Ugh, so this one seriously lapsed.

I seemed to get quite carried away on the technical side, spending a lot
of time on AI/orders and controls, so never managed to produce anything
that was actually fun to play.

So I think it's definitely on hold until I can come up with some inspiration for it.
In the meantime, I had added a little star system simulator for use as a map/mission select
screen. I'm hoping to be able to salvage it.

@PNJeffries: The dungeon-master like revision is looking good, I'm guessing you came up with another combat system?

I think I can call ColdRL a success, it certainly has a beginning, middle and an end. It's got an nice central mechanic and I guess is pretty fun in a coffeebreak sort of way.

I think writing my first roguelike from scratch in a language i'd hardly ever used before, with an API that i'd never used before was a bit of a stretch. I could have used some time for polish!

Here's the success announcement. I should probably find a better place to host the game than the community block media uploads section though

I'm giving this a go, it'll be my first 7drl so i'm pretty excited.

Gonna give löve2d a shot, see what I can make with it.

Managed to put together the deployment phase today, although as development progresses it's becoming less important, the emphasis seems to be moving to the RTS component.

For each mission you'll have the option to begin with your squadrons deployed into available green zones, or to keep them behind as reinforcements with which to surprise your enemy. Heres's a quick example of deployment.

This is also showing the (hopefully improved) weapons range indicator, this time as just the outermost surface of each ship's range rather than three separate circles. Hopefully that's a bit less confusing.


Also, a couple of new units, a repair frigate and laser mines!

Which when simple things like this don't work properly, I really start to get concerned when I think about much more advanced controls like tree controls, multi-line text boxes, and other junk.

It wouldn't be so bad if I popped over to the github, filled out an issue, and then got a response, maybe even a fix, however its been a week and I've received zero in the way of responses. It seems like the library isn't really maintained or worked on very consistently.

Which in the end is indeed a shame, since I really am liking how simple and lightweight it is. I just don't think I want to start trying to re-write bunches of it, to fix problems.

Fair enough, it's a killer if there are obvious issues like that lying around and no active maintainer. As you say though it's a shame, it looked to me like a nice solution.

With my projects, homebrew GUI code has been a massive timesink actually, and of course it's a pretty uninspiring thing to spend a lot of time on. In hindsight I'd probably be better off having gone with a library. Although now I feel like i've got a much better understanding of how to put together a good Widget UI system.

Posting to follow!

sadly the gwen gui library is really turning out to be less than ideal.

Sorry to hear that, I feel bad for recommending it now 

It's just full of bugs?

So, my first go at using a stencil buffer didn't go so well...

Looks good.  I love tactical map things...
It's a bit hard to "read" what's going on quickly with the current graphics/colours.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on at the moment, I'm thinking about how it can be tidied up a bit. It actually looks a lot clearer I think though in motion, In that last screenshot there are a few projectiles which make more sense when moving! I'll have to try and put some gifs up.

Looks nice so far. What kind of orders will you be able to give? What are you thinking of for objectives?

Thanks!

At the moment i'm heading towards fairly standard RTS style orders as a control system, with the specific order allocated being dependant upon the selected unit. So typical move to target/attack target/protect target/repair target etc.

Objectives will again be typically fairly simple, destroy this target, protect this unit, capture this target etc, sometimes within a time limit. For example, a test map i'm using now has the player trying to lure away or destroy a fighter escort from a platform within three minutes so that allied bombers have a clear shot at a target when they spawn in at the end of the countdown.

In game this can be complicated by randomly generated triggers/events that can add additional objectives to mix things up during play. E.g a shuttle attempts to leave the platform, and must be disabled. Getting these random events to play nice however, is troublesome!  

 

Looks nice! What kind of gameplay are you planning?

Trying to get unrotated sprites to look like they're dogfighting is tough  .

I need to work a bit more on the ship's firing ranges (the green circles) too. When I get quite a few overlapping it looks a bit messy.

I like the depth of field effect! Seems to suit the geometry.

To be fair, the Finished forum is a new addition. You can see that the projects there were only finished as recently as 2012, while the DevLogs forum goes back to 2008.

Ah, ok, I didn't spot that, it's not so depressing then 

In case you're wondering why we're so unsupportive, and you aren't really a troll, we get a lot of people who say they're going to be the latest and greatest indie hit, without ever finishing anything. Look at how many members this forum gets compared to how many games we finish.

A pretty depressing figure is the ratio of devlogs (2248) to ratio of finished devlogs (84) 

You could give gwen a try, it's a pretty lightweight GUI setup. I was going to give it a try, as it looked to me like one of the cleaner libraries available, but I decided to try and roll my own as a learning exercise (although I'm beginning to regret that  ).

Are you using straight openGL or SFML/SDL?

Hah ha - a wait button would completely destroy all challenge in the game. The whole point is that you can get stuck on the same colour check as an enemy that can move every turn. So you have to find something in the level that's equivalent to waiting - such as attacking or being pushed - otherwise you can't kill them.

Waiting in other roguelikes is simply to remove the puzzle element from moving on a grid. This game is all about the puzzle of moving on a grid - a wait action means there's no puzzle. The player has the resources around them to perform a wait action - adding a button for it would be like placing the exit two tiles away.

If that's the sort of puzzle you're after then you're best off playing Pudding Monsters. I've seen you can get 50 levels in before you actually have to think.

Hehe, this is probably what makes me a terrible chess player, I'm always too impatient to think more than one move ahead 

+1 for fullscreen

This is really tough but pretty compelling. Those push-movers seem to be the real killers to me .

Do you think a 'wait' button would make sense? I felt like I needed one a couple of times there, but I guess it'd make the game considerably easier.

Over the weekend I got some time to spend working on the game's internals.

I put together a basic event system, with a set of simple triggers (squad/unit destroyed, time elapsed, objective complete etc) that can be used to set off associated events. For example to add a new enemy to the mission after 5 mins, or throw a message up once a certain unit is destroyed.

I'm hoping to add the possibility of semi-randomised events associated with these triggers, so for some missions the events that occur during play could be varied to make the level less predictable.

Next up, I have to write some GUI code to get some kind of event/objective editor working!