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[Spoilercat]

Gambit

Hello all, thanks for stopping in! This devlog is devoted to Gambit, which I've been working on solo for the past seven months. Gambit is a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.


(Above: Explosion ability in action.)

Gambit emphasizes anticipating the opponent's actions and controlling the battlefield. In this screenshot the blue team uses the blockage ability to prevent an enemy from attacking from behind...


But the red team's character uses its own ability to create a fire to force out the enemy.



There is a light RPG mechanic of creating characters out of parts which have various statistics.




For anyone curious about the tools/languages, Gambit is written entirely in Objective-C, and uses OpenGL ES 2.0 in a not-quite-game-engine I wrote for this game. I wrote my code to load in OBJ and COLLADA files.

On the graphics side, I use Blender for inanimate objects (apart from the maps, whose geometry is generated either randomly or from text files specifying heights of each cell) and animation. For modeling the characters I use Zbrush. Yes, Zbrush for low poly art. I am a terrible person.

The game mechanics are basically done, though the art and UI could use some work, and I still have yet to make any music or sound effects. I'll be working on that, as well as the multiplayer and maybe better AI in the coming weeks.

[Spoilercat]

I've been busy with GameKit Integration for the past week... Using GameKit Turn Based Matches has the advantage that players can drop and pick up a match at any time, but that comes with the disadvantage that.... Players can drop and pick up a match at any time, so I need to be able to reload a match from any point, including map selection or deployment.

Deployment is actually a new stage of the battle. Before, the player's units just spawned in a line in whatever order Core Data fetched them. Now, the player can set the turn order.



And below, the result. Its the same army on both sides, so the names are the same.

[Belimoth]

Stylish!

[Spoilercat]

Haven't gotten a lot of work done recently. GameKit continues to be a major headache. I jumped in without thinking through all the cases that there could be, and since a lot of things can't happen without the animation playing I am currently in the deepest pit of callback hell. I have learned a valuable lesson though: never, ever, ever, mix business logic and UI code, no matter how superficial and innocuous it seems or much easier it makes things in the short term.

One of the problems is that certain UI elements use key-value-encoding of properties directly to change what UI they are displaying, and that has created scenarios where I have to hold off on modifying that property's value in the game logic till the UI catches up to it... its a Very Bad Thing. I've run out of scenarios where I can create desyncs between the two players in a match though, so that's something... it might be done. 

I do have a new asset for the Wildfire ability that looks more like a fire, and a new, diametrically opposed ability: "Heal Aura." The player can put a heal aura on a square to restore 20 hit points per turn, making certain positions even more desirable and hopefully leading to even more intense conflicts over those particular squares.



The heal aura. Was trying for a pool of water type thing. That's the best I could come up with the symbolize healing. The animation is a ripple. I might make it more circular, I think it comes off as more like foil of some sort right now.



The new wildfire is taller. Looks better in motion.
I've also been thinking a lot about what sort of AI I want. I've had a number of classes on the subject, but none of the techniques I learned there seem to be easily applicable. I don't think I can use a chess-bot type AI here because the number of possible moves per character per turn is just too massive.

[Spoilercat]

Added a bunch of new animation sets. What animations the characters have are related to their stats, so a player with experience can figure out what a character is built for by looking at them.

Theres also a new background, but I'm not sure if I'll keep it.

[Spoilercat]

Working on a new style to replace the solid grey backgrounds in the UI. The lattice ripples back and forth, but I can't get imgur to upload my gifs, so still images it is.



I'm not happy about the edges, which kinda look weird in motion, or the readability of of the labels.

Old version below

Okay, really old version -- it has no shadows in the environment and a grey background.