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[Ikkir_]

Announcement: Public alpha demo now available at https://goldenshovelgames.itch.io/missile-comrade
(current version: .476)
(Notes: have some complaints about the Ux, notably the launch button not working immediately and cards not draggable to choose - to ready up, turn the key, and cards when you first open the menu are the 'base' cards and you choose below. Changes coming soon!)


Hello everyone, Ikkir here. I've been working on a game on and off for awhile now, and decided its a good a time as any to get started with a devlog!


We are Golden Shovel Games, a small group of ~3 developers (1 ~fulltime [with distractions]) and a handful of contractors,  and the name of the game we are making is Missile Comrade. No crowdfunding, no venture funding, no publisher, nothing but us, a severely underfunded development, and a few copies of Unity, hoping to show how to make things that are better than your typical shovelware. Go Team!  

Missile Comrade is a multiplayer missile-defense type game with zany commanders, lots of explosions, crazy powers, and a storymode with said zany commanders making bad decisions and having things escalate to insanity. Our story follows these commanders on both sides as the war quickly goes down the path of Mutually Assured Destruction... and it gets weird from there (with influence from the current political climate as well as the great classic, Dr. Strangelove). For gameplay, we of course take a lot of influence from the original Missile Command, some of its offshoots, and also from other games like Advance Wars!

(Also: remake an old game, they said. Pick something early and it will be easy to make, they said. Hereforth also is a story on how you make something simple incredibly complicated)

I am posting some of our latest progress on twitter at https://twitter.com/Ikkir_Isth
You can also follow our company account at https://twitter.com/goldshovelgames
And our facebook at https://www.facebook.com/GoldenShovelGames
(I've really just started posting stuff on these, expect quick, in-dev stuff at my personal one with more things like character portraits or story overviews at the company ones)

Here is some of the latest images (updated on new posts)

Latest: actual terrain!

Actual gameplay (first video!)



The glorious titlescreen, with an analogue-esque UI


The latest fruits of labor: working on arcade mode UI and powers and multiplayer functionality.  When powers combine together perfectly, the result is glorious.


Also, full transition from titlescreen to arcade mode, for single, coop, or coopvs!


Now with some panel art for non-active players. Also, some UI arranging for VS!


You can find more info about the card system in the next post, with samples of card powers and an explanation of how the card system works.
Also, you can find some of the older dev info in the post Here

We are also looking to get a private demo out sometime by march, and a public one soon after that, so stay tuned for fun!

[Ikkir_]

Ok folks, heres where I go over how cards / powers in Missile Comrade works!

First of all, right off the bat: there are no lootcrates or purchasable cards or anything like that: we are making an entire game, not a casino / p2win storefront. All card/powers are something players earn in game by actually playing the game, with rewards for finishing story missions and doing well in arcade mode!

How the card system actually works:
Cards in Missile Comrade are meant to represent actions taken in the course of war, and have a cost to select from draw: think of them as semi-randomized budgeted powerups. You earn war funds by being able to save missiles in stock each round, and also (mostly) by preserving your cities (and you can also gain funds in a few special ways, notably with cards).  The cards themselves have specific types-

Defense: Things that influence the battlefield directly, whether launching interceptors or causing missiles themselves to have extra immediate effects.
Escalation: Wildcards that do a myriad of functions, but also make the enemy more difficult in some way. These represent the desperate actions taken in the course of war that then get reciprocated. Use with caution!
Commander/Comrade: These cards represent actions taken by individual Commanders/Comrades themselves, and may involve getting into the field and throwing missiles themselves, launching themselves into the air, or simply shouting the missiles down themselves. It is a game about mad commanders, after all! (warning: one commander might actually be competent!).  You control one commander at a time and only can play their specific cards.
Armament: Increasing your missile stocks, putting a factory in your city, long term missile and gameplay buffs, defense shields, etc.  These are longer term effects that build up over time, and are absolutely necessary to survive in the long run!

In short, we have the DECA cards system. Defense, Escalation, Commander/Comrade, and Armament.  Select which ones you bring to the battlefield carefully! There are also faction specific cards, like the Fourth of July for America, or the Iron Curtain for Russia. Since the most distinctive cards are going to be Commander/Comrade cards, let me just show off some (early) examples of what those are going to be like!

