Here's a dev update. As always, you can find out what we're up to by visiting our
devlog.
Our short-term goal is to implement a "first pass" of the three pillars of the game: resource gathering, building/crafting, and tactical combat. We're doing this so we can start tuning the overall pace and feel of the gameplay as early as possible. Resource gathering and building are complete, and we've moved on to combat!
So while Ponder (the coder) focuses on monster AI and threat tables, I've been working on both our UI infrastructure and modelling the basic enemies and combat units.
Combat ModelsThe first monsters we're adding are goblins. Goblins will always attack in packs, and will coordinate their actions. Here are a few different goblin variants along with some weapons and a battle standard.
And here is a set of models showing the gear progression for a melee combat unit. So you will be able to gear up your townsfolk and army through crafting and looting monsters. The progression shown is no armor -> leather -> iron -> steel
UI Progress!First, yes, the world is tiny and ugly as crap! We haven't ported proper world generation to the production code. Don't worry, the real world will look even better than our prototype.
This kind of simulation game has a lot of management sections, so there are two big goals of the UI.
- Different parts of the UI should be easily discoverable
- Stay out of the player's way!
UI TechOur UI is 100% HTML and JS, using the
Chromium Embedded Framework. Basically the UI runs in an offscreen chrome window and communicates with the game via a tiny embedded http server. Every frame the game renders the chrome window to a texture and overlays it on top of the game.
As you can see from the 2nd half of the video, this gives us all kinds of goodies for free, like an excellent debugger. We also get to take advantage of the many great UI tools that exist in the browser: jquery, css, html5 canvas, etc.
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