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[Belimoth]

HORNS VS HALOS
by Bones and Belimoth

Coming soon, to a computer near you.

DEMO

VIDEO
working on it

Scorekeeping
  Each team starts with 100 reinforcements
  When a player/bot respawns or a corpse is stolen, that team loses 2.
  Recycled corpses add 1. Stolen corpses add 2.
  You win if you lower the opponents' reinforcements to zero.

Classes
  Fighter(Demon/Angel): Throws bombs, tries to kill opposing players.
  Thief(Satyr/Hermes): Steals corpses from the enemy base.
  Harvester(Troll/Saint): Picks up corpses and recycles them at the friendly base.
  Human: Corpse fodder.

Controls
  Arrow keys to move and jump.
         Jumping depletes stamina; if your stamina goes below zero you have to recover.
  Z to throw bombs (Fighter) or corpses (Thief/Harvester).
         Down arrow + Z drops a bomb instead of throwing it (Fighter) or eats a corpse for health (Harvester).
  Walk over corpses to pick them up (Harvester), or touch the enemy base to steal one (Thief).
         Deposit picked-up and stolen corpses by throwing them at a friendly base.

[Belimoth]

Bones did a snazzy new mockup(up there), and I've got a demo to show off early gameplay ideas. Grab it here.

[Bones]

Here is some progress of the art I've done.
You can see I've come up with a few different stylistic approaches.

[Belimoth]

Programming to-do list:
  Message system.
  Improve message system.
  Better camera tracking.
  Better/more varied AI.
  Squad-based AI. (not as exciting as it sounds)
  Score-keeping and objectives.
  Victory conditions.
  Actual menus.
  Networking.

[Belimoth]

Yet again, Bones' mock-ups are one step ahead of my screen-shots.
I'll catch up though.

[Hangedman]

Looking good. I love the outlines.
Hope it has a good biblical-ish name generator.

[wilbefast]

Demo runs on Wine (Ubuntu 10.04)  no sound though 

I had an idea for an RTS suspiciously along these lines - it was more RTS-y but... well... Get out of my head 

[Belimoth]

New demo!

Scorekeeping
  Each team starts with 100 reinforcements
  When a player/bot respawns that team loses 2.
  Recycled corpses add 1.
  Allegedly you win if you lower the opponents' reinforcements to zero first, but who's to say?

Classes
  Demon/Angel: Throw grenades, try to kill opposing players.
  Satyr/Hermes: Can heal and... steal life and... basically it's not all worked out yet, don't play as this class.
  Troll/Saint: Picks up corpses and recycles them at the friendly base.
  Observer: Not choosable yet, and not really a class, but it looks like an eye and who am I to pass up that kind of opportunity?

[Bones]

Demon-Imp-Troll [Human fodder] Saint-Hermes-Angel

Trying to differentiate the human fodder, from the "Saint" he used to just be an edited version of the human fodder.

[Belimoth]

I am beginning to work on this project again, lots of changes are taking place.

I've decided to explore alternatives to the   Healer class, since in it's current incarnation it is boring to play and hard to write AI for. It also works against the Troll class in that by healing teammates you are decreasing the amount of friendly corpses that drop and not contributing directly to the amount of dropped enemy corpses.

The corpse economy is my favorite feature, so my favorite idea for a Healer replacement is a Thief class that steals corpses from the enemy base. It would have the same stats as the Healer(high stamina, low health), and stolen corpses would count more than the ones recycled by Trolls.

Goals:
Staggered respawning.
Actual class/team switching mechanics.
Endgame scoreboard.
Allowance for cooperative scoring.
Actual menus.
Secondary ability for Troll.
Horizontally-looping levels.
Different level layouts to choose from.
Arrows showing offscreen players.
Clouds to indicate maximum elevation.
Power-ups that drop occasionally.
Better sound effects.
Networked play.

[:^)]

This is cool.

[Belimoth]

New Demo!

The   Thief's mechanics work now; You steal one corpse from the enemy base when you come in contact with it. When thrown, stolen corpses are yellow and can't be picked up by harvesters, only other thieves. Right now there is no limitation on the thief's power so you could continually steal corpses without returning them just to drain the opponent's reinforcement count. I have several ideas to fix this, I just want to see if the thief is fun to play first.

The AI thieves are terrible... actually all the AI is terrible but the thieves show it the most
That's what I'm working on next.
I have left one on each team so that you may laugh at them.

I am also thinking of deprecating the minimap now that there are those arrows.

[Belimoth]

My meddling has ruined the colors.



I just wanted to be able to change the palettes why is it bluuuue

[Mikademus]

Blue is cool. Blue is the new white.

[Hangedman]

I like it.
Blue/Red reminds me more of 'Law vs Chaos' than 'Good vs Evil' which was always way more interesting

[Belimoth]

I like it.
Blue/Red reminds me more of 'Law vs Chaos' than 'Good vs Evil' which was always way more interesting

That could work out, but I do not want them to be the color of toothpaste.

[Hangedman]

Play with the saturation a bit and make the colours more moderate?
Might make the outlines less vivid. But you can always go with bright red and blue (or whatever colours) that aren't pure ff0000 and 0000ff.

Like... try E17474 and 74C2E1, if you want a pale blue. 7474E1 if you want royal.

[Belimoth]

Update!

                                                   Thief AI and gameplay is functional.
                                                   Added a simple effect to indicate when things are picked up.
                                                   Added an instructions page on main menu.
                                                   Scoreboard displayed at end of game and during pause.
                                                   Harvester's secondary ability added.
                                                    Stats tweaked.

[Belimoth]

Switching gears now from gameplay to programming.


Adding a grid for collisions is the next objective, but I don't want to have to tweak the placement and size of the grid every time I change a gameplay variable like jump height or blast radius.

That sounds like a lot of work... so instead I'm going to do even MORE work to make a grid system that tweaks itself! Programmer Logic

Here's the gist of the classes so far, for any curious BlitzMax people.

Code:

Type TDynamicGrid

	Field cellSize:Int
	Field width:Int, height:Int
	Field xStart:Int, yStart:Int
	Field _xy:TCell[,]
	
	Function Create:TDynamicGrid(cell_size:Int)

	Method Add(e:TEntity)			'adds an entity to the grid
	Method At:TCell(x:Int, y:Int)		'returns the cell at given grid coordinates 
	Method GetCell:TCell(x:Float, y:Float)	'returns the cell at given screen coordinates
	Method ObjectEnumerator:TDynamicGridEnum

End Type



Type TDynamicGridEnum

	Method HasNext:Int()
	Method NextObject:Object()

End Type



Type TCell Extends TList

	Field parent:TDynamicGrid
	Field x:Int, y:Int
	
	Function Create:TCell(x:Int, y:Int)

End Type



Type TEntity	'base class for anything with a position

	Field x:Float, y:Float

End Type

[Belimoth]

The grid system is done, but not integrated yet. It's the kind of thing I might reuse so I wrote it as a standalone system first.

Video!