First, one of the earlier commander powers we made was the Disco ball, to fit the personality of the American Disco Scientist.  Right now, the model itself is pending a rework (like just about everything, dear art pass, please come soon!) but the effect is pretty solid: place up to 3 disco balls on the battlefield that wreak mayhem with colored beams of light with various effects: pulling, pushing, slowing, damage, etc. These disco balls persist thru many rounds, but are vulnerable themselves to repeat missile fire.


Then, a commander power with a missile effect: the Matryoskha Missiles, for the Russian Missile Engineer.  This power causes your missiles to pop out smaller offshoots on death that target random nearby locations, causing quite a bit of mayhem on the screen!  This power combines with other missile effect powers quite well, so if you are able to join it to a power that doubles your missiles fired, or one that causes missiles to have effects on explosion, you can boost its effect tremendously!


After that, we have the Roundup power, from great American Ex President.  This power is a true hands-on power, requiring a quick hand and some good eyes to quickly clear the battlefield.  Since you don't have to fire missiles during this power, you can save and stock up, or use it to save your own hide if you are in danger!


Last, we have the power of Sputnik, the original "Russian spy satellite", from the lovable Russian Spy character.  Summon the power of Sputnik to have it make several revolutions around the planet, blowing up incoming missiles with the power of electronic warfare chain lightning.  This power also targets missiles as they are enroute, which can save you from firing at missiles that are on field that were about to be destroyed by Sputnik as well! The power Sputnik is, of course, not unlimited, and it will eventually crash into the ocean after a certain number of revolutions, but the satellite does at least maintain its power between rounds if it has any orbit left.


Overall, there are 10 commanders in total, and each of them have a myriad number of Commander powers to fit their personality / playstyle, so theres going to be plenty of options and very, very silly amounts of explosions.

[Ikkir_]

(Warning: Really ugly initial commit and early WIP stuff follows!)
Here, we have the humble beginnings.  When I signed up to the project, here is what we had - a simple, somewhat functional cramped screen that was initially setup to be something like a 'mobile-esque' view with incredibly simple gameplay.  Also, have the first really quickie titlescreen I setup for it at the time.




Immediately, I worked on opening up the gameplay area, after discussions about release platforms, viewable area, and in general, gameplay look and feel.  Some quickie prefab cubes rotated around and a water standard asset later:



After quite a bit of work getting arcade opened up, I started working on our expected dialogue system for our story mode, and story gameplay scenes.  Here is what would be the initial -story dialogue scene- look  (also, before I set up the canvas properly!)



In addition to the pure story scenes, I needed to setup gameplay-with-story scenes as well, plus choose which scene would be going at any time (and keep records of completion).  Here is some intitial story-gameplay testing and a really quick selection scene (with a line drawing to the next available scene, think of how Trauma Center scene selection works here)




After that it was back to arcade and getting our powers/cards system working properly.  Our initial system had a handful of general cards available that would do simple things like increase explosion radius, fire rate, etc.



Once that was done, it was time to start on the dreaded multiplayer stuff.  First of all, I had to setup the scene so that it actually spawned in cities and said spawnlocations could be moved, or a coop set could be chosen from instead (with positions for cities and launchers different for 1 or 2p).  In addition, I got a simple VS mode setup as well, with players on each side and a little barrier in the middle where cursors could not pass.  In this mode, if you shot down a missile on your screen, the mirrored missile enroute would disappear on the other screen as well (with your offensive mirrored missiles appearing to the sides and mimicing the routes to the opponent, yay for fakery).
Also during this time: working with the dreaded Unity networking (specifically, the new network transport stuff).  Do you know whats not fun? Little documentation and straight up broken stuff after all that necessitated a version upgrade anyway!




After the !fun! that was multiplayer and networking, I went back to the UI and mocked out something a bit more appropriate.  I decided we needed a little 'folder' thing for our rounds menu UI, in order for it to look more like its one of those 'Top Secret' folders with various things inside.  We also did some work on our title screen (included is a picture of the super cool concept art I drew up) and had an initial deck management scene for our card system.






While we were doing UI, we had the conundrum of how we were going to do the selection of our Commanders / Comrades. In this, we went thru a LOT of little ideas about how to present the character selection menu.  I sort of left it at this for awhile.




