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.