Soldiers become more experienced with each battle, but over a really long time the stress reduces their performance and negates their battle experience.

Sounds like an interesting idea. XCOM (the latest one) had something kind of similar where if a soldier took a near-fatal wound but survived they would get a permanent penalty to their Will, which would make them more likely to panic the next time a combat situation got scary. Is this the sort of effect that you are planning?

The Long War mod for XCOM added an extra mechanic called fatigue which made it so that after a battle a soldier would have to wait a day or so before they could be sent into combat again. The main result was that the player had to have a largeish number of soldiers all leveling up roughly equally instead of one super squad. This in turn meant that you could have an absolute disaster of a mission where you lose the entire force sent but still have sufficient reserves to continue playing.
You could combine the two mechanics so that soldiers soldiers lose stress slowly in the time between missions. The higher their stress level is, the more likely they are to acquire a permanent penalty and/or do something badly during a mission.

Of course, if you want to see how complex a system for managing the stress levels of characters can get, you can always check out Darkest Dungeon.

I plan on the player/commander being deaf to all the gun shots too, except when the radio channel opens to issue a move or attack order.

This aspect might not work so well, since the player will be able to see the shots (since soldiers will always be shooting into their own field of vision) they will expect to be able to hear them too. Maybe consider using some sort of abstract chiming sound as a substitute instead.

What do you think of these new ideas? I'm not sure if having all of this stuff is wasted without a proper story.

Depends on what you mean by story. I don't think you need a lot of cutscenes, voice acting or tons of text to create a powerful narrative. The game I am working on at the moment doesn't have any of those, and I would consider the story to be the focus of that game.
I think you can do a lot with reoccurring elements across missions. Whether it's a character, a piece of technology or the type of mission objective. I'm assuming you have some sort of end state in mind for the campaign, so presumably you have some level of storytelling you intend to do. The important thing is to ask yourself how you want the player to feel once they have concluded the game, and then build the experience that will lead to that conclusion.

So, Let's talk about some more of those enemies.



So here we have another kind of bat. This one however has a much more aggressive AI. Regular bats will simply fly around in their assigned area, but these guys will actually swoop down to attack you. They don't do a lot of damage but their unpredictable movement makes them hard to both dodge and hit.




I call this guy the Spiter. (Spitter + Spider = Spiter. Also, has the word 'Spite' in it.) It's a pretty straightforward creature. It just walk back and forth, and if the player gets too close, he spits a corrosive glob of green goo. His range and aim aren't very good at the moment, but I may go back and refine them when it comes time to properly balance the combat.



This Jellyfish/balloon creature I call a Loonsting. I'm sure you can figure out why. This thing just passively  floats around the area, but it's large enough  that manoeuvring around it can be awkward. To kill it you have to hit the bulbous 'head' which can be tricky if you have to come at one from below. The tendrils, naturally, will injure you if you touch them.

I would classify Trench as a name that is acceptable but not exceptional.

Do games need story? I would say yes, but let's unpack this question a bit. What is the purpose of a game? Do games need story to achieve that purpose?
I would say that the purpose of a game is to entertain. Do stories entertain? Yes (at least, well told ones do). Can you entertain without a story? Yes, but you are depriving yourself of an important and powerful tool if you chose not to have a story. You can make a game without story, just as you can make a painting without color. You might decide that you want to limit yourself that way, you might even have good reason for doing so, but you are limiting yourself.

When the story and the gameplay disagree with each other might be likened to a picture where the linework and the coloring are from two different scenes. A really skilled artist might work this dissonance into being part of the intended experience, but most of the time it just results in an ugly mess.

A platform shooter in which you can freeze your own bullets and save the positions of your bullets in the current room and take them into other rooms, allowing you to shoot from places you normally wouldn't be able to.

Potentially interesting. I think the trick will be making the mechanic intuitive enough for players to use easily. Also, I suspect that in order to make best use of the mechanic players will have to rely on forethought and planning more than reflexes, which means it will probably feel more like a puzzle platformer than a platform shooter. Nothing wrong with that though - I'm quite fond of puzzle platformers too.

Our game is turn-base strategy theme game. The action is happening in space and your main task is to defeat your biggest enemy - alliens. In order to do that you will get spacecrafts from small Scout (who is perfect for snooping around in enemy's base) to amazing war machines, who are prepared to make huge mess for your enemy. However, everything is not as easy as you think. You will have to work on your strategy if you want to create undefeatable army or shield up your base. Everything from spacecrafts to laser towers have their own price in resources and population. Population is the number that youb can't change, while on resources you will have to work in order to get them. So in the end of day you will have to come up with a good strategic plan if you want to be able to stand up against alliens and be able to protect your base.