With that, I did a looot of work on various card powers and having a decent selection for each commander, etc. After those though, it was time to get down to brass tacks and do a crapton of work on getting the 'actual' story first stage done.  Whew, this took awhile: so much scripting and changing of things due to unexpected concerns.  What resulted was some pretty neat stuff though!  We have now a full tutorial + segway into the first stage, some dialogue that branches depending on what you do, in-game options, and a lot of jokes.  While I'm sure we will replace a bunch of the models / looks and all that later during the next art pass, overall its all playable!







With the first story stage playable, I went back to our titlescreen and started our first REAL UI pass, working out the character select and, in general, how the entire UI should really look at all. During making the story stage I had decided I liked having something that looked like one of those old, green terminal monitor things for UI, and it hit me at this time to just make the entire UI like the old missile command terminals/stations/etc.  Which means... analog UI and a whole lot of neat stuff.  This also started on the character panel stuff as well, for selecting which characters for each side for arcade mode.




During a lot of this there was just so much setup and arting / scripting to make it all come together.  I also had to basically make my own button class and interactions to make the buttons work how I wanted them to... and to also make them multiplayer cursor compatible (pretty much nothing Unity has is easily setup for this kind of multiplayer access, especially UI).  Note: I made the little pop-panel thing by rotoscoping a simple blender model to an animated sprite.



With more work into how multiplayer UI would work, I was at the point in the character select menu where I needed to figure out how players would join, select teams, and all that fun stuff.  Since I was already in the 'analog UI' mode I decided to keep it the same, with plugging in controllers to which player they would control (in addition to the start button thing working and all that).  This would allow easy choosing of which team/character a player would control and at the same time allow controllers to go 'inbetween' and enter 2 players 1 controller mode.  (Not pictured: an insane amount of controller work to get this all to actually work)




Since I was pretty happy with how the title screen was working I went back to the arcade mode and, since I basiclly needed to change all my UI around to the new button system, started ripping things out and making everything work again.  My new buttons basically have it all: players they respond to and dont, onHighlight, onExit, onClick, onUnclick, in-editor and easy in-script function pointering/delegates/whatnot, etc. (Its all a lot more exciting than it looks, I swear!)



Still in UI mode: its time to get this arcade mode looking fancy (and to, of course, work in all multiplayer modes as well!).  After some general resizing and dummying out the UI, I think I've gotten something that will work for both vs mode and normal/coop mode.  Plus, stuff actually works now for both players so thats pretty damn awesome.




And here we are, where I am at at the current time of writing: getting all this UI fancy smancy stuff and all working.  It feels good when everything just works! Also, I have to go change some of the powers I had made previously so they play nice in multiplayer too, so theres that.

[Ikkir_]

So I was looking at our explosions and thinking: "these really could be better" and decided to finally remove the red orbs of doom and turn them into proper explosions! And since I was already improving the explosions, the missile trails went from yellow-snot trails to actual-smoke trails.  Just a little bit of work improves the whole thing tremendously, I dare say.



I've also got the smoke trails for each player slightly tinged toward the cursor colors by taking said cursor colors and desaturating them a bit (towards white) for the ever-so-slight effect to show which player fired any missile.

Other than the little graphical change, I've been doing some pretty large refactor + fixing powers to properly work for all players in all multiplayer modes.  Its nice when you can refactor a script to a third of the original size!  Now though... back to the grindstone - gotta get the titlescreen with however many players properly transitioning to arcade mode with proper coop / vs setting!

[Ikkir_]

With working powers and mostly working UI for normal/coop, its now time to get the UI/powers and all that done for vs mode!  Before that though... I wanted to get true, proper transitions from title to arcade in (or maybe back in? I had some different ones hardcoded before for various modes, but I needed one that automatically got the active players and set proper controls and spawned proper terrain and placed cities/turrets properly for all situations. Hell, I still need to actually truly set chosen Commanders for each player and change available cards and all that too!).


I will probably have terrain select (among other things), and something other than the insta-load-start later, but hey, speed is good now.  Also, I need more hands: playing 2 players, let alone 3 is a pain in the butt! I might have to learn to play a controller with my toes so I can test 4 players at once properly.

[Ikkir_]

Whew, been awhile since I was actually able to work on this thing, between sickness, distractions, broken down cars, and other things.  In any case, I was working on Coop / VS UI stuff before being, well, not working on it, so decided to get back into things by getting flow from title to arcade working (and lots of little bug fixes, and maybe a few new bugs while I was at it).

