What if the round blobs that make up the leaves were to be more dithered, around the edges maybe? I think it'd look more detailed. Also, I've never been a fan of this shade of green for trees, but it's pretty common in games. To me it looks more like greenish teal. Definitely nothing I've seen in nature. It probably depends on the background and other colors around it but I think it should be a bit greener. The overall tree and the trunk especially are sweeeet!

Thank you very much

Do you need to click End Turn every time you run out of moves? If so, it'd be more convenient to automatically end the players turn or have a popup or hotkey for to move to the next turn, just to streamline things when you're just trying to walk or sail.

I thought about it. Automatically ending the turn doesn't quite work because you can several characters to control. There's no way to tell if the character you're moving should end the turn after it has done its thing or if you want to move around with the others as well. I'm really used to pressing the E key so there's rarely any slowdown when moving for several turns. What if there was togglable option for a short countdown timer (2-3 seconds maybe), so when you complete the move and don't switch to another character (which cancels it), the turn is ended.

Also, will there be any way to traverse treelines? I think it'd be cool if you could maybe move through trees, but it'd consume more moves. Are you planning on having people walk through trees, or just chop them down to move through.

At first I considered trees impenetrable when not cut down, but slowing down the movement trough it (should cost 2-4 moves perhaps, depending on the density) makes sense too. And of course, you will have axes and stuff to chop down the trees. The slowdown in movement was planned for swampland and such from day one actually.

And finally, are you planning on animating more things than just the boat and water, like the people (walking) and trees? At that one point in the song where it sounds like wind, I was really in the mood to see the trees rustle or sway.

Yes, of course. It's just that animation is really not my thing. With characters on such a small scale it shouldn't be too difficult, as there's only so many pixels to push around, but the trees and such are probably quite challenging. I spend ages just trying to draw the darn things.

I'm loving the UI. Especially the border detail of the highscore name entering window. Adds a lot to it. The only thing slightly bothering me is the selection highlighter in the list. I'd wish there was a tiny space between the selector background and the next label. Anyway, keep up the good work!

I put on a hat just so I could take it off.

Mommy!

On the map, you shouldn't be able to see any further than the areas you've explored. I'm not sure if the map should be generated automatically or not. One idea is that you pick the character with cartography skills and then click "draw up map" and it draws up a piece of map in a certain radius of the character. That would get tedious I think. A better solution would be that the map drawing happens automatically but it takes time, so you need to stay in one area for a while. The longer you stay put, the more accurate the map is. How accurate the map should be and if it's even needed at all is up to the player.

cartography

MY WALLETS

I shall not be held accountable for features that might not be implemented in the end.

I just need a pretty way to represent the map, also something that would make deforming it inaccurate easy. Verticessomethingsomething probably. We'll see.

Works for me on windows 7. Fun just poking around in it! Hard to give feedback now as there isn't much to do but looking forward to more of the game.

Thanks, actual stuff to do is coming soon. Things can only get better from now on (not so famous last words )

Something that annoyed me alot is that map isn't scaled

The map is mostly for debugging atm. Eventually it will be much larger, scrollable (if needed) and only discovered areas will be shown. Also, cartography will come into play, so depending on the mapping skills, the map is either accurate or distorted.

I made a party of 4 people, disembarked one and had him walk around 'till he died.
I then couldn't do anything, is there a button to go back to controlling the ship?

Sorry, I should've given some instructions. You can switch between characters by either pressing the TAB key or clicking on the name in the sidebar. A list then pops up.

[E]

Try out the tech demo!

Download here (Windows)

You can't do much but you can get a feel for the game, although the world is really empty so really, you don't. Oh well. On to first order of business. Does it run? Any DLL file missing?

There are plenty of issues that I'm aware of, such as you can build a camp at any distance from your position and sometimes when you want to board the ship, it does so instantly without traveling to the ship first (if you are away). No eating and drinking yet. No inventory. Just you wandering around and potentially dying if you don't rest somewhere.

All kinds of feedback is welcome. And I'm scared now, because it's out there

How to play

* Move around the map by either using the arrow keys or WASD
* You can switch between characters by either pressing the TAB key or clicking on the name in the sidebar. A list then pops up.
* To open the actions menu, you can choose it from the menubar or by right clicking on the game area.
* Shortcut key for ending the turn is E

Depends on how you handle your Object position and how you manage your Camera/Viewport. I keep the objects positions unscaled and multiply them just before drawing since my viewport positions are scaled.

I might get around to unifying and re-writing that part eventually.

EDIT: also can you overlay sprites on top of eachother and display them all at once as only one sprite

If you mean batching, then you can't do that with Sprites, you still need separate draw calls. You can however create VertexArrays containings Quads for example, which you can render in one draw call. These quads would all have to use the same texture, but you can change the texture coordinates, so if you merge several textures into one, you could draw different stuff.

Please tell me this will be free! Sounds really awesome!

Thank you. It will certainly be something, I haven't really thought that far ahead.

Could you tell me how you did the scaling with SDL/SFML whatever you're using?

Code:

// SFML
mySprite.SetScale(2,2);

Liking the addition of the perception attribute.

Thanks a lot. It was a very prompt addition. Once I had the hidden area around the player working, I knew this range had to be parametric.

You should be able to move the bodies around to purposely attract bears and wolves.

Makes sense.

Inventory:
Knife
Some herbs
Dead body

re: Perception. Something that's always bugged me is that it usually doesn't make sense. You can see clear through a thick stand of trees or high mountain if it's nearby, but you can't see across an empty field or body of water if it extends beyond a set radius?

