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[FuriousGamer87]

Hi folks, currently developing this game called Gangster Tactics : Pile them In. This is intended to be an isometric tactics turn-based RPG game which is mostly set in the fictional city called "Casa City" (Hope you Spanish fellas have your kick  ). I intend to release this game in windows only for now, due to lack of required hardware for personal testing and not because of some elitist bullshit.

The setting of the entire game. Will change based on your actions and plot events.

You suddenly received word that your elder brother had died, killed in a gang fight in Casa City, your hometown. While you have no love lost for your black sheep of a brother, your mother plead that you at least come back to attend his funeral, as a close family member. Angered being burdened once again by your worthless brother, you packed and set for home. And unknowingly walk into maelstrom of rivalries, hatred and violence that will soon engulf Casa City.

And you, along with the people whom you gathered together will decide out of that chaos, the future and fate of Casa City.

The gameplay is, as above mentioned, tactic turn-based. The mechanics for this game is largely inspired by the best of the tactics RPG genre, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together . As you will see, most of the game UI design is also inspired by its UI due to its simplicity yet robust style. As they say, learn from the best  .

Showdown at Crazy Woods Bar between two rival gangs. Poor barkeep ;_;

Without further ado, here are some of the intended battlefield mechanics:-

• HP, SP and AP - It's too obvious what HP and SP are (SP replace MP in this game). AP stands for Adrenaline Points which you only get as you attack,get attacked by others, being bloodied, or defeating someone outright. Many powerful moves require AP to be used. Please note that in this game, the enemies also can use those moves with the same requirements, so take that information in stride.
• Positioning system - Position is king in the battlefield. If your men are facing the back of the enemy, they can dealt up to twice the usual amount of damage. Once again, do note this also apply for the enemies and they WILL attempt these maneuvers, even if you want to fight "fair"  .
• No random number generator in battle - While random number generator have their uses, this feature is brought over from tabletop gaming in which it is used to randomize players' chance of success in an attempt to bridge the skill gap between a tabletop veteran and a rookie. After all, who want to play tabletop with a veteran where his victory is guaranteed 100% of the time? In a single player game, I found the main opinions is that the feature largely served unintended to annoy and frustrate players. Also make everyone use the save button more often. It also diminished the importance of skill in tactics game if used heavily. So, in this game, it won't be used in the battlefield and only be used in the strategic layer to handle random events.

We are reading Henry's personal files. Let's hope he don't find out

Let's talk about some mechanics that is shown on the image above.

• Equipments - Each character have four equipment slots which they can outfit with different stuff. Standard stuff. Let's move along.
• The smiley face at the bottom of the character showcase in front of a scale - This icon reflect the personality of the character in question. Based on the image, the smiley is smirking while giving us a finger salute. Therefore, the personality of the character is "a bit of dick". Personalities is crucial in assigning tasks in the strategic overlay to your gang members and when trying to reclass them so to speak, as some classes(stereotypes) require a certain personality to access it. Personalities can be changed through behaviors on the battlefield and for some, plot decisions.
• The number beside the character showcase - That is the number of lives the character have. If it falls to 0 in any way, the character automatically died. If your main character died, it's game over for good (At least, until you reload the last save). As with Tactics Ogre, the number is reduced primarily by getting unconscious in battlefield and not received any appropriate medical aid in less than 3 turns.
• Stats - Some of these are explained below:
  
  • Strength - Affects Physical Attack (Melee and Ranged). Used in some events and strategic activities.
  • Constitution - Affects Physical Defense. Used in some events and strategic activities.
  • Intelligence - Affects Special Attack. Used in some events and strategic activities.
  • Willpower - Affects Special Defense. Used in some events and strategic activities.
  • Agility - Affects Initiative. Used in some events and strategic activities.

You may start small. The intention is to fill this screen to the brim until scrollbars appear with your gang members. Let's hope they don't have expensive tastes.

The image above show the characters that belong to the player's gang. As with tactics ogre, you can switch to class list view to see how many people of each class do you have in your gang.
If you look closely, you will find Xbox button icons is shown on the UI.This game is intended to be play either with a controller using XBox mapping or via keyboard. The mapping can be changed via controls UI. Mouse controls will not be supported at least until a while after the game is completed and only if requested then.

From Provocateur to Drunkard. Henry's mom and dad will never be happy, will they  

The picture shown above is the Class Change(Stereotype) UI. In this game, classes are referred to as "Stereotypes" which better reflect the tone of the game. In-game explanation is that most people change accordingly to what the society and largely what their friends expect from them. If they expect someone to constantly be strong and act like a idiot, the person will usually comply. Classes have their own stats, skill tree, requirements and effects. Also important is the fact that each class give different stat progression at each level-up.

