[Milestone 1]

Yes you read that right.

Peasant - salt of the earth. dirty. you're the king? he didn't vote for you.
Macing - Verbification of Mace, the medieval instrument used for bludgeoning.
Cannon envy - the desire to get one's hands on another's cannon.

Peasant Macing was a game I made in highschool using gamemaker. It was inspired by the only fun I ever had playing age of empires 3. The AI kept trying to expand past a cannon tower, but didn't seem to notice it was there, so it would send one undefended peasant at a time. Getting hit by a cannon ball would usually launch the peasant into a nearby lake, leaving his spiffy hat to drift to the ground somewhere. The original Peasant Macing was just that and nothing else: you control a cannon tower, peasants try to run up the hill, you knock them back down. Every hundred peasants knocked into the water would give you a powerup, which were all completely insane. Things like a rotten salmon nuke, burning greyhound, rolling easter island statue, whatever.

Peasant Macing: Cannon Envy is going to be a remake of the above, as it was made in game maker and I lost all the code and executables GO ME. I'm making it in C++ using Irrlicht for graphix and box2d for physics. I'm going to shoot for an NPR style of 3d game that pretends to be 2d to match the original fairly closely.

Gameplay:
You have a side view of a hill leading down to a body of water, with a castle at the top. You control a wizard and a cannon at the top of the hill. You fire the cannon, but cannot adjust the elevation of it. While the shell is in the air, you pull the shell towards or push the shell away from the tower, presumably using the wizard.

A boat will dock at the bottom of the hill, and huge masses of peasants come out. Your goal is to use the cannon to knock them back down the hill into the water, and sink their boat. Whenever a boat is sunk, a new one shows up, so the game continues until you lose.

On their way up the hill, there are certain nodes where the peasants build huts, which spawn more peasants quickly.

Every hundred points makes the wizard load something awesome into the cannon. I'll figure out the powerups when I get there.

Basically, it's like a shmup. Except down. It's a shoot-'em-down, yeah!

Milestones:
I'm not taking any chances. My checklist shall remain in view of the public, where it won't get lost.

Milestone 1 (Hello peasants) Get milestone 1 here!

• Get irrlicht and box2d to play nice
• Make peasant model
• Animate peasant model
• Get peasant model in engine
• Maintain and update a list of objects in the world
• Make terrain base class
• Make basic peasant class, get the lazy bum to climb the hill

Milestone 2 (Hello wiXard  )

• Make cannon model
• Make wizard tower model
• Make Wizard model
• Animate wizard model
• Make longboat model
• Animate longboat model
• Make longboat object
• Add the cannon at the top of the hill
• Add the wizard tower behind the cannon
• Add the wizard to the tower
• Make projectile that can be directed with arrow keys

Milestone 3 (I heard you like ballistics)

• Make peasants react to cannonball
• Make cannonball explode on impact with ground
• Make cannonball come out of the cannon
• Make peasants splash when they hit the water

Milestone 4 (fourt' o joo-lah)

• Make effects for all relevant actions
• Add huge sinking effect for ships
• Make 2 powerups for the cannon

Milestone 5 (bring da noise)

• have at least 8 powerups
• finish effects for all powerups
• have an effect for wizard putting powerups in the cannon

Milestone 6 (when its time to peasant we will always peasant hard)

• Fix all known bugs
• finish loss conditions, scoring, title screen
• Final cutting and polishing
• 

This is going to be an incredibly silly project. I am under no illusions that it will be easy. If it ends up being good enough, I'm going to release it commercially for an appropriately scaled amount of money. probably between 5 and 10bux depending on quality and my financial situation. Until then, I'm going to dump a build of it on you guys every time I hit a milestone so I can see what sucks and what flies. At the current rate of coding, I should be at milestone 1 by next week. I'll keep this thread updated with screenshots and progress reports daily. My goal is to finish this before college gets back in in september. TOOTLE PIP

Day 3 update:
Gorram internets reset when I uploaded this before, so I'll keep 'er brief. I will be on vancouver island for part of next week, so I will be away from my PC I program things on, but I have my laptop, but it has some problems with irrlicht's .md2 animation. I am getting paid for work during this trip, which is awesome. I want to get the first alpha build available for download on thursday or friday. words from the past!

