Well, I have incredibly basic combat going on, fog of war, win and failure conditions… a lot of the important stuff.
I don’t have enough time to really make this great – I have to work on the level graphics a lot, there’s a lot of balancing of resources etc that could be done, I need to make at least a few level maps to play on, the level editor needs to have the ability to rename levels… lots to do and not enough time to do it all I fear. But I’ll try to get as much done as I can.

Now that Space Lord has made its little splash on the internet (featured on the Newgrounds front page, yay!) I figured it was time to put Space Hero out into the world.

Space Hero is what happens when you take a game about being the villain, and then make it about being the hero again. 😉 In other words, people design levels by playing Space Lord, submit them to the Hall of Fame, and then you can test out the levels they’ve designed by playing Space Hero. I won’t pretend this is the best shmup game ever made – it’s mostly just a fun little experiment.

And now it’s on deviantART.

And on Kongregate.

And on Newgrounds.

I wonder how it will do!

While we wait for the game to emerge from its judgment period on the portals, you might enjoy reading this detailed blog post I wrote to announce the release of Space Lord.

Good luck to everyone participating in 7dRTS, by the way! I wish I could have joined you. 😀 Looking forward to playing all the games you come up with!

The penultimate day of the 44th MiniLD compo comes to a close, I’m happy to report that the game is more or less feature-complete.  I didn’t get the chance to include all the features I would like to include, but I’ve managed to implement all the core functionality I wanted to include, including:

• Spacecraft and immobile space stations
• Unit selection (single and box-based) and command
• Combat
• Income according to public approval rating
• Income from raiding trade routes
• Capturing planets
• Enemy AI
• A win and a lose state
• Basic sound and particle effects

This is great.  Tomorrow, then, I will focus on solving the game’s remaining problems, including a fixing a few bugs and adding missing features regarding unit selection; softening the extremely difficult enemy AI (the AI doesn’t even cheat! If anything, it is handicapped.); adding more sound and particle effects; balancing unit costs; fixing population limits; and generally fixing bugs and trying to track down and prevent the mysterious random crashes I experienced earlier today.

Good luck to everyone else on the last day!

Cross-posted on my personal website.

Tags: MiniLD #44, RTS

Finally got attacking and damaging working over the network. Some bugs I’m still fixing though.

I also noticed goffmog said, “There had better be guitars in this.”, so I made this:

Tags: progress, screenshot, Strat Souls, unity

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.

Darn, it’s getting close to the deadline and there is still so much left to do.

Check out the web demo for a preview of the death and destruction. Still need to get the player units attacking and responding.

Units dying, buildings blowing up… mech rampage!

Tags: #7DRTS

Here’s us doing a playtest to make sure the bugs are fixed.

And one thing we immediately noticed is the poor movement handling.

I don’t have any pathfinding or obstacle avoidance yet. Also, no formations. Boid movement can be worth a try here.

Also summoning cost isn’t implemented yet so we had too many units (we were goofing off), I was envisioning something like 10-20 units only per player.

To the two guys who joined us, sorry I think you got disconnected. Blame it on my country’s ISP.

Web Build WIP

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

I love RTS games. And it seems that I love making them, too. I could have made one this week. I tried. And I failed.

Here’s why I didn’t manage to make a proper game for 7dRTS:

• I didn’t have time on monday.
• I just came back from an “exhausting” vacation.
• It’s been hot as hell from 9 am to 10 pm straight.
• I’m still learning to use Haxe/NME.
• Haxe is hard to debug (I’m used to Java)
• I suck at finishing projects.

Here’s why I should have made this game a proper one:

• It’s a simple concept.
• It’s possible to code with my low level of experience.
• It’s easy to continue without a lot of refactoring.
• It doesn’t include a lot of art.
• I love Sublime Text.
• I love Haxe.

I might use it as a base for a future project, but at the moment I just need a break.

If you want to play around with it (which I don’t think you do), here it is.

I’m sorry.

Hi! I go by auto_suggestion, and I’m a fairly newb-ish game developer. This is my first Ludum Dare anything, and I’ve been really excited to participate since several years ago when I first heard about Ludum Dare.

Yes, it’s already the final day of the 7dRTS challenge and this is my first post, but I’m just going to talk about my entire process from the day I conceived the idea until now. In any case I’m really glad how things turned out, and I’m still motivated to continue working; even after the Monday deadline comes and goes. The 7dRTS challenge has given me a push, if not a push to the finish line.

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I did a lot of thinking about the RTS genre. I love playing and watching RTS games, being a League of Legends player and crappy Starcraft player. Much deliberation led to listing the elements of an RTS in writing in order to clear my thoughts; this is what I came up with:

• Resource management / building units
• Unit placement / control / micromanagement
• Base management / placement
• Map / terrain considerations

My game idea (partly affected by the fact that I knew I had to aim low to get anything done at all) was to abstract one element and make it the focus of my game, and at the same time de-emphasize every other element. I decided to focus on resource management. Here’s an early mockup.

