Wow I love everything about this. I grew up playing the Impressions Games like Cleopatra, Zeus, and Poseidon so I would love to see something like this make a come back. The closest thing that has released recently is Banished and that doesn't have the over-arching exploration of history that was present in the Impressions Games' releases.

Do you plan on having multiple scenarios like those games or will it be more sandbox-like the way Banished worked?

Glad to hear you like our project.

Our focus for the game is a story/campaign mode with various scenarious and within each a set of goals/missions, so it should be a pretty good fit for anyone who loved playing the Impressions classics.

Looks amazing, I absolutely love the progress over the past few months in both, the art (Henk's pixels are just as outstanding as they were 2 decades ago. I even sense a bit of Lionheart in the backgrounds) as well as the game itself.

Keep going ... it's going to be a hit (guaranteed in quality but I hope also commercially)

This looks more amazing each time I visit this thread or see the posts on twitter.

Really looking forward to the final game.

Hi there, I'm the one who has to make these little guys find their ways and it's great to see there's someone interest in this extremely early stage already - so welcome to our devblog.

With regards to the suggestions the problems with the, let's call em, originals, is very well known but the more you start implementing these systems the more you notice that there's quite some good reasons for the decisions in those games. And I also spent days just reading through all the articles and postings on heavengames.com - it's stunning to see how dedicated those fans were and even still are, how they analyzed the games in a spectacular and time consuming way. I'd be happy if we even just reached 1% of what they did, back then.

Anyway, with regards f.i. to the walkers we probably will have the typical random walkers which, IMO is pretty good for casual players who just want to enjoy building their cities without trying to turn it into a perfect balanced machinery. I also think it's quite good for the dynamic of the game if there's some randomness you don't control as this makes the game less predictable. But I also see needs for some other modes/optional ways to have more control

- One would be to just mark a rectangle and the walker wanders randomly within that range - there's still some randomness there.
- Try to find a perfect route automatically (travelling salesman/np-problem, not a good idea if we may have hundreds or even thousands of these guys wandering around).
- Full control by setting the path through a set of waypoints, might result in a pretty static city but then different users enjoy different ways to play a game

The problem I see when users have to micro manage these walkers is, whenever you build/remove buildings/roads etc. you're waypoints may become invalid and the whole system collapses. On the other side, if you have both options, you could rely on the random walkers first, and with a settled city (or for experienced players if they have a special city layout in mind already) you can set the waypoints for a perfect distribution.

In any way, this will be a an ongoing topic during the development and we'll see what works best.

Movement of goods is another hot topic but I've just started with a first implementation so I need a few more days until I have a better idea about the ways to handle these (I'm away from my PC for the next 2 weeks so might have a better idea not before the end of the month).

Haven't played Lethis but it's obviously pretty high on my todo list.

What about this one?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/531070

I suggest to watch a few of Casey Muratoris Handmade Hero videos

https://hero.handmade.network/episodes

might be surprising to many "Engine" users what you can do in what's literally a few days of fulltime work.

Just finished reading the Jordan Mechner journals of Karateka and The Prince of Persia, great stuff.

It's pretty much just a personal journal but it has some interesting stuff about the development process of both games. It's interesting to see how Mechner struggled to develop them, it's quite similar to the situation of some indies today and it gives you some perspective about how the industry was back then. It's funny how at one part he talks about how the programmers at Broderbund were complaining that the industry was not like it used to be and everything was just about money now (in 1983).

I just finished the one about Karateka and will continue to the next one about PoP.

It's quite interesting, even more so if you have memories back at that time too. The only downside is that I wonder how much he has tweaked his entries for the release with additional "fiction" for a more interesting read? The reason I question this is, because very early in the Karateka Book, an entry at 1982, he mentions he saw Lemmings as a sample of a complex animated game at a computer store which obviously is not true.

Still a great and very easy read as it's just a bunch of journal entries so you can start/stop reading at any point, even in 5 or 10 minute bursts.