Ok ok, heres a gameplay video. First one, in fact!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41fiTzNM9Cw&feature=youtu.be

While more or less all the cards work for however many players at the moment theres still a few nagging issues to sort thru.  Its good to start work again at least, maybe I can get the fabled 'demo' ready soon!

[Ninjalemur]

This is cool but you might want your ship to look less like a giant, flying penis. 

[Ikkir_]

This is cool but you might want your ship to look less like a giant, flying penis. 

Giant flying penises need exposure as well! Oh, I think I'm on a list now.

Anyway, quite a few of the models are placeholders anyway (like, say, random shapes mashed together in the editor for some even). After dicking around with the models later they should be less dickery.

[Ikkir_]

Whew, got busy / distracted for a week and some change (Tip: don't play Elona+ if you want to get stuff done) but managed to pull myself together and get back to working on stuff.

Mostly been doing a lot of boring UI anchoring and stuff, but I've gotten most of it done now and now have UI that works in all the common aspect ratios, yay! 

More than that though, I've gotten WebGL builds working. 


I've just got a few more things to go now in order to get a demo working.  Just a little, more... UI...
(and also doing some stuff to the default WebGL page to make it more snazzy)

[Ikkir_]

Whew, been awhile since I've had enough to be able to post, grumble grumble UI housekeeping grumble. Anyway...
Got basically all of the UI framework for Coop and VS modes in now, and general support for all the major aspect ratios! I can even change them while the game is running, huzzah! 



I also had been doing some art practice for 3d modeling and pixelart (you can checkout those at my Twitter and decided I could just make some panel art for the unused player space for an inactive player.

You can see it in game here:


I also had to go thru a lot of housekeeping to get all the VS stuff working properly for each player; score, funds, card selections that I somehow missed, powers, and of course the rounds menu itself.  Here you can see 1 vs 2, and the single player getting all the score / funds for the cities while the 2 player team has it split between them.


Speaking of getting powers to work for both sides, the more !fun! one I had involved the one titled: From Russia, With Love.  This power charms incoming missiles and sends them back the way they came.

The real problem though was its not as simple as just a camera on one continent and a camera on another... to get the same look and gameplay I actually offset the playfield and then duplicate the terrain/setup/etc with an offset camera... this means that if I want to have missiles on one side have direct representation from the other I have to do quirky things with shadow-clones.   I ended up having, effectively, the roles of each missile-clone pair swap as soon as the primary missile is hit with charm.

There are some other powers that reroute missiles, but none as directly gamechanging as this one: I'll probably need to go over the others to make sure they show missiles getting deflected or confused or however else stuff is happening on the far side but it should be much much easier now.

Anyway, I'm going to go back and have player character choices actually matter now: change portraits, change the commander cards, etc, and then get a proper WebGL demo built once all the little stuff is taken care of.

[Ikkir_]

Whew, so little time, so much to do.

Anyway... I worked on the UI around the frames a bit more to make things look a bit better.
Note: Pending a Title/Logo redo based on advice I've gotten



This gives the UI a more uniform look now (and I have modified images / scaling to make things work for other resolutions as well).

Meanwhile, I'm starting work on the card selection on the title screen.



Had to implement scrolling functionality via holding down a press in my UI buttons. Thankfully, I had already ditched the default Unity button in lieu of my own, so that only took 20 minutes to do.

So far, my thoughts on actually fleshing out the commanders is as such:
Each commander has some passive stats that modify some basic stuff. Like, say, explosions are 10% bigger, or fire rate is 5% faster, or maybe they start with an extra missile, etc.
In addition, theres also going to be some special quirks as well.  Like, say, drawing an extra card when the escalation level raises (which can raise by escalation cards or by set time periods), or drawing a card from the discard pile on certain occasions, etc.

With this in mind, I'm probably going to change how the cards actually draw in game: right now, they draw and you choose which ones to buy and pay the cost up front.  I will probably change it so its more like a typical card game, with drawing and spending to play instead.  This means I could more easily have other resources spend as well, like having a card burn a missile as well to play, etc.

I'm also looking into ways for the player to grow their deck as they play.  Full disclosure here: I've watched a lot of Slay the Spire gameplay and think the way cards are done there are pretty brilliant, so working on ways to earn extra cards from available cards and also unlocking new cards as you go to continue building your opening deck + getting new options thru play.  Right now though, gotta do some maintenance on our deck system to fully support full CCG stuff, and it probably won't make it to the demo.

