bomberman, RTS

I have a day job, apparently its also a night job now so I’ve only had about a day and a half on this so far.

Still confident i can get something done before deadline though.

Implemented the weighted pathfinding system and the single/multi-selection…..so that’s nice.

Originally I was planning to use rain{indie} to do the path finding but I was not at all familiar with the library and it turned out to be easier to just implement weighted a* myself.

 Despite how sparse it looks I’ve actually got quite a bit of the code done, i just need to hook it up to the graphics now.

We shall see.

Hey Everyone,

I’m going to be streaming Day 5 of the 7dRTS for a short while, you can check it out here: twitch.tv/0creds

Hope to see you there,

– 0Creds

I’m now at the stage where I wanted to be yesterday morning… networking works and the multiple client stay synchronised. At least it supports up to 8 players. But this does mean that I’m going to have to make a very sad announcement. Network coding has to be 438.4% harder then I originally thought it was. Although I can say that what I’ve got is fairly stable now, I foresee very many problems tomorrow when I implement the placement of tiles. So much so that I can’t see this finishing in any sort of playable state by Sunday. But fear not. I’ve got another week to work on this game afterwards, even if I can’t submit before the deadline. So hopefully, by this time next week, I’ll have something playable (yay). Most of the progress was on the code today, so I think some code stats are in order for now:

• lines: 3359
• files: 67
• largest file: 498 lines

What’s the size of your projects for this miniLD?

I couldn’t sleep tonnight so I added in some fog of war, which was down as one of my tasks for tomorrow.

I will post the details of the cool algorithm I came up with on my blog tomorrow.

The8BitPimp.wordpress.com

Tags: 8-bit, classic, Fog, game, indie, Lode, Of, pimp, retro, Storm, the8bitpimp, war

Hi guys Faisal (Team Leader/Designer) from Team Tartan Paint hear again to show you the progress for today.

Character Art

Currently Jurgita has been working on animating characters, the walk cycles will be roughly 6 frames, as will the death and attack animations. The simple pixel style lends itself well to low frame animation.

User Interface

Since Stewart has finished most of the environment art and has now moved on to finishing the User Interface. So far he has been able to produce more instruction screens and a new pause button, with rollover and click variations. And some buttons for the title screen.

A few more instructions screens have been created detailing the various units and user interface elements

I have also been working on the Main menu which now lets you see the credits and has a bonus screen, which will contain some unused assets and concept art.

There is a splash screen for the title in the works, but that’s categorised under `polish` if we have enough time.

Heres a sneak peek at the health animation, a crumbling statue of a gods arm. The final version will have animated crumbling dust

Code

Zac has been working on more behind the scenes formulas for the combat and currently has combat play out.

Though some tweaks will have to be made to enhance collision and insert animation.

newest prototype

Tags: team tartan paint

Along with visual improvement,

I added a handful of console commands, useful for debugging :D.

Units fight eachother, It’s nothing new but i have improved it a lot since before. They now all have semi random attack speed and damage taking delays.

<-I added that nice new little mini island to the middle of the map

When units enter the water they instantly mount to a cherry for naval transportation. If thou to not have any cherrys? The unit drowns.

Oh, and the Cherry cannon is in development.

So, that’s a thing! 😀

This is a solo endeavor, and trying to spend a full day working on one game, then coming home and working on this one, with all of the extra curriculars that are going on, at my age, yadda yadda yadda. GUYS THIS IS SO HARD  😀

I’ve made a lot of progress in the past couple of days, but I’ve got a once-in-every-few-years chance to going deep, deep into backcountry on a camping trip with my son, and I won’t be missing that. I’ll be shelving this instead.

I leave you with a color comp and the silhouettes of the main “actors” of the game: the whale “fortress”, the crab “turret” (minus his floating rock), and the two flying heroes you could spawn: the tiger and the damsel. The goal was to hit a Darius vibe, but … I don’t know where it’s heading, art-wise, anymore!

I look forward to playing the games I’ve seen emerge thus far. You folks are amazing.

Oh my – I had to actually think about what day it was when writing the title to this post.  I just went back and checked to make sure.  Things are starting to fall into place rather well.  I spent most of the day working on multiplayer and user profile management code.  So players can now change their name and have that selection persist between play sessions.  Users can also host and join games.  The player list is sorted by join order which, for now, also determines what starting position you are assigned on a map.  To that end I hooked up networked map loading and automatic camera positioning over the player’s starting point (yay math!).

We’ve already realized that we’re not going to be able to implement everything that we designed at the outset – and we’re ok with that, it was sort of expected.  But we’ve already decided that if you lovely folks here think that Attrition is as cool as we do then we’ll take some additional time away from our main project to finish it up after this compo is over.  The feedback and ‘hearts’ we’ve gotten so far have been super cool – so thanks for that.

Lastly – because networking code dost not a pretty screenshot make – here’s a refinery and a Hammerhead tank.

