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!

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.

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!

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.

Woof – day 6 is behind us.  We got a ton of stuff down today.  Todd and Ryan are starting to wind down on the ingame assets which means Todd will be spending a fair amount of time tomorrow working on UI stuff.  Today I focused on getting the game into a playable state.  This involved getting all of the player actions working over the network.  I spent the last bit of the evening working on our neutral AI.

Attrition doesn’t have traditional RTS tech trees in that you don’t build structures and do research to upgrade your army.  You need to steal everything.  To that end – you start with only 1 available combat unit and must fight AI controlled opponents on the map in order to gain upgrades.  These neutral structures automatically spawn units to defend and drop “Tech Cards” when destroyed.  The better the card is, the stronger the defense will be.  A player can run over a tech card with one of their units and if they manage to return it to their base then they are granted new units or structures.  The catch is  – if your base is destroyed then you drop the cards you’ve collected and any player can come and capture them.

Welp – the compo has come to an end.  We worked our butts off this week.  Unfortunately – we weren’t able to get everything in that we wanted to.  There are probably a fair amount of bugs to be worked out and there aren’t any victory conditions in place.  But the basic mechanics are there and Todd and Ryan’s art is awesome regardless.  We came up with a pretty ambitious plan and still managed to execute a large portion of it (curse you day job!).  Here is Attrition in its super raw state.  Please shoot us some feedback!  We had a lot of fun working on this and sharing our progress with everyone.  The support we got from this site was awesome so thanks a bunch!

Check out the Attrition entry here – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=24891

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