Speaking of demo... currently on branch - DemoPrep.  It is coming....

[Ikkir_]

Happy after 4th of July recovery everyone! (I was going to make a post on the 4th here but got random family timed instead! Ah... holidays...)

Anyway, we have a public alpha demo now available up on itch.io!
https://goldenshovelgames.itch.io/missile-comrade

Please check it out and see what you think! Known issues listed below on page.

(will add a bunch of stuff that actually got added/worked on in next post later, soon as I have time!)

[Ikkir_]

Ok here we go:
Other than, of course, fixing darn near everything I could handle before pushing the demo, I've been working on some of the core visual necessities.  Namely, a visual for missiles remaining and visual damage to buildings.  Also, turbo mode (and turtle mode) because why not... plus escalation actually works now, and a little news ticker informs you of escalation changes and other things. To-do: improving the newscaster system to let you know what happens on escalation, plus putting in other random news messages.



In addition, I've gone back to the cards and modified the card template a bit to give text a LOT more room, and, in general, increase the card size (and text size) so that its much more readable. Did I mention you can buy cards during "peace talks" now? How about relics? Well, relic, I've got one, but its there and it counts!



I've also streamlined the titlescreen cards a bit and, in general, improved it: cards more visible helps a lot, of course, but you can also push joystick / keyboard buttons to instantly move card selection left/right or scroll up/down, or select/unselect, making things a lot faster.



Next thing I'm going to hit is the rest of the card visuals in the rounds menu: going to get rid of the cards in the hand at the bottom and bring that up into the folder, plus have tabs for each player to keep track of discards, exhausts, and cards still in the deck.

(Also, I'm really digging into heavily theming our itch.io page now, liking my options so far.  Gonna need to look into replacing that font though, where possible.)

[Ikkir_]

So much done lately! Heres what I've been working on: terrain and launcher improvements!



The launcher itself is a mostly simple model with a few damage level models to show damage taken.  The main thing I was going for with this was the ability to show reloading in progress and to make the missile launch dynamics look a bit better: they launch based on launcher rotation and then go on their merry way, speeding up as they go (which works in most situations).  I still have little placeholder 'ammo missiles' on the sides that need to be worked on though, but for now they serve their purpose.

I decided to model a better terrain base than the 'random blocks' I had been using before in Blender.
Since I was going to be going back and forth a lot, the 'save copy' button in Blender really helps
(saving the direct .blend file to the project folder for automatic re-import).  I also made a one-button-setup
script to grab all the positioning information for city spawns and various crater positions so that each iteration
only took the time it takes for Unity to re-import. (~5 seconds)


Each (well, at first anyway) crater is made by using an icosphere and duplicating the base terrain and using a binary modifier to create the crater top.  After I started looking at actual looks in game and trimming out triangles though, really most of the craters just didn't need that many faces, so I simply trimmed out everything except the edges and a point in the middle + UV map. I can still probably trim a bunch more though.




Grass itself is fairly simple, and placed purely via scripting (make a region with gameobject plus box collider, then place them at div/length parts from each other, then raycast down to mesh colliders on crater tops / terrain, then move slightly up. Trees done the same way, with both ignoring city locations).Theres two different prefabs (with instancing selected) all from the same texture for a base and 4 strands (1 with sunflowers for the yellow texturing, the other simple green strands), plus a few 'charred' images for various burned states.  I plan to have some misc smoking / fires as well later. Trees right now are simply sprites made from using speedtree and cropped out/shrunk, will add charred / on fire states to them later as well.

I'm probably going to add some simple destructible roads between cities as well (and simple traffic).  So far everything is only ever checked on any time an explosion starts to shrink, and all from set arrays of objects: no checking collision every frame on grass or anything like that (they dont even have colliders on them).  I can optimize further if necessary: region packing by X values, etc.

Then... I'll probably finally remove the default 'Unity blue' background, add some clouds, put some stuff on the far continent, etc.  So much to do in order to make stuff visually interesting.  I still need to go back to the titlescreen too in order to improve the Ux; had complaints of the 'launch' button not working and it being the first thing people see, and immediately opening the cards menu up and dragging not working, etc.