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[Mete]

You dont need to be sorry, your post really made me laugh ahhah :D

Good job on Pike & Shot, I will keep an eye on your game.

[James Edward Smith]

Heh, when your gif gets too big in dimension and frame count, gifcam starts to lose a lot of framerate on my computer. The timing gets all jerky and fast like an old "flicker show" too. Makes me want to add some film grain and a silent movie dialogue placard to the end of this. All this stuff happens a lot slower and smoother in-game, heh.



Doppelsöldners are one of the special attack soldiers in Pike & Shot. Paid double, they will fearlessly run into the fray, swinging their zweihanders or halberds. They temporarily create a protective screen of deadly steel around the formation.


Couple of variants on appearance.

[Muzz]

Just gave the latest build a shot.

Really cool game! i like the dynamic of having to swap out your lines, that's really creative.

I'll say that i think the move speed is way too slow. I really wish i could have some sort of limited dash, as things move way too slowly and i found it quite frustrating. I find for stuff like that a good approach is to iterate and work out what feels too fast then slow it down slowly till it feels really good. Imo you can't find what is the right speed until you know what is too fast to deal with.

Other than that there really needs to be a solution for shielded guys just getting pushed, like that mechanic feels really unrewarding. I'm not too sure of the best solution there however, but i think maybe bouncing off and loosing a shield could be cool.

[James Edward Smith]

Hey man, thanks for all the compliments and feedback.

I'll say that i think the move speed is way too slow. I really wish i could have some sort of limited dash, as things move way too slowly and i found it quite frustrating.

Figuring out the move speed of the player's formation and enemies has been tricky. I've changed it a lot of times already, usually making it faster. It's a sort of thing where if the player formation is very fast, I can't make the enemies as fast or the game becomes too hard to play. But if I leave the enemies as slow, it makes them start to look a little silly and more importantly, starts to make the game too easy to play. Now, there's other things that could be altered to make enemies more imposing even if they are slow (amount, hardiness, etc), but it starts to change the nature of the game, so it's risky and doesn't always lead to something I like. It is something I need to mess around with more though, and will in future.

As far as dash moves go, one of the formation leaders will have knights as their body guards that will do a lance charge as their attack. Also one of the formation leaders might have pikemen with shorter spears rather than pikes, but that will dash whenever their spears are lowered. I dunno how many of these ideas will end up in the final game, but at least the knights will I think.

Other than that there really needs to be a solution for shielded guys just getting pushed, like that mechanic feels really unrewarding. I'm not too sure of the best solution there however, but i think maybe bouncing off and loosing a shield could be cool.

Well, the concept with these is that they are a troop that really needs to be shot to be delt with, but unlike ranged troops, you can put off shooting them if you need the fire power for something else and it isn't the end of the world. You can't kill them with pikes, but you can prevent them from damaging your formation with pikes until you have arquebuses ready to fire or in future builds, body guards to attack them with. That's the idea, they are a managable threat that you need to deal with eventually, but not necessarily immediately. Also I just like enemies in shmups that take multiple shots to kill and seem to break apart and change state as you fire on them.

They can slow down the pace of the game if you fail to shoot them before you have to defend against them, but I'm not convinced this is bad. Sometimes I worry that I bill Pike & Shot too much as a shmup and then people expect a quick, fast success or fast failure situation when they play the game. I want the game to feel smooth mechanically, but I don't think it needs to always be fast paced in terms of the resolution of every enemy wave. I think that expecting it to play like a shmup maybe isn't fair to the game. It could be fun in it's own right while not always mirroring a shmup. It could be more of a thinking, strategizing game, I think that could be its strength in the end.

[Muzz]

I'd say the speed thing for me was mostly frustrating between enemies. Maybe adding in a run where all the dudes can't attack while running, making it a risk system reward for mobility. Honestly one of the biggest frustration is I can't dodge enemy bullets, if I'm in range and they shoot, by dude is already dead.

and i think i understand where you are coming from with the pikes, i just think it feels silly that they just stand there at the end of your pikes. Maybe it would feel less silly if they bounce back and charge back in?

[James Edward Smith]

I fixed pretty much all of the pikemen bugs that are in the alpha and I've been able to tweak the behaviour of Doppelsoldners some more.

I attempted to update the project to XNA 4 tonight in hopes of having access to more fancy graphics stuff, but the result was a lot of wasted time downloading things and failure. But I regrouped and managed to implement a cool little "flash" mask animation thing to my sprite class. Now when say an arquebusier has to reload they can sort of get grayed out, brighten overtime as they reload and then when they are actually fully reloaded and ready to shoot again, they'll FLASH bright white for a split second. I think it looks pretty good. When I pair it with a subtle audio queue, you should be able to tell when your guys can shoot a lot easier, making for no need to pound fire until they fire when you want to shoot.

Honestly one of the biggest frustration is I can't dodge enemy bullets, if I'm in range and they shoot, by dude is already dead.

I'm not sure what you mean. I dodge projectiles all the time, even when I'm very close to the ranged guy shooting it at me. Try harder?*shrug* Are you maybe just trying to run away from the shot in the same direction it's moving? It's true, you can't outrun most shots if you just move back, you have to move to the side to dodge things. You know, like perpendicular to its path.

Maybe it would feel less silly if they bounce back and charge back in?