Today I managed to get lots of little tweaks done, such as fixing crashes, implementing population limits, fixing bugs, adding the minimap and tooltips, and adding particle effects and more visual feedback, and so on.  The game is basically playable, with the glaring exception that the AI is not yet implemented.  I’ve started working on the basics, but it’s rather daunting, as I’ve never done anything like this before.  The weather was also awful today, sunny the entire time, and as a result I feel like I’ve been beaten up by somebody with a hot iron, so I wasn’t at my most productive.

I’m going to try and get some extra sleep tonight, and hopefully wake up fresher and able to tackle the problem that is AI.  I’ve got two days to get it done, really, though I’d like to continue tweaking the game and adding gameplay features as well.

Cross-posted on my personal blog.

Tags: MiniLD #44, RTS

Today’s new features:

• Improved animation
• Place units using UI
• Select all units by type (~, 1,2)
• New enemy mech unit. Like most of the models its thanks to OpenGameArt.org. Sits there and shows hp if clicked.
• Some Audio but allot is hidden. Will be cooler when units are fighting, dieing or taking fire.

Hoping to have combat ai and building destruction done by this time tomorrow. As always the web demo is available and updated many times a day.

CITY FALL

Tags: #7DRTS

This article is copied from my personal blog.

I spent a good chunk of the day trying to solve a performance problem. After approximately 100,000 bullets were fired, the framerate would drop to an excruciating 16 FPS.

I was able to figure it out by using Google Chrome’s heap profiling tool. Here’s what the heap snapshot looked like:

I found out that there was a memory leak in the game engine – every time a sprite was created it calledsetInterval but it did not call clearInterval when the sprite was deleted. Ever since I fixed the issue, FPS has stayed at a nice and smooth 60, no matter how many objects are created and destroyed.

Here are some other things I got done today:

• 9pm – Miscellanous small enhancements.
• 11pm – Fixed the performance issue.
• 12am – Added the new thruster sound that Michael gave me.
• 3am – Added Sandbox Mode.
• 4am – Added more features to Sandbox Mode.
• 6am – Added Ctrl+A to select all your ships. Also made WASD and J work the same as arrow keys and space.
• 7am – Added dogfighting mode.
• 8am – Added graphics so that ships display their targets when selected.
• 8am – Added 2 more dogfighting levels. Enhanced manual piloting of Militia ship so that you can use your melee attack.

Here’s a screenshot of Sandbox mode:

Here’s me playing through Dogfighting Mode and messing around in Sandbox Mode a bit:

I have only 2 days left to work. The last day will be primarily reserved for gameplay tweaking, bugfixes, touchups, and testing. That leaves only 1 more day to make actual progress.

These are my goals for tomorrow:

• Add a rotating turret to the flagship.
• Add a civilian to Level 1 and use that to explain the Move command vs the Engage command.
• Add a dogfighting level where there is an ongoing battle and you have to rack up a certain number of kills to win.
• Add more campaign levels. I reserve the right to ramp up the difficulty in the later levels!
• Pan sound effects and volume depending on scroll location
• Add some more ship classes and implement upgrades.

Thanks to the folks in the #7dRTS IRC channel for helping me playtest today. Specifically Zapa and Orava.

You can try the game out now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 27th, 2013 at 7:02 am and is filed under MiniLD #44 / 7dRTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Dont you just love it when you 2+ hours trying to fix a bug and its because you used the wrong variable.

Any way that happened to me. Now most of my night is wasted which means I have 2 days to implement all remaining features (alot) and a tutorial and add a UI, fun…..

But it was worth it as now 1 of the games main features is 100% implemented! Electricity power lines can no longer go through other objects to reach their targets which means players will have to tactically plan out their citys to maximise power output without spending precious resources. Any way here is a screenshot demonstrating it.

**PS thank you unity technologies for making shadows a free feature in the latest 4.2 update, it makes my daylight cycle B-E-A-UTIFUL!

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 27th, 2013 at 7:03 am and is filed under MiniLD #44 / 7dRTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

AK

this is my first game, first ludum dare and I’m doing it solo. There is so much to do!

1. how long should the games be? (right now I have  a very hard game but it only takes a couple min to play)
2. at what point do we panic?

worked on today
quickly made new gumby sprites in 3d in modo rendered them out and added them to game maker there animated but barely and look like there pirates on crack wearing onesies.
made some sounds .wav

I’m tempted to make more levels… that may be more important at this time then more graphics/sounds.

Good new everyone 😀

EGGZ is a real-time strategy game with eggz in it…

I was really happy to hear that there’s a 7 Day RTS, because I really love RTS game – it’s a pity more indies don’t make them!

Anyhow, we held this friendly multiplayer oriented game jam called the “Funky Future” last weekend, so I decided to make a single-screen competitive RTS controlled with the keyboard (or a gamepad) and with no elimination. The game was basically finished last weekend, but I’ve been tweaking it and doing bugfixes since then.

