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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsCannon Brawl :: Action RTS
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Seiseki
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« Reply #40 on: April 01, 2013, 07:25:33 PM »

Energy systems are awesome, please tell us we can also pay money for more energy! I love that stuff!
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Petey
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« Reply #41 on: April 02, 2013, 05:12:25 PM »

I don't like that Facebook decision , maybe finish the game first and then make the Facebook version ?

Don't worry, this was just my April Fools joke. Rest assured Cannon Brawl won't be moved to facebook, be pay to win, or any of that sort of silliness. Although you guys seem pretty keen on pay to use energy systems... Wink

Hope you all got a laugh out of it Smiley
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Whiteclaws
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« Reply #42 on: April 03, 2013, 03:54:01 AM »

Goddamnit , you sure got me

Whiteclaws is upset because you made him fall from his chair  Who, Me?
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Petey
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« Reply #43 on: April 07, 2013, 10:04:55 AM »

Cannon Brawl has a lot of different weapons and defenses to choose from. Some games would count "small cannon", "large cannon", and "extra large cannon" as 3 different weapons, but I don't! So when I say different, I mean really different.

A video would help explain better, and hey, here's one right here:




0:05 - The Cannon Tower is first. It shoots a little missile, has 3 levels of ugprade, your standard enemy pounder. You can play with this one right now by trying our free alpha.

0:17 - Next is the Shield Tower, it protects against cannon shots depending on its strength. It can also reflect laser beams (more on that later). This one is also in our alpha.

0:28 - Then we get to a pretty crazy building, the Bank! Banks make money automatically and can be built anywhere. Boring right? Wrong! They can also perform hostile takeovers of enemy buildings. You can enter a bank and choose an enemy building to 'buy out'. After 3 buyouts, the enemy building becomes yours! You can even buy out the enemy HQ to win (if you can build up enough money).

0:33 - Now lets talk Laser Tower. It's generally a bit more powerful and expensive than the Cannon, shoots in a straight line, and reflects off enemy shields - which either player can sometimes use to their advantage. Imagine an enemy fires a laser at you and your reflect it right back at him!

And there's a lot more in store. You can try out the Cannon and Shield and a few others in action by downloading the free alpha.
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Petey
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« Reply #44 on: April 10, 2013, 05:48:52 PM »

After a lot of people who tried the alpha mentioned they wanted harder AI, I fixed some issues and made a little before/after video:


Still working on an 'Insane' difficulty mode and making the AI more competitive overall without having to cheat. Hope you guys like the video (and my 'beautiful' voice)!
« Last Edit: April 11, 2013, 10:53:14 AM by Petey » Logged

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Petey
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« Reply #45 on: April 11, 2013, 10:53:35 AM »

Oops, realized the youtube link was broken - fixed now Smiley
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Petey
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« Reply #46 on: April 26, 2013, 10:57:38 AM »

Hey guys, made another dev update video to further talk about how we're improving the AI based on the alpha demo feedback.  This video shows off how I've improved the AI's laser targeting to deal with shield reflections and how the AI works overall and what I'm changing to make an Insane difficulty mode:


Right now I'm working on online multiplayer code and it's looking pretty promising, so more updates coming up!
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Petey
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« Reply #47 on: May 09, 2013, 06:29:23 PM »

Ok guys, made a new update video. Don't know if you're enjoying these or not, but have another!


This one covers a bunch of game design improvements I've been making.
- Demolishers crack cliffs rather than tunnel through them, making them more effective
- Juiced upgrade effect to encourage upgrading
- Smoothed out initial game economy to make early mistakes less punishing
- Improved explosions
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Petey
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« Reply #48 on: December 22, 2013, 05:01:30 PM »

Hey guys and gals, I haven't posted here in a long time...

Things got super crazy, we were very lucky to be able to release on Steam's Early Access back in July and it was the most stressed I have ever felt. A week before launch I would find myself just spontaneously clenching my teeth throughout the day! Cannon Brawl is the first game I've ever released unto the gaming public and I was so nervous about what people would think of it.

Here's what I learned about the game now that it's out:
  • There is a surprising amount of design around ranking people in multiplayer. I thought it would be enough to do a leaderboard with people's ELO ratings, but it wasn't. You need to take into account ELO decay if people haven't played in a while. You must be careful when you show player's ratings to each other (do not do it before a match begins). Ideally, bucketing people into divisions (bronze, silver, gold) is a nice way to reduce the psychological pain of losing ELO, although I haven't done this yet.
  • I tried really hard, but game was completely unbalanced. We played a lot of multiplayer before launch, but real players quickly found a dominant strategy. They were understanding though and posted lots of analysis about balancing on our forums. Their feedback was really useful and the game went from 'build cannons as fast as possible, never upgrade, never do anything else' to supporting a much more diverse set of strategies, just by adjusting a few tuning numbers.
  • I focused very heavily on the core gameplay of Cannon Brawl but neglected the metagame, which can add a lot of value to your game. While the second to second, minute to minute, and half hour to half hour experience is really fun, after you've beat the campaign and played a little multiplayer, there is no meta-game to keep you going (and this is what I'm working on now). For example, Rogue Legacy has some pretty fun core gameplay (jumping, slashing, spells), but what kept me going 18 hours+ was the 'upgrade your mansion' meta-game. So really, I owe a thanks to Rogue Legacy for teaching me that Smiley