To be honest, you could have stopped after the first two sentences there. The rest of the paragraph contains no information that couldn't be assumed from the fact that you called it a turn-based strategy game.
What makes your game unique? Why would someone choose to play your game instead of some other turn based strategy?

Thanks for the feedback!
I'm using the black outlines to help signify to the players which things are important/interactible, as well as to make them stand out. I think it helps players look at a scene and instantly be able to identify which things they need to pay the most attention to.

The terrain is pretty bland though. I did briefly mention earlier in the devlog that I intend to improve the appearance of the levels, but I have not yet done much work there.

Alright, time to add some more enemy types to the list.




Today I bring to you this wall crawling... thing. I call it a Spiderilla, even though it doesn't actually have much in common with spiders or gorillas.
This guy is relatively tough, and will pull stones out of the wall and throw them at the player. If you do manage to kill and eat him however, you will be rewarded with an increase to your maximum Health.




And here we have the final and most iconic prey animal of the game - the rabbit. These guys will already attempt to keep their distance from the player, so they make good hunting practice for a new player. They are generally the first creature in the game that the player kills and eats, and have spurred some memorable comments.

Player: "Oh hey, rabbits! Can you eat them?"
*Nom*
Player: "Oh my God, you can eat them! Why would you do that?!"
Me: "Why would I do that? You're the one playing the game!"





And finally we have the rabbit's larger, more dangerous cousin, the Jackalope! Jackalopes are still herbivores, so they won't attack you and will in fact attempt to avoid you, but those horns mean that pouncing on them from above is a bad idea.
Jackalopes are large, meaty creatures, which in game terms means that they take longer to eat and give more health. The best way to hunt them is to use your breath attack if you have it.

Hey this is looking pretty nice. Am I right is thinking that players will have to set up their own hosts for this? If so, you might want to bias the game towards shorter sessions. Most groups can't generally play more than an hour or two and getting the same group back together to finish a session later on tends to be difficult.


It looks like you're going for a kind of 'multiplayer BoI' style of game design. I think this could be really popular. Are you planning on having unlockables that become available over multiple sessions?

From what I understand it's pretty typical for a kickstarter to get a big spike of backers at the start and end, so I think you should make it.

Alright, lets continue working through all the enemy types in the game so far.






What platformer would be complete without some evil bats?
These guys are one of the first creature types I made. Looking at them now, I realise how far I have come. In other words, I'm not really happy with how they look and move right now. I do intend to revamp them, but that a little bit low on the priority list right now.
These bats will fly in a specific are, paying no attention to the the player. Their movement is intentionally erratic to make them a bit harder to deal with. They are easy enough to avoid, and only slightly harder to kill. At the start of the game they are a hazard, but as the player becomes more skilled they should be able to use them to regain health by eating them.






Is that... a burning deer? Why yes it is! Some of the creatures of Dragon's Wake are familiar animals, but others are strange things dredged from the depth of my imagination.
I mentioned in my last post that certain creatures in the game will increase particular stats when eaten by the player. The Fire Deer here is, unsurprisingly, the one that will increase the player's ability to breathe fire.
The Fire Deer moves quickly and can be hard to dodge. Not only that, but they are immune to the player's breath attack. They are pretty fragile though, so they don't quite qualify as a boss fight.





And our final entry for today is... a really big mouse.
These guys are another prey animal. They are even easier to hunt than gekos. Not much else to say about them, although I should actually make them try to avoid the player... guess I'll put that on the list.

Interesting discussion you have been having here.
I'm probably part of the larger market that you are hoping to attract with the the tileset, since I like roguelikes but don't care for ASCII (which has basically restricted me to Stone Soup for 'real' roguelikes that I enjoy).

Out of the options in your last post I like 'P' most with 'A' running a close second. The sprites in those are clear and easily readable without being noisy.

The reality of the broader market (beyond those already familiar with roguelikes), is that using letters at all is a big turnoff. I'm not sure (though I'm very curious to find out)

I'll see if I can explain, but keep in mind this is purely my own experience.

The reason I dislike true ASCII is because there is too much to unlearn. The human mind has a whole bunch of rules that it picked up when learning to read and uses whenever looking at text. Things like "A capital Letter is the same as a lower case letter." But in the context of a roguelike this may not be true! So the player has to unlearn that rule, which takes additional cognitive effort.
Often the letters used don't correspond well with the things they represent. A Squid might be a letter 'Q' instead of an 'S' because the 'S' was already used for snakes. So the player has to look at the letter, identify the letter... and then thing of a thing that may not begin with that letter.
It's just easier to learn if you start with a set of images (or even symbols), that don't have all those associations that can mix you up.

