next »

[Sub]

It Usually Ends In Nuclear War

• 4x civilization building game in development for Windows and Linux
• Heavily influenced by Civilization II, Alpha Centauri, Call To Power, and Rome Total War.  To a lesser extent Endless Space and the Europa Universalis series
• Currently prealpha
• Design goals.
  
  • Keep microamanagement to a minimum yet allow for larger empires than recent civ games.
  • Not turn based, but rather semi-real time.  When the game is unpaused, turns will occur at a set-interval of roughly one turn every 500 milliseconds
  • Revolutions / collapsable civilizations
  • Interesting end game
• Huge gallery (1000+) of screenshots I've been maintaining throughout the project.
  

Screenshot from October 15, 2017

[DarthBenedict]

I looked through the screenshot gallery and didn't see any nuclear explosions 

Interested in seeing how this progresses.

[Sub]

Thanks for the interest Darth.  For the record, your game looks pretty damn cool.

In news completely unrelated to anything, I made a post on reddit explaining how a Tetris AI I made a while ago works.  Check it out if you're interested.

---

I spent the past few days working on taking my existing code and gutting a lot of functionality that I don't need anymore.  

One of the main things I want to do is show the player the more macro side of history, so I made the decision to increase map size by quite a bit.  The previous maps were 70x75 -- The new maps are 280 x 300.  That's a change from 5,250 tiles to 84,000 tiles. I think if we compare this to the real world it comes out to around 50 miles per tile, but my math might be off on that?  

The old game:



First I increased the number of tiles to 84,000 and decreased the physical size of the tiles (I think they were previously 64x32, now I think they're 16x8?)

My game has a boolean value where I can turn tile textures on / off.  I decided to turn textures off, as the new tiles are much too small for it to make sense.

I had a pseudo 3d effect (was trying to go for something akin to alpha centauri) in the old game which doesn't work so well with this new set up.  The screenshot above is actually the first attempt I made to scale it down, because it looked even more ridiculous than that.  The second try was much more reasonable:



Decided to get rid of the ocean floor. I never really did quite like the way it looked:



I think around this point I decided to get rid of the tile height completely.  It can be turned back on by uncommenting one line, but I think it's for the best with it off.'

The zoomed out view shows that the map generation algorithm needs some tweaking.  It's designed to work on much smaller map sizes (5250 tiles vs 84000!)


I didn't want to create a new algorithm for generating maps.  I decided that the easiest solution would be to generate a map for the old map size of 5250, and then just scale it up to a larger map size.  The map is scaled up by a factor of 4 compared to the old one, so I'm basically just treating every one tile in the old map generation algorithm as a group of 4x4 tiles in the new map.  


Whew it compiled!  But it didn't quite work...




Closer, but what the hell is going on with the water and the topright side of the map?



Fixed the water, but something still isn't quite right.  I am happy at this point, though, because the general theory I had seems like it'll work.



There we go.  



Now I just need to make the shoreline not so rigid..

Whoops:


Better...



So that's going to be the default camera view.  Conveying information with such a high view is going to be a bit of a problem.  I need to figure out how to display the locations of cities, as well as nation borders.  I think maybe having a red outline around tiles with cities might be the way to go.  I tested it out by randomly outlining tiles here, but I'm going to sleep on it:


I'm thinking if you mouse over a tile with a red outline, maybe a tool-tip like popup will appear with the city name and some more information.


Also tested to see how bad the height looks if it's turned on again:


Pretty sure I'm going to leave it off as it clutters the game.  

Tomorrow I'm going to work on the generation of tile types since that's still using the algorithm designed for small maps.  For the record, though, the tan tiles are desert, white tiles are ice, and the green tiles are grassland.  

I'm also going to work on adding in rivers to the game.  I'm hoping to start and finish both of those things tomorrow.  

If anyone made it this far, let me know what you think.  Also let me know if I used too many pictures, I'm afraid that it's going to be a pain to load for people with slower internet.

