I played Indie Brawl with my girlfriend once, back when she was living out-of-state. I came to visit her with a laptop full of multiplayer indie games. We had fun, even though it wasn't finished.

Nicalis doesn't approve of fangames.

That just seems nuts to me. How can you not approve of fan games? That's like having a policy against being complimented. Unless you have reason to believe that a particular fan game is going to replace sales (e.g. because it's a straight remake of one of your games), who cares?

Hey folks! Sorry for the extended silence there. The truth is, I was a little stumped about how to proceed with a certain aspect of multiplayer: specifically, accurately reproducing the results of random die rolls.

I started off by recording each die roll along with the action it was associated with. Eventually, however, I realized that certain events occurred during battles which were both randomized and automatic (that is, not tied to any player action). Player spawn locations, move order, whether item drops occur, item drop positions, which space a character or item is displaced to when it falls onto/spawns on an occupied space--was I going to have to record all of those things as well? Multiplayer was quickly ballooning into a huge headache.

Today, however, I finally had a breakthrough in figuring out how to get a virtually limitless sequence of results from a random seed. Using a seed single-handedly solves the whole messy problem of making results replicable: the same seed reliably produces the same results in the same sequence. The only true point of randomization now comes at the moment of the seed's creation: from that point, it's all just generating a deterministic sequence of numbers from the seed.

I now have this new method of random number generation in-game and working. With that out of the way, it's time to continue coding multiplayer!

I don't generally play Telepath Tactics with fog of war on. However, in the process of updating the fog of war tiles, I played a few matches and discovered that some not-insignificant bugs had crept into games with fog of war. Those are now all fixed, however!

In the meantime, I've created a variant of the icy bridge map I posted above. This version is filled with lava and an explosive charge sitting in the middle of the map, ready to be detonated--in other words, it's even more crazy and high stakes than the earlier version. Here's a screenie:



I'm considering changing the placement of those boulders in order to encourage the frantic scramble for the center without forcing a drawn-out fight at one of two choke points.

Another small update: I've figured out a dithering pattern for the fog of war that works without me needing to drop the opacity below 100. That's now in the game, along with destructible wall, door and fence shadows. Behold!

Inane has just gotten me complete drafts of each unit facing in four directions! I'm especially fond of the Bronze Golem and the Lizardman:





Once we get final drafts of all the units facing in all directions, it will be time to start animating them. I'm really excited about that; I cannot wait to see all these guys in motion!

Someone mentioned a gameplay video; have you made one yet? I'd be interested to see how this is all coming together.

Nice! Kaltos looks superb.

I just reworked the graphics for fog of war so you can still see the map's terrain in areas outside your field of view--just not the characters and objects actually on it. I started with a classic dithered style, but it flickered really obnoxiously when panning around the battlefield. I was able to get rid of the flicker effect by reducing the opacity of the tiles to 53% (which partly defeats the purpose, seeing as I was hoping to avoid using transparency for performance reasons, but oh well).

I've updated the CPU AI again--it now correctly judges whether it can push/pull/throw a character into water or lava, then decides whether to do so by taking into account how much environmental damage the target is likely to take in the process. I played a match late last night where the AI was pushing and throwing my characters into lava with wild abandon; it was pretty awesome.

Interesting map design, can see that would be all out war like the bridge shadows also

Thanks, man!

I've been making lots of little bug fixes today, as well as rewriting various parts of the engine that rely on hard-coded attack names so they refer to attributes changeable in the external Attacks.xml file.

For a change of pace, I decided to create a new map with tons of destructible terrain. It looked weird having so many bridge tiles without any shadows, though, so I went ahead and added in shadow graphics for bridges. Here's a screenie:

Confirmed: CPU-controlled Mentalists will now drop your flying characters into lava without mercy or hesitation.

I've been tinkering with the game's AI--it now takes into the account the type of space a flying character is above when deciding whether to use a Heavy-inducing attack like Gravity Spike on it. (Characters flying over lava are especially likely to be targets due to the crazy amount of damage falling into lava does.)

I've just written knockback into the game as a formal attack attribute, and am going to rewrite the code handling Shove/Pull/Throw/etc. so it's no longer hard-coded into the game. This will allow me to write AI behavior for pushing other characters around much more easily (to say nothing of giving players even more flexibility to create new attacks).

Fixed!

I just fixed another odd bug: charges blowing up all surrounding bridge tiles, but leaving the one they're sitting on untouched. No more of that!

Next, I'm going to fix the weird bug from the last video where Feedback deals more damage than it heals. It doesn't happen in normal matches--it seems the computer AI is ignoring some sort of rule. I should have that fixed in a jiffy.

Watching that, I realized that the computer AI was ignoring frozen characters and moving with them anyway. Not good! I just fixed it, though.

All right, bugs squashed! That didn't take long, but uploading this latest video to Youtube did. Behold, an exhibition match between two CPU-controlled players with randomized armies.

So, I was just recording a head-to-head matchup of computer AIs for an update video when I discovered several horrifying bugs. One of them is now fixed--the other, I'm working on. I'll post a video once I'm done.

Hm. I was just thinking: if you need an air recovery for Duvalier, you could have him use the Azure orb.

Small update: I may have just figured out a way to do direct computer-to-computer multiplayer over the internet. Still no guarantees, but it has just become much more of a possibility.

Have you emailed TouchArcade yet? They seem like an ideal site to review this sort of game. Hookshot Inc., too.