This is a good idea. As it is, what happens now has always just been a place holder animation (it's just part of their melee animation played backwards and forwards over and over). Maybe if the final animation looks more like them pushing and shoving more or yeah, if they actually bumped into the pikes and bounced off over and over, it might look better.

[James Edward Smith]

Oh also, here's a preview of the eventual improved arquebusier sprites that will look as good as the pikemen and etc.

[Daivuk]

I love the perseverance you have on that project. When I first met you (6 years ago?) you were already working on this!
And it's getting awesomener every time I see it.

[Panurge]

Fantastic concept, awesome animations, enjoyable gameplay. Get this finished please!

[Zyxt]

Just tried the alpha, it's ridiculously fun! What a great concept too. Looking forward to see how the development goes.

[James Edward Smith]

I love the perseverance you have on that project. When I first met you (6 years ago?) you were already working on this!
And it's getting awesomener every time I see it.

Hahaha, Well, perseverance would be good. I'd have finished the game 3 years ago if I had that. What I do have though, I would term "stubbornness". One day, if my perseverance can match that we may see a good game come out of this. Everyone always likes the WIP when they play it.

;_;

I'm working on it right now at least. I submitted it to MAGfest to try and get a fire under my ass after a bout of loss of motivation due to multiple factors recently.

I gotta get this finished, even after all this time I still love the concept. Also I have a lot of other games I have to make. At least this one fishing one...

@Panurge: Hehehe, thanks man. But I'm curious, will the Ro'gue show up again in Gladitorius? I love that guy.

[Panurge]

@Panurge: Hehehe, thanks man. But I'm curious, will the Ro'gue show up again in Gladitorius? I love that guy.

The Ro'gue will definitely be making an appearance, albeit in a slightly altered form.

By the way, I forgot to mention how much I dig the period setting of Pike and Shot. The cartoony pixel style seems a perfect fit too - not only does it bring back fond gaming memories but it also reminds me of this sort of thing:

[James Edward Smith]

Yeah, I've been playing with the idea of aping on the sort of terrible perspective and depiction of relative scale that you see in a lot of late medieval art. You know, stuff like castle defenders barely fitting into tiny towers and that sort of thing. It sort of rhymes with the art of old sprite-based games in a lot of ways. If I can't realize it in the levels themselves, then at least in the map screen or maybe in level dialogs, sort of like what they did in later Dimahoo games with the little boss preview scrolls.

[James Edward Smith]

I didn't want to post again until I had a demo level completely done. It was to be replete with its own wonderful boss, the most feared Saurian raider of them all; the one they call LOS COLMILLOS

Defeating him and all the other goblin bosses while scoring perfect rankings in their levels will unlock the Saurian faction who fight with SHIELD & MISSILE rather than with Pike & Shot, have their own leader characters as well as their own kinds of doppel soldiers.



Unfortunately, my day job has been lousy with overtime lately and so things are a little delayed. On the bright side I may get some time off soon as a result and then can hopefully get some DEEP DEVELOPMENT done.

BUT, the bugs in the old alpha build bugbothered me so I've decided to release a small update that fixes them and adds has some of the stuff I got done recently.

Pike'n Shot ALPHA v0.2 (windows only for now  )

NEW FEATURES THIS RELEASE
==========================================



-Fancy pansy CRT effect shaders (Thank you for all your wonderful assistance, David)



-Brand new loot & coffer (health bar) system to address the old design problem of how losing soldiers put new players into a terrible game state where they couldn't really play the game properly anymore due to their formation getting gimped.

CONtrols
==========================================

arrow keys - movement

Z:     Pike!
X:     Shot!
Z + X: Doppel Soldier attack

ESC: quit
CTRL + 1: restart game
CTRL + 0: turn fullscreen mode off/on
CTRL + 9: turn shader effects off/on (Try
playing with shaders off if the game is
running poorly on your computer.)


FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS
==========================================

Kill Saurian raiders until they are all
vanquished.

If you run out of money your army of mercs
will retreat (game over)

Earn PHAT LOOTS by killing ranged or
shielded heavy infantry to keep your mercs
paid and fighting.

Pikes cannot harm shielded opponents.
Break 'em with shots first or hack them
down with a Doppel Soldier.

Doppel soldiers earn double! Add them to
your formation by filling up the second
coffer bar without taking a loss.

Taking a loss while the doppel coffer is
up will forfeit the entire bar.

[IndieEmma]

Looks really cool.

[Storsorgen]

I had my doubts about how this would work, but you've made it incredibly fun. Good job!

[mtarini]

The first screenshot was enough to get me!!!
WOW I love that style, what a unique game!!!

INSTALL NOW!


 
Nooooooo!!!!!
Why oh why MS-XNA-Framework?

(I'm on Windows 8...
I even let it install that ugly thing --yes, I liked the screenshot **that** much!-- but I still get that.
Also tried run the installer "as an administrator").

[James Edward Smith]

Crap, I think I had the prerequistes set wrong in that build. I've overwritten it with a new one that I think is set up correctly. Could you try downloading it again and giving it an other try?

I'm hoping that eventually this won't be such an issue when I port this game to use FNA instead >_>.

[mtarini]

Sorry, re-downloaded, same thing
(tried both the .application and the setup.exe -- also ad administrator)

[James Edward Smith]

Hmmm, the only thing I can think of is to uninstall the previous installations and then try and make sure that you are really getting the new file and not just a cached version of the one you already downloaded.

I don't have access to a windows 8 machine right now, so I can't try to trouble shoot this until monday, sadly ;_;