Select the meat shields *ahem* valiant teammates to go with you into battle. Insurance will not be covered. Their own fault for forgetting that.

The Battle Placement UI. Subject to change but I like the design so far.

The smell of good old capitalism and plain human greed. Beats any belief every time.

This is the Strategic Overview UI. Let's talk about some of the elements here:

• Money - Self- explanatory. Require to buy anything.
• Fame - how much people have heard of you. This may both be good and bad, depending on the situation and the plot
• Street Cred - How much respect you have earned from the underworld and other gangs. Higher value give you access to black markets with rare items and special missions.
• Date - The passing of time. Usually irrelevant until you receive/start a time critical mission. May be used to set chances of random events (Still unsure should or not)
• Strategic Icons - The color shows whenever you can go to the location and access the activities there safely or about to start a fight/mission. Blue for safe, red for danger.

Since the battlefield main activity is obvious, let's talk about the planned activities in the strategic map.
I planned for quite a lot of stuff but most of them can easily be defined as:

• Investment - Invest in business and real estates. Choose between renters and staffs. Also many of your investment allow for more investment to improve on or buy stuff. After every mission completion, you will receive the fruits of the investment, be it good or bad. Random events may happen. The investment rewards will not be based on time/date but rather on number of missions completed to player visiting it to claim the reward.
• Assignment - Assign your gang members to do other stuff such as loan sharking on idiotic young people with low financial discipline and high ego. Assigned gang members may not participate on the next mission. Each assignments end after mission completion. Random events may happen.
• Renovation - Renovate your gang hideout with new rooms, new equipment and new decorations. Gain some bonus and more importantly, open access to some game features and stereotypes. One of it is to allow any gang member to be assigned to the room and after a mission completion, level up to 2 levels below the highest level character in the gang. The feature is intended because since I am not japanese, there will be no grinding. Every battle is important.  

Scanlines for retro lovers. No scanlines for retro haters. Now everyone can be happy!

The Settings UI. Not to be confused with the Controls UI which is another UI. I would be grateful for suggestions of further settings people would like to have in an isometric tactics game.

Yes, you can save anytime you want! In battle, toilet and during intercourse, if you please!

The Save UI. Currently planned to have only 16 save slots due small part to lack of programming skill and large part to unwillingness to commit further time on the feature.

[Dehimos]

The gameplay is, as above mentioned, tactic turn-based. The mechanics for this game is largely inspired by the best of the tactics RPG genre, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together .

You had my curiosity, but now you have my attention.

[SamLouix]

This looks like it's going to be seriously brilliant.

I would really be interested in making music for this game, so I sent you a message, including my site details with samples

Sam L. Jones

[Sly]

Yes, a million times yes.

[FuriousGamer87]

Some progress during the last week

• Sam L. Jones is joining on board to design the soundtrack for the game.
• Finish gamepad controls
• Finish keyboard controls. Can be customizable.
• Finish title screen.
• Finish all intro screens.
• Finish isometric movement and tiling.
• Screen transition effects are done. Ported over from my previous game.

Some gifs to show progress

There's nobody here! Just a shitty graffiti. Inspector Gordon, who the fuck give you that info!

Why are there scanlines all over? Are we inside an old television set! GORDON!!!!!!

Going to focus on finishing up scrollbar functions, options, and all other GUI functions before moving on to character creation.

[Kiririn51]

Saw this on /agdg/ a while ago, bretty gud, man, would play.

[FuriousGamer87]

Today progress.


Smooth and sexy, I love it!

Custom Scrollbar function is complete, woohoo!
HTML default scrollbox can go straight to hell with its ugly shit.

Can easily change to fit any amount of arrays.
Usable through keyboard and gamepad.
Can add image,text, buttons and links to the scroll if I desire it.
All parts are customizable. Quite please with myself over it.

Won’t clip any layers ,
Won’t default itself to the top layer screwing everything up like the default



A short rest before continuing on with control UI.

[Jasmine]

This.
Yes.

The music, I can just hear it.

Totally following.

[FuriousGamer87]

Alright some more progress today.

I just finish the Controls UI for the game. Holy shit, that was harder than I thought

It is not complicated, just hell lot of work and thinking that goes into what buttons should what. In the end, I just copied Tactics Ogre schematics and then move on, believing that in the future, when all my features are set, I will have a better understanding how to ensure the players can use all the buttons with high efficiency.