Gunpoint

Also I quite like the Hexcells games. Simple but clever and relaxing minimalistic/abstract puzzles. If you don't mind these kinds of games (as you haven't listed one) they're very worth a look.

Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells II

With a decent caching system it should be neither of the two besides games that need a huge amount of very different assets all the time. But that's nothing lots of indies should have to think about.

I usually access all my resources through a caching abstraction. I.e. each time I render an image/tile/sprite, display a text or do anything else I request the actual resource from my caching system. What's not in the cache already get's loaded immediately. At a given threshold - depending on the game and target hardware, I purge the least used resources.

If you don't need huge amounts of resources immediately you usually can get away even without prewarming this cache but it's also simple to do a little preloading during intro/main menu etc. states in the background. And if you want to make it really good, you remember/check the last savegame of the user as chances are high, that's where he/she'll continue to play, and preload whatever's required for the level/section of the world.

To me, backups are very important so I use multiple ways to do them - just in case

I backup to an external drive pretty regularly
I use multiple external drives and at least one is always stored away in a different physical place
I use CrashPlan which is a cloud backup provider. At the moment I only use their free client which already allows you to backup to a friends PC (in my case, I backup to my parents PC) or to a local folder/drive.
Given Office 365 now comes with 1TB (iirc, by now it's even increased to unlimited already) OneDrive I'd love to get an easy and flexible way to backup to my OneDrive too

I'm looking for a pixel artist interested in some paid work on small mobile games.

The scope of the games would be something like Flappy Bird, Swing Copters etc.

If you're interested it would be great if you could send me a link to your portfolio or some sample images of your previous work and the estimated costs if you'd do the graphics for games similar to the two named ones.

Availability would be a huge plus - so if you do have some time available for short projects, just send me a PM.

All the best

http://www.monkey-x.com/

It's an awesome package almost for free ($99 including all targets) used f.i. for New Star Soccer as well as Crypt of the Necrodancer (shot right to #1 on Steam on release day)

I have a theory about what happened - moneywise.

What if they fakebacked $100k by themselves (family + friends) to push the campaign - it's not a secret that this is a typical way to get some initial and/or final momentum to a KS campaign. Maybe they had an agreement to get back their "investment" from the sales of the game but at some point in time, they noticed it's just not gonna happen, the game will never ever be done nor will it match the quality expectations/requirements to generate decent sales.
At that point, they just tried to not lose their money but, for obvious reasons, don't want to tell the true story in the public as this may hurt them even more.

Just my thoughts but it's the only sane idea I can imagine.

Another is https://www.madewithmarmalade.com/

For those who prefer working in code it's a pretty decent choice. Sadly it's not as well known as many others even though they approached the multiplatform problem in a very interesting way, you can even build iOS games using Visual C++ on a Windows machine.

Ready to join
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197971558489/

This one might be interesting too
http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/

Theme Hospital does a lot of stuff with partial characters, i.e. ony animating arms etc. from doctors, mix heads + body sprites, I'd bet they use different palettes to add additional variations and the same goes for animated objects.

Back then, games like TH had to run on Systems with 8MB ram for everything, code, all runtime related data, images, sound/music. Even today's *low* spec smart phones have *huge* amounts of resources compared to this

So ... to answer your question, to reuse 2D animations, split your sprites into unique and reusable parts and mix/layer them during rendering.

Today you do have another option with tools like Spine, Spriter, Dragon Bones, Smoothmoves etc. but whether these are an option depends a lot on your type of game/graphics.

Hi,

we're looking for an artist to help us for a few days with a current mobile game.

If you're a good allrounder ideally with a sense for modern style UI and if you can work within the usual limits of tiny displays and memory limited devices you're welcome.

The only problem ... we don't have much time, so you should have some time available right now for a few days.

Tasks are stuff like UI, background tiles etc. (no huge tasks but multiple smaller ones)

It's a paid job of course (negotiable)

Intersted? Just send me a PM or eMail.

Michael