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Work on our current project, Franchise, has come along far enough to justify a short engine demo, mostly to get some performance and compatibility feedback.

About that game:
Franchise is a turn-based tactics game that takes place in a future world that has come to be dominated by fast-food franchises.  The four biggest franchises have been locked in conflict for centuries, and employ strange, fast-food based technologies against each other.  The game has 25 or so different units, 6 different battlefield structures, and even a few monsters that have evolved from the growing pools of expended cooking grease that litter the landscape.

This is a very early engine demo that runs through the first four maps in the tutorial campaign.  All graphics are placeholders at this time, most were imported from the campaign editor.  We're working on shiny 3D models for all the terrain, units, and buildings.

The flow of the game is inspired by Shining Force, in that all active units go into a big initiative pool and are forced to go in order.  There are no distinct turns like most games of this type.  The maps included in this demo don't have any opposing units, so this system isn't completely clear in the demo.

No animations are implemented at this time, and the combat engine is extremely primitive at the moment.  Attacks do occur, I assure you, so on the missions where you have to destroy something, just keep hammering away until your target goes down.

Here are some screen shots, Linux version pictured, but the others basically look the same:

Dispatching your units into the field:
(http://www.averagesoftware.org/images/franchise1_thumb.png) (http://www.averagesoftware.org/images/franchise1.png)

A pair of TMMWVs prepare to assault a blue billboard:
(http://www.averagesoftware.org/images/franchise2_thumb.png) (http://www.averagesoftware.org/images/franchise2.png)

Limitations!

At present, the units are the images from the campaign editor pasted onto cubes.  There is no ownership indication at this time, but most objects on the map belong to you in these missions anyway.

The command buttons were thrown together by me in about 5 minutes and look like crap, they will of course be replaced.  Most of the interface in general is temporary right now, some of the windows look awkward (the structure selection window in particular) and most of them are temporary anyway.

Text rendering performance is shitty right now, I'm working on improving it.

Controls you need to know:

Most things are mouse driven.  Left click makes selections.  Right/Control clicking on a hex will move the map to that hex.  The following keys also have functions at this time:

Arrows: move about the map
C: move to active unit (stolen from Civ)
H: move to headquarters (stolen from Command and Conquer)

The mouse wheel should also work on the introductory text before each mission.

What I'm looking for:

Three things:

Compatibility, does it run?

Performance, there is an FPS counter in the top right corner, and I'd like to get some numbers.  The game window is fully resizable, and the window size affects performance, so for the sake of measurement I'm only interested in numbers at the default window size (800x600).  Note that the framerate drops a lot when there is a lot of text on the screen.

WARNING! The framerate is currently unrestricted, this will probably chew through laptop batteries awfully fast.

Quality of tutorial, I've intentionally left a lot of gameplay details out of the description, because I want to know how effective the tutorial maps are.

System requirements:

OpenGL 2.1 support.

Windows and Mac versions should run out of the box, they include all of their dependencies (normally I never do this, but for the purposes of this short demo I'm subverting my principles),

Linux version is compiled for x86 32bit and requires OpenAL, ogg vorbis, Gtk, and FreeType, all of which are pretty much standard on most Linux distros.  If you can't run on it your distro, let me know.

Links:

Linux (http://www.averagesoftware.org/files/franchise.tar.gz)
Mac OS X (http://www.averagesoftware.org/files/franchise.dmg)
Windows (http://www.averagesoftware.org/files/franchise.zip)

Campaign editor:

The campaign editor is at beta 2, and if you want to play with it, it's here:

Linux (http://www.averagesoftware.org/files/franchise_editor.tar.gz)
Mac OS X (http://www.averagesoftware.org/files/franchise_editor.dmg)
Windows (http://www.averagesoftware.org/files/franchise_editor.zip)

Not all of the features of the editor are reflected in the game at this time.

Thanks for the help, and look forward to more impressive demos as time goes on.

missing libstdc++-6

Yeah, same as Frank00.  Missing libstdc++-6 (I'm on WinXP).  Also, you might want to export the SVN folder instead of just zipping up your working folder in place.  That way you'll lose the hidden .svn folders (which double the size of your zip download).  Not a big deal at 3MB, but anything to make it easier for people to download and test is a good thing.

I love the concept!  Competing fast food franchises in a land war is beautiful.  Are the names of the factions going to be parodies of McD, BK, etc?

Shit, I thought I solved the problem, it worked for the editor.

Anyhoo, new build posted to fix that.  I shall investigate my link commands a bit further...


I thought I did get rid of all the .svn folders.  Which one did I miss?

Unspecified error on executing (WinXp), but maybe it's my 9" netbook?

Okay, works now.  Runs great on my machine.  Getting about 1800 FPS, which should be adequate for turn-based strategy.  ;)


All of the subfolders still have them (it looks like you just deleted the one from the root folder).  I always just do an export from SVN to a different folder, rather than trying to delete the .svn folders.

Btw, the idea of potato mines kills me for some reason.  I'm still giggling out loud.

Unspecified error?  Doesn't help too much.  If I had to guess, I might say that the OpenGL version isn't high enough, I intend to put a check in for that at some point.


I remember now that I spent so long purging those from the editor (which includes the full source) that I completely forgot to do it for the game.  I didn't know about svn export, that will be helpful in the future.


My personal favorites are actually the beef paddies, which sadly are not in this demo.