To show progress: here’s some gifs:

 
1/3


2/3


3/3

The current control schematics:

No "rape" button? This is not my gangster game. Dropped hard. - a 4chan anonymous


I may need a "Everybody Walk the Dinosaur" button in the future. Maybe not

Do tell what changes you wanted to the current control schematics. I will see what I can do   

[FuriousGamer87]

Alright! Another day gone and another day full of progress.

The setting UI is done.
Admittedly I went in doing it, thinking it would be easy but that is so wrong on so many level.
Finally finish it though and implemented all the settings features that is on the first post of this thread, including in-game screen resolution changes and a better(I think  ) scan lines shaders effect.
I also changed the quick button to cancel out of menu from gamepad's Y to the default B as indicated by my control schematics.


To show progress here are some gifs:







While the gifs may only show the web deployment, desktop deployment also worked just as well.

[FuriousGamer87]

Today progress:
I just finish my Quit UI which is easy to do.
Actually, I also planned to finish my Save/Load UI today.
Only, half way through that, I realize I need to extract strings from the stat system to put in the save slots so the player can identify each slot easily.
So, the Save/Load UI workload is put after I finish the combat system.



With all the current UIs workload finish, I will concentrating on character creation.

[FuriousGamer87]

Doing dialog box mock up today
Finish coding some of the dialog functions but still halfway there.



Not much progress today due to transferring all my sfx to a newly brought external drive and discussing about character creation methodology with other indie game devs.

[knifeySpoonie]

Really cool Idea and execution so far, plus like you say you can't go wrong being inspired by tactics ogre

[FuriousGamer87]

Just finish the dialog features for my game.
With this done, I can fully concentrate on my Character Creation using a variant of this feature.
Also here's a gif to show progress.

Trigger Warning: Contain Rape.

Ignore the slight jam after the choices. I already fixed those and are just too lazy to make another gif.I also have finish inputting all the required sprite fonts for my game.

[FuriousGamer87]

Finish Character Creation.
While I still unsure how the stats bonus going to affect difficulty (i want to give the pc a boost, not turn him/her/it into a demigod of rage.) , I can adjust it if the values are too much.

A bit tamer than my last game character creation.
No gif this time though, because I like to keep most of questions hidden as a pleasant surprise.



Now, focusing on porting over my stats engine to this game and configuring it to fit.

[FuriousGamer87]

Alright, progress report time.

Finish designing my isometric tiling and other associated functions to work together.
Also prepared some notes on importance of origin points in isometric projections.
Most of my dev time today is to design a isometric battlefield template so i can easily dump tiles from Photoshop to my Construct 2 arrays very quickly.
This allow me to design the battlefield in Photoshop instead of in Construct 2 layout, which is less convenient



The picture shown is a in-game view of my tutorial battlefield. There are no characters yet. Which will be remedied soon enough.

[FuriousGamer87]

Some progress from the past few days.

Finish creating the female model to represent the females of Casa City.
Can't have the game turn into a sausage party, can't we  ?

The image above is totally not before and after Hanks have a sexual change operations. And those lumps are totally not oranges.

Finish creating the first animation in the game, the walking animation.
This take me a lot of time to get it done and look good in a few frames but I think I succeed in it. Have a look and judge for yourself. 

Not enough ass-shaking but hey this is fighting game, not a modeling one.

I have also finished the chess placement functions for the game, allowing me to place the sprites I have created into the game and onto a battlefield.

Roger, my man. Why in the world do we keep walking in the same spot over and over again?

All in all, that's quite some progress but I still have a lot to do.
Some of my immediate future tasks to complete:

• Finish the stats system and link it to the characters in the battlefield
• Create the battlefield UI so everything's description can be read ala Tactics Ogre style.
• Port over my previous AIs to this game so the enemies can fight back.

[doctor_ebenstedt]

This looks awesome. I like the idea of a tactics game that isn't the usual fantasy RPG theme.

You're building this in Construct 2? I've heard that engine is a bit tricky for these kinds of games. Are you finding that it's working well for you?

[FuriousGamer87]

This looks awesome. I like the idea of a tactics game that isn't the usual fantasy RPG theme.

You're building this in Construct 2? I've heard that engine is a bit tricky for these kinds of games. Are you finding that it's working well for you?

Thanks for your compliment. 