I know what you mean, but it's visual and audible cues combined (no difference in representation, it's one range). In real life you may not see everything but you can hear stuff and identify it. I could make it so, that you see and hear further when the sight is clear, but when there are trees blocking, the range stops 1 tile after the object. That extra tile would come from audible stimulus.

Yeah, a bow made using a branch of a firtree works much better than let's say a soft and bendy willow. That sounds like a sweet level of micro-management, though I'm not sure how many players would appreciate or like it. That should apply to other aspects as well then. Like hunting animals. How do you catch a rabbit? Using a trap or using a bow and arrow? It's so fast and runs away as soon as you get anywhere near it.

Anyway, I implemented a visual and audible range for characters. That in turn prompted me to add a new attribute, Perception, so the higher the value, the greater the range. You won't be able to see or hear moving objects outside that range. Also, my little men can die now. One of them did in the image below. At the moment, dead guys turn into graves instantly, though perhaps there should be a body that you have to bury not to lure bears and wolves with the .. ehm .. smell. Is that going too far?

I just wanted to say that's a neat idea for a game and something I'd very much like to play. Good luck with it

So, what exactly do you do in the game? Is it mostly textual or will there be some sort of a graphical simulation for covert operations? Or will this be a "secret agency tycoon" where stuff is very graphical but in a user interface sort of way?

All this reminded me of Sid Meier's "Covert Action", which surely you've played.

[Devlog 5]

Devlog 5

* I drew some new trees
* Changed the water so now it's constanly covered with some wave animation and graphics.
* Wrote a simple particle manager that's atm only used with the ship movement (for the wave trail)
* Resting in camps and ship
* Some GUI fixes
* Bunch of code improvements

Next up: INVENTORY .. gosh, how long can I postpone it.

Here's a screenshot of the new trees. Grouping them was a quick and dirty job and they don't really align that well. I'll redo that when I get home. Also, the forests make no sense botanically. Different types of trees are mixed up very randomly without any logic. I will make it so, that pine trees grow more near the coastline, fir and other trees will be found more inland. And the forests should be much denser near the edge of water, so it'd be more difficult to find a good spot to embark and journey in-land.



I'd realllyy like to get a playable build out sometime soon but there just isn't that much to do yet

Oh, wow! That was great. I haven't played a single button racing game before but this is surprisingly fun!

It would be the bees knees on a touch screen device. Have you thought about iOS and/or Android support?

I was really enjoying it and I only took a break to write this comment. I'm back to racing now, see ya!

Thanks for the brainwaves.

I don't think the Colonization/Civilization movement system would fit here. In those games, units and maps were generalizations of the real thing. Things as large as mountains but also small as trees would all fit onto one tile. Units were as large as the villages and so on. My game is more to scale so I think it would look strange if the ship or the character would move real fast between the tiles.

The reason I chose to do stuff turn based is to give stats (like agility for movement range) a meaning, but also to emphasize that certain actions take a while to complete. Like chopping down trees and such, these things don't happen instantly. Also, doing stuff real-time paces things up to a point where if you don't act fast enough, you die of starvation. That's not what I want. I quite like the current pacing. So, for the time being, I implemented the first option for resting.

I'd say it's about exploration and survival. Quite a lot about survival in fact. Not so much about settlements, though as I've said before, elements of such things might come into play later on in the development. At one point, I talked about an idea, that there's one huge map and you go as far as you can and find a spot with plenty of resources and settle down there. Then, from that point on you can always hire new crew and stuff and go further.

Here is a new video for all of you good peeps. The sound is delayed due to recording at lower frame rate. Sorry about that. Bad Fraps, bad.



There is some stuff broken, like the ship wave particles I added this morning that are drawn over the terrain when they shouldn't be.

Fix it, fix it nao! Looking at your video, which I like, will you add a damage indicator to fights? I see you clicking the enemy but it'd be nice to see, if and how much damage was dealt.

First impression of the two bush sprites are that there seems to be some pillow shading going on near the bottom. I'd have to see it in-game I think, but I'm worried that they will appear to float...

The pillow shading happens because I tried to define their shape near the bottom. I did a quick edit:



The blue stuff on some land tiles is just ... I don't know, denser/darker patch of grass maybe? It should probably be spread out a little.

[Option 1]

ninto, thanks.

I started thinking how I should implement the "resting" feature. I had a brief discussion in the IRC but things still aren't clear. First of all, resting only happens in camps and such, not just anywhere in the wilderness.

I have two three options:

Option 1

You choose the number of days/turns you want the character to rest. Then, for that amount of turns, the character is in a state where it can't be moved or used for any other action and such. You could of course cancel the resting. Hunger level is still affected during that time and you can eat (eating is an instanteneous, you only choose how much to consume, depending on how much food you have to go around). My main gripe with that option is, that it's not really realistic for somebody to rest for 3-5 days.

But I like that it still affects the hunger. So the fact, that if you had a weak character who'd have to rest all the time but meanwhile still eat the precious food, would be a sort of a penalty for choosing such a wimp (he'd of course be good at other things and still essentially needed)

Option 2

You choose the number of hours you want the character to rest, depending on how low the energy level is. Then, for a certain number of seconds (like 1 second per hour), the game blocks everything else and shows a progress bar while the character rests. You can cancel that if you want to. You can't do anything else or control any other character while resting is in progress. The problem I have with this option, is that it doesn't fit in with the turn-based thing. I mean there is no concept of hours in the game. The day is not 24 hours, it's just a unit of time during which you can do a certain number of things, depending on stats. But is more realistic out of the two.


Option 3

Combine the hunger and energy levels into one, so the more you eat the more energy you restore and you don't have to sit down and rest.


What do you guys think?