Ok, well it's been awhile since I last updated. Sorry about that. I could make a bunch of excuses, but they would be just that - excuses. Instead, let me show off some of what I have done in the last 3 months.

What I have mainly been focussing on lately is getting the game alpha complete. This means creating all the systems and features, including cinematic events. I'm not willing to show many of those because of spoilers. In addition, creating the final parts of the framework has required some rework of previous areas, and I have not yet made them look pretty again, so the game now looks uglier than it did before.

That said, there is also a lot of previous work that I haven't shown off that still looks good. Enemies for example.



Ok, this guy isn't really an enemy per-se. He's more like... prey.
Gekos are harmless to the player. I do intend to make them eat insects, but haven't done that part yet. The main things they do are just crawl around on the wall, and die if the player attacks them.
Prey animals are important in Dragon's Wake because they represent a risk free way for the player to regain health. Think of them as healing pickups.




This guy might look a little intimidating, but he's actually another prey animal. He take a bit more damage to kill though, and has a special bonus. In Dragon's Wake the player has three stats; Health, Stamina, and Fire. These stats can be improved as you progress through the game by eating particular creatures. Our yellow friend pictured above will increase the player's stamina when he is eaten (Stamina is the stat that determines how long the player can fly for).





And finally, an actual enemy. These snakes are the least dangerous threat that you will encounter in the game. They don't move intelligently, they are stuck on the ground and can't jump so you can just fly over them, and even if they get close enough to attack you can still dodge or kill them first.

I love story focussed games, but I very rarely continue playing after I have reached the end. The end of the story is the big emotional climax, bigger than anything that has gone before. If you want the player to keep playing after that, you probably need to promise (or at least hint) at an another emotional payoff that they can achieve if they keep going, whether you decide to use New Game+ or End Game content.

New Game+ would probably work better for giving the player access to a modified storyline with a different climax, but then the New Game+ mechanic becomes part of the story itself, which can be kind of awkward. As arrogant.gamer mentioned, this works better in a story that features time travel.

If you want to go with End Game content then you have a different problem. The climax of the story will have wrapped up (almost) all of the story threads (if it doesn't, then it's not really an ending), so in order to give the player a new emotional climax you have to basically have a second story that plays out after the first.

In either case, getting people to replay a story driven game is hard because once you know the story you lose the driving reason to play the game.

A shooter game with a strong 'love' motif? Sounds like a severe case of ludonarrative dissonance to me, but I haven't played or even seen the game so I can't say for sure. I'm inclined to assume that you are creating this dissonance intentionally based on what little information you have given. Sounds like it could be interesting.

So it's been awhile since I last posted. I'm about to head to PAX Aus tomorrow, so this might be might last chance for awhile too. I'll try to get some better photos from PAX this time.

You may be wondering what I have been doing this last few weeks. Last time I posted I mentioned some difficulties with the new shaders I had been hoping to use.
Well, they're still not cooperating as well as I would like, but I have found that while I probably won't be able to have the best lighting on the terrain tiles, I can still use use the SpriteLamp shaders on the characters. I currently only have them applied to the player character, but other creatures will have it applied... after PAX.

I have combined this with a certain amount of 'fake' lighting (basically circular additive glow textures for lights and subtracive ones for shadows). The result has been surprisingly nice I think. For contrast, I'm showing the same scene as in my last post, but with the new lighting.



I'll see if I can get a few posts up during PAX, but no promises.

That sounds really cool.

Any thoughts on what kind of faction you would be playing as? Space Pirates/Privateers? Nascent Rebellion? Personal quest of vengeance?

I'm not sure I can agree agree with your 'story + theme = narrative' equation, but that's an instinctive reaction rather than a reasoned one. I'll see if I can figure out what my subconscious is telling me and give a proper response later.

That said, if you consider Dwarf Fortress to be the beginning of a new way of designing stories, then you should probably take a look at RimWorld.

What are your thoughts on having a strategic layer to the game? I recently got the Enemy Within expansion for the latest Xcom game, and Boarding Party looks like it could fit that kind of structure really well. I love the idea of being able to pick your own way to complete the mission, and that kind of openness works really well with being able to customize you crew between missions with the spoils from previous missions.

I hate the attitude that that quote represents. It's basically saying 'Games aren't real art, so we won't expect too much of you'. I particularly hate that so many game designers seem to buy into it.

Dialogue isn't the same thing as story though. Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons is a game with a powerful story and not a single line of non-gibberish dialogue. The game I'm currently making is likewise story focussed but lacks dialogue.