A two-player game. You are responsible for two things: collecting resources and spending them. You have a set number of workers that you can allocate to each type of resource, red, green and blue (hence the name of the game, ‘rgb’). The number of workers allocated determines the speed at which you collect that resource. The resources you collect can then be used to build certain units. For example, a unit of the grunt class costs 1 blue, 1 red, and 1 green. This is where the creativity comes in. Unfortunately, I haven’t thought about this part at all, and I have no experience with game balancing. Fortunately, designing and balancing the units is a completely self-contained job and has no effect on development of the engine, which I’m working on now, so there’s no pressure to think about that now. I have some good ideas floating around, though.

Anyway,  your units are completely AI controlled (no micro for you!; a de-emphasis of unit control). They’ll leave your base immediately upon being built and make a beeline for the enemy base, stopping only to attack the enemy units in the way. There are several lanes which the units can spread out on, so that there won’t be a problem of bottlenecking like in the flash game, Age of War (does anyone know about this?)

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That’s essentially it for the idea. As for actual progress, here’s a screenshot of “gameplay” (though my game is not playable yet):

One major concern I have is multiplayer implementation. What about private information, like total resources collected? Isn’t it possible to immediately counter the enemy the moment they start building something? Stuff like that. The end-goal is putting the bases on separate screens, essentially splitting the battlefield in half and putting them on their own screens, probably on mobile devices. I can think only of Spaceteam, which uses Bluetooth for multiplayer. I have no experience there either, so that’s a milestone for another day.

Finally is the last day!, after a week of hard work with my partner Rageshow, Monkeys vs Crocodiles is about to be finished, we only have to fix some bugs and give it the final touch.

Below you will find some pics about the game, and be aware, before the night we will create other post with the link to the game.

See you soon!

So six days live streamed the whole development twitch.tv ging3rtoby. It is a tower defence game with a twist. You build building to generate resources to create the towers. I have got some stuff left to do but it is nearly finished. I am really proud and happy with the game.

This article is copied from my personal blog.

Today I worked on making the level format and core engine more robust. I added a bunch more dogfighting levels. There are 11 now, and they get pretty crazy at the end.

The cool thing about them is that the core game engine does not even know that you are in “Dogfighting Mode”. There’s no dogfightingMode variable that tells the engine that’s what you’re doing. Instead, thelevel format supports trigger conditions, events, and groups, and the logic of dogfighting is done in the level JSON file.

Michael gave me the battle music today as well. It sounds amazing. I made it so that the game automatically detects when you are entering or exiting a battle and transitions the music appropriately. I’m pleased with the effect.

Here’s a list of what I got done today:

• 12am – Added battle music. The game automatically detects when a battle is happening and fades in the battle music, then fades back to normal music once the battle is over.
• 1am – Added more dogfighting levels.
• 3am – Worked on making dogfighting levels more fun. You have to try again if you die rather than respawning.
• 4am – Made the Militia ship show the area of attack when you are manually piloting it.
• 6am – Sandbox Mode: Ability to load and save. I was able to use this to build some dogfighting levels.
• 7am – Added more dogfighting levels.

I did not accomplish most of what I set out to today. Regardless, I am really happy with Dogfighting Mode right now. It’s almost certainly more fun than Campaign Mode currently.

Here’s a video of me playing through it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vye8Sfs3rFM

This version of the game is going to be pretty close to the final one that I submit for 7dRTS. I will probably only spend about 6-8 more hours on this debugging on Firefox and bugfixing. I will not be supporting Internet Explorer.

You can try out dogfighting yourself. Too hard? Too easy?

Hello everyone,

I just put up a playable beta of Lode Storm, my entry for the 7RTS.  I hope you all enjoy it, and please let me know what you would like to see changed and improved.  I wont make working right up to the deadline unfortunately since my hands are cramping up and it to painful to type any more.

See my entry details for a complete description of how to play.  I am worried that it wont be too intuitive.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=20953

I’ve been on holiday the past week so I missed out on 7RTS, But I still have like 8 Hours! I’m gonna try and make it!

Coffee’s not working yet. Kids are annoying the wife and she’s gone on strike. Have a headache. Didn’t get enough sleep.

Going to try to get in something of a macro-game in today, something I’ve never done on a week-long prototype before, but game design genius Mark Nau sent me a doc with his ideas for it so I’m going to give it a stab.

Title screen:

Omaha beach:

Gratuitous blood splatter:

And, for posterity, here’s Mark’s notes on the macro game. We’ll see how much I can get done today –

The moving parts

1)      The game is divided into “levels” which are pass/fail challenges. Passing a level makes the next level available for play. Completed levels can be freely replayed.

2)      While playing a level, the player earns a level score which increments as he marches toward completion. For example, every time an enemy unit is killed.