I hope you found something interesting and useful to you as you make your games! I'll leave you with my latest update video, I'm trying to shift more towards a design analysis 'what we're changing and why' approach to possibly help other designers:

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Petey
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« Reply #49 on: January 10, 2014, 04:09:58 PM »

Here's a little quick preview of the new flame thrower building I'm working on. It does AOE damage in a cone shape, ignoring terrain. It should feel really different from the other units and since it's range is shortest in the game, require a totally new playstyle:


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« Reply #50 on: January 11, 2014, 09:03:34 AM »

The successor of Worm's finally arrived folks Smiley
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« Reply #51 on: April 21, 2014, 06:40:19 PM »

The successor of Worm's finally arrived folks Smiley
Thanks Smiley

Also, time for another update. I want to fully explore the design space of the attack towers. All types of damage shapes, damage application times, trajectory curves, and on hit effects.

The next step was adding a Grenade Launcher (for V shaped trajectories) and a Flame Thrower (for cone shaped damage over time). This is all in the latest build, and here they are in action:


Next thing on the todo list is to fix a campaign pacing problem...
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« Reply #52 on: April 22, 2014, 02:40:22 PM »

Ah nice to hear from this project! Nice progression since the last time I'd been checking out here.
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« Reply #53 on: May 01, 2014, 06:22:08 AM »

Super quick update, we now support Mac! If you have a mac and want to test it out, PM me and I'll send you a key.
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« Reply #54 on: May 01, 2014, 08:17:01 AM »

This is awesome, great idea! This weekend will be buying a two pack and suckering an old friend into getting exploded by my skills Smiley.
Keep it up!
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« Reply #55 on: June 02, 2014, 08:59:10 AM »

This is awesome, great idea! This weekend will be buying a two pack and suckering an old friend into getting exploded by my skills Smiley.
Keep it up!
Awesome, let me know what you guys think!

And now for some more update progress. Last post I mentioned we wanted to fix a campaign pacing problem. The game has a ton of depth and variety, but I wanted to get players into it faster. So we tweaked some of the earlier missions to speed up how fast you unlock new pilots and we added a totally new pilot (the driller) with a really disruptive power (destroys terrain at will) right into one of the earlier missions.

Also then updated the Driller to still be balanced vs the other pilots for multiplayer.

We also added puzzle levels, which are optional challenges you can try out while you're playing through the campaign. Now not only is this an action strategy game, it's an action strategy puzzle game!

Here's the update video:


Next up is a revamp of the main menu...
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« Reply #56 on: June 13, 2014, 02:49:05 PM »

Working on the main menu more recently. Here's a little gif of what it's looking like:


The little cannon and shot are actually exported from flash using my friend's flash to xml file exporter, which spits out the flash file as a very readable set of frame, image, position, scale, and rotation information. My friend was thinking of open sourcing the exporter, which would be awesome.

I just took the xml output and ran it through some code in my engine to load the images and move them around. The particle effect and wall break are all hand set in code.
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« Reply #57 on: June 16, 2014, 12:07:30 AM »

Wow the intro is really effective for such a simple plan. Well done. The whole games coming together really nicely.
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« Reply #58 on: November 22, 2015, 01:46:21 PM »

It’s been a long time since the last post, but the big news is Cannon Brawl is done! Hooray! Actually it’s been done for around a year. We launched our final release on Steam in September 2014 with a new



So it’s been a year since launch, time to reflect back on what I learned.

  • Press coverage is unpredictable - A few weeks before launch, we sent thousands of emails to press people, personally tailoring around 50-100 of them to those we had more of a relationship with. In fact, we got more press coverage on our beta a few months earlier than we did on our final launch.
  • Demo version has no measurable effect on sales - we introduced a demo a few months after launching. Our daily sales were neither reduced nor increased. Given that it had no effect on sales, it probably wasn’t worth doing.
  • You only get one launch - our early access launch was an order of magnitude larger than our final launch. Maybe most people who really wanted it already bought it. The section on early access in this article is true to our experience.  The lesson here is to make sure to budget your development time appropriately knowing that your final launch is going likely to be smaller.
  • We learned how to make a really fun game - this was our first indie project, and through good fortune and tons and tons of playtesting, it turned out pretty fun (93% positive reviews on steam). It was a little rough learning game design along the way, but it’s great to hear people say “You made Cannon Brawl? I love that game, I played the hell out of it!”
  • It’s not all about mechanics - I’m a very game mechanics oriented person, and Cannon Brawl reflected that. It’s fun, well balanced and mechanically interesting, but being fun just isn’t enough if you want to maximize your chances of success. Next time I would make sure to focus more effort on the narrative design, mood, tone, and atmosphere, the world building, and a fictional premise that can be more easily communicated to people.

Next up for us is getting the game ported to consoles. We're working with these folks to help make that happen. In the meantime, Cannon Brawl’s artist Theresa went on to release a Gear VR game about flying a magic carpet called Bazaar. I’ve been working on DIGHARD and on a new project about building a medieval city and protecting it from a dragon.

Hit me up with any questions!
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