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[Reilly]

Added some unit profile pages and a few more game mechanics. I'm sure it is full of typos and misspellings.


WarbitsManual.pdf (2Mb)

The unit descriptions are just functional right now, I want to go back and make it more light hearted when I have some time.
I'll probably make the title cards more interesting too. Little blurb and a spot illustration or something. I'm having a lot of fun basically remaking the game in this style.

[danieru]

How to approach the AI has been a constant internal debate for me. This is my first experience trying to develop AI so it's been a challenge, a mix of frustrating and rewarding development moments. It's interesting because it's easy enough to think through the data and logic required to gather a general sense of intelligence, but how to organize and execute it in practice has been the real chore.

Knowing how smart to make it in some areas has been important. It's tempting to go overboard calculating every possible scenario, but sometimes a heuristic approach works well enough.

In general I'd say I'm taking the GOAP approach (goal oriented action planning). I have different modules that handle various phases of decisions in each turn. All goals are weighed and the highest rated goal executed. Every time a goal is executed the module calculates the best goal again, since it can often change as a result of the precious execution. Ex: A units health is brought down to a killable threshold for another unit.

I'm happy to talk more if you have any other questions.

Wow, thanks Vanhail I'd love to pick your brain. I read through the F.E.A.R doc on GOAP and I'm interested in how you adopted it to a TBS. From my reading the major benefit of GOAP for an FPS is emergent behavior towards a known goal. For a FPS the goal major goal is a simple "kill the player" while picking the goal is the difficult part of a TBS, so how did you adopt finding the goals?

From your description my understanding is you use a heuristic to cull the goals, then find the best unit to carry out the action? Would goals be things like "Kill unit 4", "Capture city 2"? How complex can the goals become, would there be a "Form blockade at chockpoint" goal?" Are the weightings static?

Thank you for mentioning GOAP, I hadn't considered working from the result-we-want to the moves-attacks-capturing. All the time my mind had been on running through the units and finding the best moves&attacks weighted by the result.

[Reilly]

[Belimoth]

lol

[Photon]

Oh my word, it took me a second there.

[Reilly]

Still plugging away at the operations manual.
Added Terrain and Structure profiles to the guide as well as some other random gameplay mechanics.

WarbitsManual.pdf

Also been working on cleaning up some of the UI.

[Reilly]

oops nvm

[Reilly]

Making fun challenging campaign maps can be quite difficult!

Trying to cook up a bunch for a new batch of Alpha testers.

[Photon]

 

[Reilly]

Hey, there! We're still alive. Busy mostly on boring behind the scenes stuff.

Here's a mockup I cooked up of Wall blocks (cubes), Power Cores (outlined in white), and Reactors (large cylinder).

Hopefully we can show what all this adds up to in the near future.

Also here's a mockup of the Multiplayer Intel screen.
The star shows who's turn it is.


Swiping to the left will show some more detailed stats about the game.

[RealityShifter]

Love me some advanced wars. Looking forward to this.

[JustRadek]

Nicely polished visuals. The game screen doesn't feel cluttered, but I still appreciate the icon-based minimap.

[James Edward Smith]

Still plugging away at the operations manual.
Added Terrain and Structure profiles to the guide as well as some other random gameplay mechanics.

You wrote "factory" again in the Airport description.

[Reilly]

Thanks guys!

@James Hah, good catch! Lots of stuff I need to update/add in the guide.

[Reilly]

Redid the wall blocks because they were old and bothering me.

[Photon]

Ooh, interesting. But are you going to connect those wall blocks at some point? They look sort of strange just sitting out in distinct blocks.

[Seiseki]

Looks much better!
But I think the saturation of the purple clashes too much with the rest of the color palette.

[knifeySpoonie]

Looks much better!
But I think the saturation of the purple clashes too much with the rest of the color palette.

I thought this earlier but thought probably work in progress so won't say anything, but with the updated block, the purple still looks really bright compared to the slightly desaturated feel of the main game....

[Reilly]

Thanks for the feedback guys!

@photon- I really want a wall system that is modular and doesn't require a million different versions for bends and turns so... probably not.
They'll slowly float above the ground so they can be placed over both land and water.

@Seiseki, knifelSpoonie- I want these objects to seem very foreign but I don't want them to be too distracting so I'll play with it.

I hate posting empty handed but I'm in the middle of a bunch of stuff, sorry!

[James Edward Smith]

Those wall things look very strange... like units could just squeeze between them or something. Doesn't look very logical... ludonarratively weak I guess I would say. I don't fully understand why you think making all the joining wall tiles would be that much work.. I mean you made all the shoreline tiles for regular ground, right?

Could I suggest maybe just making something that looked like it was generating some sort of electrical wall? Like, the individual wall tiles would just be these little floating generator/relay things that daisy chained a sort of lightning/laser looking wall around. I think that would look a lot better, I dunno, just my opinion. You could even have the little "wall pods" cutely conform to the tile they were placed on. Like, if they have ground below them they sprout a little tripod like stand, if they are over water, then they sprout a buoy type bottom, if they are over a city they are an antenna type thing on top of the building, etc.