Yes, I am using Construct 2.
Construct 2 is actually fine for this type of game.
The main problem and also the main advantage with Construct 2 is that is an engine which simplify and speed up a lot of game development work.
Why is this a problem?
Because this creates a very low entry barrier allowing people with low programming experience to create games, which is bad in the fact that most of such people not only do they lack understanding of programming languages, they also lack knowledge of game design and programming common sense such as memory management, proper usage of functions, classes and arrays.
Suffice to say, some of this people have ridiculous expectation that also won't work on other engines, such as dropping several hi-def 1080p sprites and expecting the game to work on a old tablet.
Simply put, despite Construct 2 far lower entry barrier than its competitor, it's still isn't a magic software that convert your dreams into the perfect game^TM, much to the chagrin of a lot of people.
It, however, is a good software with a good community, which help speed up a lot of development work, all of which you still need to do  .

[FuriousGamer87]

Progress report for the past week!

For the past weekend, I replay Tactics Ogre and have found several key gameplay issues that irked me. This, of course, helps to improve my gameplay design for this game to ensure those issues, such as the overpowerness of the archer class do not happen.

Also, I have finished the stat system for the game.
I have also finished the level up algorithm, the damage calculation for the game, the skills and abilities system.
All of them are done in excel for easier updating and maintenance since there is a Construct 2 plugin that helps to transfer excel tables in .csv format into arrays quickly and easily.
All there is left is to create the class variables for the characters in the battlefield and it's most of the engine work is pretty much done, at least for the planned demo.

So basically no visual progress..... Sorry for that.

In exchange, let me tell you how I designed the classes (called stereotypes in-game).
If you are familiar with the MMORPG scene or with tabletop gaming, you know in a good party, there would be a tank, a glass cannon, a healer/buffer and a controller. Those are called archetypes and it help the player/group to determine how to better use a specific class in the battle or how to redesign his tactical plan to suit the available classes or lack of in his current party.

For my game, there are several archetypes, each classes usually have a huge part in one while dipping in another one or several. Here are them as they currently are in my spreadsheet:

Tank
Description: Basically stereotypes with high defenses/hp. Most of them have unique mechanics to keep enemies attention to them despite their plans. An example would be Brutes project Intimidating Aura that turn all surrounding tiles around them into difficult terrain which cost more to move into. The size of this aura can be enlarged via appropriate skills.
Stereotype (Major): Brute, Luchador, Firebrand
Stereotype (Minor): Drunk

Glass Cannon
Description: Weaklings with usually low HP/Defenses but possess strong attack abilities. Many have extra mechanics to improve their damage capabilities even further provided appropriate situation. Punks can dealt extra damage to an enemy if the enemy have a prior negative condition on him regardless of how it got there. As usual, this mechanic can be enhanced via skills.
Stereotype (Major): Punk, Provocateur, Smarty Pant, Drunk, Wiseguy
Stereotype (Minor): Brute

Healer
Description: Capable of healing hp damage and removing status effects. They have a unique individual mechanics to improve their healing abilities. Social activist got a point blank level-dependent boost to all their healing abilities.
Stereotype (Major): Social Activist, Dealer
Stereotype (Minor): Rapper, Firebrand, GRO (Guest Relations Officer), Merchant, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

Buffer
Description: Capable of giving positive status effects to friendlies. Their mechanics is designed to help out their mates. The presence of a rapper in the party give "Encouraged" effect to any friendlies who have just took down an enemy for a turn. Needless to said, there are skills to improve on that mechanic.
Stereotype (Major): Rapper, GRO, Merchant
Stereotype (Minor): Provocateur, Firebrand, Social Activist, Dealer, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

Debuffer
Description: Capable of giving negative status effects to enemies. Also push and pull enemies into positions that are always bad for them. There are certain skills that improve debuffing abilities but no mechanics of yet.
Stereotype (Major): Rapper, GRO, Merchant
Stereotype (Minor): Luchador, Brute, Drunk, Smarty Pants, Provocateur, Wiseguy, Dealer, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

And that pretty much what I planned for now.
Only six of these classes will be available in the demo.
Five of those will be available in the player's gang for the demo.

Also, TO-inspired skills points are out for this game as of now. Skills will be obtained through leveling and are given out on the start and at every third level. Also all passive small bonuses skills are out. There are also no must-have skills which is also known in the tabletop gaming as "feat tax".
This is to stop players to only use their battle-hardened skill points heavy characters and make others, especially new characters, also viable for battle usage.
Don't worry, there will be a hideout feature that can change unwanted skills  , provided the character is assigned there until the next mission is over.
I am a tactics gamer first and foremost, after all 


TL,DR : Engine progress for the past week. No visuals, sorry.