3)      When a player completes a level challenge for the first time, he is awarded XP equal to his level score. No XP is awarded for failing a level.

4)      While replaying a level, the player has a way of voluntarily dynamically ramping up the difficulty of the level. For example, a “BRING IT” button that releases extra enemies every time it is clicked.

5)      When a re-played level is successfully passed, the player gets XP equal to the DIFFERENCE between the score he just got and his PRIOR high score on that level. In other words, you can’t just grind away at a level over and over to earn XP. You have to elevate your success, and you get rewarded by the amount you improved on your prior best attempt.

6)      The player can cash in XP for upgrades and perks that make his position stronger and therefore easier to complete levels.

Suggestions

1)      Each level should have its own cosmetic and/or gameplay “theme” that the player will use as a hook to remember that level and give it weight and identity. This can be as simple as unique colors for each level. This helps the player get a solid sense of revisiting places where he was once weak but is now strong.

2)      The level difficulty should be paced so that by the third level or so, the player is feeling some pressure to re-visit earlier levels in order to mine XP and make it easier/possible to clear the 3rd/4thlevel. Later levels should be difficulty tuned with the assumption that the player has almost fully optimized the amount of XP mining he can do on earlier levels.

3)      The UI should be very clear about displaying the player’s high-water mark on a level in as many places as possible. On the level select map, while the player is playing the level, and on the post-match screen. The post-match screen should make it very clear that the XP reward is based on exceeding the player’s prior high-score for that level.

4) The XP expenditure screen should give the player the option of clearing all his upgrades and refunding his XP to re-spend as he wishes. This keeps him from getting permanently stuck due to bad decisions.

I started 148 hours ago — it went by in a blur but also it feels like I’ve been doing it for a month.

I finally tried my hand at level design, and instead of dreading it it’s actually a lot of fun seeing it pop up in game. I credit all the work I did getting the world structure setup so I can listen to tunes and make a ton of levels.

I’ve got 1000 ideas floating around in my head but I don’t want to miss the basics. I decided to tackle lighting this morning, and it took five minutes:

It’s not the best but it looks better! Plus I can try having each of the bulbs emit light (I’ll just disable pathfinding is that cool?).

Sanojian mentioned: “Could it be that after 30-odd failed games it starts to get easier?” Yes! A ghostyard of abandoned projects on my hard drive has finally shown some value.

Little touches like, oh, the frontend are things I pass off while I’m fighting with flocking and hierarchical pathfinding. I just refuse to make another tech-heavy fun-light game. We’ll see how it goes.

So from devving like straight Friday to Sunday morning with no sleep, had some nice morning sleep up from like 3am to 10AM today. Oh and I totally have a new feature to show off as well.

So whenever units overlapped each other, their “health bars” would be practically illegible. Say hello to the new stacked hp system.

I originally started to design this system to be a universal tool for me as well as for this game but because of so many unexpected errors it required a lot of slopping tweaking, this will need to be improved and designed for universal use after 7drts. Heres a nother screenshot of it’s use.

Main menu in the game, lookin great. Yes its a full menu I promise ;p 

I’m going to start working on that cannon that was shown in the last update. I’m trying to squash nasty bugs at the moment so the game will atleast be enjoyable, I woke up to a roachfest!

Bad news first: I got so lazy about this that I couldn’t make it in time to submit the project.

Mostly I underestimated how much work I had to put into making this game, thinking it would be a simple job. It wasn’t.
What went wrong:

*Lazy Coding and Issues with Gameplay

*Multiplayer

*Controller Support which I ended up figuring out

*Limited Singleplayer

This was mostly a learning experience for me in terms of game development, but now I know how bad the others have it. For the other developers – godspeed to all of you : )

I haven’t completely given up on this project, however!

http://seagullrts.tumblr.com/

I will continue to sporadically develop this concept, and, just maybe, we’ll see how the game unfolds! If you want to keep a checkup on progress that’s actually made, this tumblr blog is your best bet at this time.

Apologies on failing to deliver for MiniLD-44.

Looks like I got busy on the last couple of days of the MiniLD. I had a lot of fun streaming. I am quite disappointed that I don’t have time today to finish it up. However, I do have a demo for you guys to check out. I thought I’d at least share what I got done. Not the best week to work on this, but I tried to get my time in.

Enough rambling, here is the demo. Instructions are on the bottom of the webplayer.

Even though I only had a couple of days to spare, I decided to participate in the 7DRTS. Had I an entire week, I would have tried for a space-conquest game with fleets battling each other. Instead I opted for a colonization game. Whoever colonizes the most stars wins. The metal available in each type of star determines how quickly you can build colony ships, so the game speeds up as you continue to expand your empire. The compo page is: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/?action=preview&uid=15656

I will be taking a few hours off then writing a postmortem. It looks like this challenge has a lot of submissions (for a miniLD) so even though I am not a big fan of RTS, it looks like I will be playing a lot of them over the next couple of weeks.