Eggz is sort of based on my previous “Funky Future” entry, an HTML 5 network game called Hubris, in the sense that all the resources are on the map: players don’t have a resource “pool”, their units are their resources.

Day 1

I’ve had a lot of people compare it to a sort of real-time Go: your eggz need fertile ground to grow on, and when fully grown can hatch into various static units which can defend the surrounding area. You can also steal your opponents eggz and drop them on infertile ground or next to your towers, just to annoy them. The goal is to capture 51% of the map.

Day 7

I still have a couple more tweaks I’d like to do, and I should probably write an AI so you can play by yourself. I have compiled a build, but the source (love2d lua) is up on github under LGPL when a build is ready I’ll pop it over on the LD game page.

Tags: #7DRTS, eggz, flying, gamepad, MiniLD, MiniLD #44, RTS, strategy, tower attack, tower defense

Gearing up for final content push, getting the maps setup. Next couple of days are going to be a panic so I had to get this solid. The idea is that this map I’ve been staring at all week can become a Tile in the larger world. I already spawned a bunch of them but the pathfinding wouldn’t sync up and I wasn’t about to make a colossal A* matrix for whatever map size I decide.

Tile-ification: Marked exits as Doors with their respective direction normals (dx, dy)

This tile already has a method for constructing the A* map, so I wanted a way to allow units to seamlessly travel between any two points on the map. That’s going to be brutal for long distances, and I don’t want to be limited in this regard. Why? Because I guess I just don’t feel like it…and that’s why I don’t finish LD48’s

Before I could crap all over myself I realized that if I arrange these tiles on a grid of their own like cards on a table, I realized I could use the pathfinder to solve the world path (macro, or inter-tile path as opposed to tile path which is micro, or intra-tile path). So I hacked a fake Ogmo file and modified the loading code to generate tiles.

Rigging the level loader and pathfinder to build worlds from building blocks is the smartest wheel-reinvention I’ve yet to perform.

Since A* assumes adjacency means walkability, this system would allow world pathing across adjacent tiles even if there was no door. Sticking this limitation on the designer is not the end of the world, and the pathfinder could be subclassed to be door-aware.

So here’s where the recursion comes in: why don’t I just screengrab each of the tiles and allow myself to build world maps in Ogmo?

Since the world map tiles are image captures, they’ll need to be updated if the referred tile gets changed. Otherwise, I’m ready to rock.

I could essentially build a GTA-sized map with layers upon layers of these things. I got no sleep.

Finally there’s the pathfinding. What’s great about using these pre-baked tiles is the A* map doesn’t change. And the paths between doors can be pre-computed, meaning the traveller is doing no A* work except at the start and end tile destinations. Booya.

The units know which tile they want to get to, but they have to ask for directions at each purple square. The directions are accurate…occasionally.

I thought I was a genius, but I cracked open Game Programming Gems and there it is. I will create the patent and sue myself, see you later suckers I’m rich.

Say goodbye to the beanie babies, I’m piling Oryx art in now that I can create some interesting roguelike levels.

I have some basic network code in, players can summon in units and move them, though things like attacking and playing animations aren’t “network-aware” yet.

I also added in the master server because, well, it’s already there. I’m using Unity’s built-in network library so it was relatively a breeze to put in.

Now here’s a blurry video of testing the multiplayer:

Web Demo WIP

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity, video

The more I hear that deadline’s footsteps the faster I code, i’m trying to crank out all the basic intended functions and remove as many bugs as I can, needless to say this “CompEdition” will be only a beta of what this game will be after, since I do plan to continue development after the seven days. I think of it as my mark to make the best playable beta of it that I can in the time i have. I’m not doing this alone of course as my first side-by-side partner, Ryan is making 3D models for the game.

After a very long time of hardcore internet searching for a better solution for the unit health display I found no luck until i remembered something. That i have done it long ago in one of my first dev projects and instantly got to it, now it works beautiful [see below].

Ryan is new to the Unity3D game engine so he helped out while learning in the process. He created this awesome fully functional main menu below.

Not as many pictures this time, were really working hard, im not really running on any sleep either 😀

Hi guys Faisal (Team Leader/Designer) from Team Tartan Paint hear again to show you the progress for today.

Character Art

All of the character animations are fully done. Characters have walk cycle, death animations and attack animations, all roughly 6 frames each.

User Interface

Stu has been adding some finishing touches to the User Interface including a main background and new UI background as well as the additions of new arrows

Code

Zac really took off today maintaining to start collating all the behind the scenes code together and getting the User Interface and game code to cooperate well enough to send information back and forwards without a hitch. He also managed to get combat working with health bars and the animations. The commander health is also working now. He is currently working on the AI and linking up the health of the bases with end conditions.

heres the playable prototype for the day

Tags: team tartan paint