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:

Militia Basic cheap unit. Has short range. Agile. Actually doesn’t shoot lazers, shoots a short range but powerful lightning attack out the front. It must resort to charging other ships to attack them. Ranger Short range weak lazers. Less agile. Less defense. In a level, a Militia should be able to overtake a Ranger and kill it. Artillery Slower, shoots big lazers. Slow moving, weak defense. FlagShip Does not attack. Has high defense. Moves very slowly. Turret Stationary lazer shooter. Medi Heals other ships.

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

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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.