[agersant]

I like it better with the height on. Inspiring work regardless =)

[Gear]

Maybe it's not the height but the dark grid lines?

[Sub]

Yeah, maybe.  The grid lines in those pictures are 0, 0, 0, 40 (rgba)

This is 250, 250, 250, 40



Looks pretty bad if we remove the transparency



No grid lines seems to be pretty interesting, although I'm not sure if it looks good?




Lighter grid lines?  This is 40, 40, 40, 20 -- so turned up rgb, and turned down alpha



I think that looks a bit better.  The lines might as well be invisible if I go above 80. 

I'm still not sure if I should leave the height in though.  I've been staring at this project for so long that it's hard to know.

[Netsu]

The height thing looks better, but if it's important to be able to tell how everything fits on the grid (for planning moves or sth) then I think it's more readable without it.

[dhondon]

I would go for the 40, 40, 40, 20.

This looks like a cool game

[Sub]

I've been busy with moving, getting a job, and life in general.  In news completely unrelated to anything, I saw this post making its way around the internet and decided to give it a try.  I made an attempt at it, and, well, I love what you can do with computers.

As for the topic at hand, I haven't done too much with this since the last update.  I did get a chance to play around with tile type generation this weekend, though.  

I'm not sure if what I've come up with is embarrassingly bad, but I'm going to show it regardless.  The current thinking is that there's going to be 4 discrete tile types -- Desert (represented by tan tiles), Ice (represented by white tiles), Grassland (represented by light green tiles), and forest (represented by dark green tiles).  Tile types are going to effect food output, the culture that develops in cities, and resource distribution (ie: oil being more likely in desert / ice areas).  





I'm open to any suggestions on how to make it look better.  

[Gear]

Maybe grass tiles that are adjacent to water can have a small chance of being a desert tile?

[Sub]

To simulate shorelines?  I'm not sure how high of a chance you were thinking, but I tried a few different frequencies and they didn't look too good.  This is near 100%.  Maybe if I blended it a bit with the neighboring tiles.

That's also modifying the entire tile color.  I could change the individual vertices color for the points which are bordering the water.  It'll then smoothly interpolate between the colors, but that wouldn't be that trivial to do, and I'm not even sure if it would look nice.  I'll look into it though.

[Gear]

When you say it didn't look good, do you mean there were small patches of beach scattered along the coast? In that case maybe you could set "shore seeds" and have them spread along the coast(or tiles that are shore candidates)?

[Sub]

It just didn't look like shorelines.  I suspect something like the shore seed idea you have would look quite a bit better, but I think I'm going to move on from tile type generation for now.  

New update!
I participated in Screenshot Saturday on reddit this week.  This was my submission:




In other news, the game was mentioned on Rock Paper Shotgun.  How fucking cool is that?  It honestly made my day, and I'm still coming down from it.

In actual development news, I'd say that I've been working on tile type generation (adding deserts / ice / forests to the world instead of it consisting of just ocean and grassland) the past few weeks.  It was like two solid weeks of failure, followed by something I was semi happy with (the screens in the last update), followed again with something that I'm happy enough with for now but need to eventually improve (the screens in this post).  

I'm now working on finishing up the game design.  It's been a huge struggle to come up with a design that I'm happy with.  I feel like I'm capable of programming whatever design I come up with, but coming up with the actual design has seemed hopeless at times.  To give some perspective, at one point I decided to move onto a new project because I couldn't come up with anything that I liked.  And that's with a design document filled with about 4,000 lines of ideas.

Which makes it all the more satisfying that I think I've finally come up with something which will be interesting and worthwhile.  I've had a general idea of what I wanted to do for a few months now, but it's been an abstract idea in my mind until tonight.  The design still needs a bit of polish before I post about how it'll play.  I'm hoping next update I'll get into it, most likely with some screens of a super early version being played.  I can't guarantee that anyone else will enjoy what the game will be, but I think it's cool and that's good enough for me.