X-com probably has the simplest approach. to my knowledge, they have a big list of premade blocks of tiles that their maps are made of, and these blocks constrain one another's placement in logical ways. for instance, a block of road must connect to either the end of another block of road or to the edge of the map. That system gives you the triple benefit of having hand designed portions of levels, having randomised levels, and not having to deal with any sort of hardcore level generation stuff. I'm pretty sure spelunky does a similar thing.

I find it hard to believe this has gone for two pages without mentioning moonwalker. I don't think it was that well made, but it came pretty close to being a musical game.




I was working on a really crazy game maker platformer for awhile that sort of matches this as well. It was a megaman style game, except you would unlock a different song at the end of each level. You played as this manic looking little wizard dude, and depending on the song you selected, he would act differently, but he would always be dancing. The dances would open up different areas, for instance breaking boulders with the russian dance, crossing small gaps without falling using the moonwalk, stuff like that. I think it was inspired by the section of bioshock where your plasmids are going nuts, and you only have access to them randomly.

Today I created a peasant. He is low polygon and made in blender.

This is for a game I am currently working on. It will have peasants. There will be about 500 of these dudes on the screen at times if I can swing it. They are about this big in reality:

in retrospect the texture size could be an awful lot smaller. You can barely see most of the detail, sparse as it is.

Also, what's a good rule of thumb for stuff to have completed before making a devlog thread?

Hello, my name is Austin Fox, and I am a Canadian wotsit with a huge beard.

I first got into computers when I was three. We had some kind of oldschool computer that I can barely remember at all, except that it had leisure suit larry and spacewar on it. I was three, so I was very bad at those games, but I still found leisure suit larry funny. I had absolutely no idea what it was about though. Oh god I hated spacewar to death though. the opponent AI was scary as hell at the time.

later on, my dad picked up an atari 2600 at a garage sale. He doesn't really keep up with the latest in computer technology, so this would have been around 1995, and I would have been 6. I had no idea what current games were out at the time, so the first time I started pitfall, it was a huge shock. holy crap, games have colors now? when the hell did that happen. Eventually, I went to a friend's house as he was in the middle of a game of warcraft 2. I was totally trippin' balls at that point. oh god look at all the SPRITES. and the sprites have more than two COLORS

Now that we've established exactly how much of a caveman I am/was, eventually I did get better hardware, and get better caught up with technology and junk, especially when I bought my own computer. Warcraft 3 had been out for about a year at that point, so I picked up a copy on impulse. The game itself was okay, and I actually bothered to get good at it up until the expansion kaiboshed all my good moves. What really drew me in was the map editor. oh god I LOVED the map editor. I would make things for fun all the time. I didn't care if anyone saw them or anything, it just felt incredibly good to make them. I even made one map that had a filesize of around 65meg. it had something like 100 custom units, 500 custom abilities, and 8 playable characters. it was exactly like dota, even though I'd never played that before. Eventually the map editor gave up on that huge ass file entirely and corrupted the hell out of it, and I had no backups, so you'll just have to take my word.

I found game maker then, liked how similar it was to the warcraft 3 editor, made a few games, didn't release a single one of them on the internet. but that was allright, because then I got back into modding, getting my first real taste of programming with garry's mod 10.

I made GCOMBAT, the all caps damage system/tank battle mod. It got pretty popular, but it made me want to get into REAL programming, so as soon as I'd saved up enough money, I started going to BCIT. So far the extent of the real programming has been pong, a shmup, and a simple port of the physics engine from N.

I fully intend not to make any more projects without some sort of release on the internet. I have so many things I've made over the years, but almost nothing to show for it, so yeah.

My favorite games of all time ever are dwarf fortress and X-com: UFO defense. There is a special place in my heart for super metroid. I used to be able to beat it in under 2 hours. Isometric games are where the proverbial 'it' is 'at'.

I guess I'm going to make games and things while I'm here damn that would be good