[Sub]

It could use a rewrite, but I’ve made a very rough and hastily put together general overview of what It Always Ends In Nuclear War is going to be. It has all nitty gritty details stripped away.

In other news, I recently moved into a new apartment, which took up a bit of my free time, but I'm all settled now and back to working on this game in my spare time.  I've started a system in which I assign myself weekly tasks, and it seems to be a good mechanism to keep myself motivated and on track.  These are pretty specific tasks that I think I can reasonably accomplish in a given week (ie:  This week one of my tasks was to finish a basic version of a dialog box gui widget).  

I'm going to be experimenting with a milestone system, too, which I think will also help out with keeping me motivated and on track.  The current thinking is that at the beginning of every month, I'll create an overview of features which I'd like to be completed at the end of the month, and I'll designate this with a version number.  This month I'm hoping to have a very basic version of the game playable, which I'm going to be designating alpha 0.1.  Here's the list of features for this month.

The past week or two I've been working on creating some simple GUI widgets, and a general structure for which to manage the game's gui system.  The widgets are going to be pretty ugly for a while, because I don't particularly care about that at the moment, but code wise I think the system I came up with makes a lot of sense, and will be easy enough to work with.  

I think that's about all for now.

[Sub]

Creeping slowly toward playability...

[bleek]

Looks great! I really like ant-hill type games and this looks promising. It will be very interesting to watch the different nations and peoples interact. If a people has been subjugated, can the player still set government types and policies for them?

[Sub]

Thanks! 

I'm not quite sure how much control you're gong to have in that situation.  Ideally you'd have very little, but that might be too frustrating from a users point of view. 

[Sub]

I’m still working on this.  I admittedly don’t have much progress to show at the moment, but I am putting in a great deal of time and effort.   The hard part is coming up with a design that I like



Graphically I like the direction I’m headed, but there’s definitely something not quite right about it. I’m about as far from an artist as one can possibly get, so I think what I’ve done so far is pretty good, but like I said, it’s still not there yet. As you can see, the current thinking is that the entire game is going to have a textureless look, possibly even going as far as to have no sprites or external images used at all. This serves a dual purpose - It takes some pressure off of me having to somehow get high quality art assets, and I also think it gives off a unique stylistic vibe.

Hopefully I’ll have some actual progress to report soon.

[Sub]

Happy new year!  Let's get to it.

The Civilization series used to have a flaw in that the minimap would reveal exactly where you were on the map.  It wasn't a huge deal, but it could be abused in some situations.  For example, if you spawned near the top of the map, you'd be able to see that and plan accordingly.  Scouts would be sent south, settlers would be sent south, and no time would be wasted exploring the north of the map.  I'm not sure what version of Civilization fixed this, but it was fixed by having the minimap zoom in to fit the area explored.   

I'd like to have that same need for exploration in IAEINW.  You should have to explore or look at the terrain type to figure out where you are on the map.  Up until today, however, you were able to abuse the sides of the map to figure out where you were in the world.  Check out this old screenshot to see what I mean.



A few months back I sort of fixed it by only drawing a side of the map if a player discovered a tile on that edge of the map, but this wasn't perfect.  The entire side was still drawn, so you could gauge exactly how large the map was and where you were in it once you discovered one edge.  I've been wanting to fix this for a while now, and today I finally got around to it.  I'm now only drawing the edges of the map between the furthest explored reaches of the edge.  Check it out to see what I mean







There are more important things I could be working on, but it's the little things that make me happy.  And as an aside, I think I've now got all the pathfinding stuff worked out.

[Sub]

I worked a bit today on the code for getting armies (units) working, and then got bored of that and decided to get the game up and running on Linux.  Cross platform libraries are crazy -- It basically worked out of the box.  



The low FPS is from the screenshot program freezing everything.