Hey guys, I'm still working away on this, I just haven't felt like I had anything presentable for a while. I'm trying to get something done that will actually be fun to play in a traditional sense by this coming Wednesday. I'll talk more about what's done and what's new when I post that update.

In the meantime what to I post that doesn't take too much time? Gabe, help!

The disembodied head of Gabriel Verdon: ~Juuuussst post some concepts or sooooomething. Woooooo, I'm a ghooooost or something.~

Alright, here's some eastern European looking shooters and infantry. There's also some archers in the bottom left there for my more Anglo Saxon looking faction. I felt a game with ARCHERS in is something the market is missing right now.



And then here we have this cool guy with a flail going on, some goblin brigands and dervishes, The Master of the Black Metal, some peasants, and sprites for an unfortunate war atrosity scene.



PIKE 'N' SHOT DOESN'T SUGAR COAT THE BARBARIC HORRORS OF LATE MEDIEVAL/EARLY MODERN WAR... MAN!

As a fan of armoured boars, I like your armoured boar. However, I feel personally slighted by the fact that you have chosen to cowardly rip off my game, by including horses in your's.

I'm trying to do the opposite lately, code how some enemy works with no real graphics for him to see what I actually need to animate him doing. My initial ideas for what an enemy does might end up being crap or not as fun as an idea that presents itself during a coding and testing iteration and then animations I made before hand would end up being a waste. But then with me, art is normally the long process and then code... well actually code's an even longer process sometimes but it FEELS more fruitful to me for some reason, even if I throw it away... I wonder why that is.

Great visual style, really makes this feel even cooler than it already would be.

I always love all your stuff, J-dawg. Your screen layouts visual style and world designs are what I love about games.

I'd like to see.

• Supply chains for armies including supply units like supply wagons, transport helicopters, etc (these could and perhaps should serve other purposes too
• Other things you can build on the map other than just cities, roads, and irrigation. I think the ability to change your environment and build up things that weren't there before or plant seeds if you will that grow into different things is one of the enjoyable aspects of Civ.

Finally got the rest of the videos up





-





-

Unstoppable Doppel

These videos and the previous video show off:

• Units that are gradually destructable (Horse dies, shield breaks, ...)
• Doppel soldiers that home in on guys and chop 'em up
• Melee units now have a little charge animation and run faster if you make them charge the enemy
• Further horsie developments
• Pikemen now pick out targets to guard against when enemies draw near

Why do fraps videos take so long to upload on my DSL ;_;

I wanted to make this more of a post, but it took too long to upload videos. More will be up the rest of this week though.

Pike & Shot lives. Your chance to be the hero of the Benz Cantons will come soon.

Yeah, the art and the general design of the evironment and characters was really good in this. I also appreciate the atypical theme as meteorology games seem to me at least, to be a severely underserved space.

I think the game could be improved by making more elements on the screen show the player the wind direction. The station on the side having the wind sock on it and the wind speed wheel and all that is cute and all, but it's too far away from where the players eye want to be looking basically all the time, the actual ground the player is standing on. If the game field had visible blades of grass on it that could reveal the wind direction during gales and if the player had some element of clothing that did so as well and stuff like the birds also did this, then the game would look much more appropriate I think and gales pushing you would feel more "right" because you could see them doing it.

What are you guys developing this in, XNA?

Well, in an effort to show people some content and keep this thing in motion, here are some dev videos.

I might do these every week, probably on Sunday night so that I actually have some stuff to show in them. See my schedule for now is that I typically only work on the game for 2 hours every weekday evening after dinner (except on Friday night if I go to a board game club meeting) and then on the weekend I work on it as much as I have time to on Saturday when I don't have errands to run or a party or something to go to that night. On Sunday, I typically work on it almost all day at a weekly game jam I have with a couple buddies of mine, jokingly titled "Jimmy-Jam" due to the fact that my name is James. So I'm thinking after the Sunday Jimmy-Jam is probably when I'll have the most to show.

But anyway here's two videos showing what I got done so far this week in my 2 hour sessions. My trial version of fraps seems to only allow for 30 second videos, so in future I might just make one or two 30 minute videos showing the visuals and then a longer webcam video of me explaining where the game stands right now and what those two videos are showing.

But for now:





and

[horsies]

Wuh! But I! And then!

*sigh*

Yes I am still working on this but to my ever lasting shame, I've made very meager progress. I work full time as a game developer at a crummy company I can't stand... and I'm lazy... and sometimes I meet pretty ladies and they lure me away from my computer with beer and good times. *sniff* </white person problems>

But I won't be deterred, NEVER! I'll continue working on Pike & Shot until it is completed or death's cold fingers drag me to my doom.

I actually have a current goal to get something together enough to submit it to IGF this year, so I have until October 17th and the motivation of this has worked enough for me to get horsies into the game so far this week and also to finally fix how targeteers interact with pikemen, hurray!

The current plan is to have some sort of playable level that I'm reasonably happy with basic mechanics wise by the end of this month, otherwise Jason Kozak is gonna have my legs broke. ;_;

Is with Fire & Sword good? Does it have pike and shotte mechanics in it that feel all cool and grittily no-nonsense and cruelly but marvelously realistic like what made me love the mechanics in the older Mountie blades? Oh cool, Gabriel Verdon, the darling of TIG source's devlog board wants to play my game! Yay!

The quests feel really long to me. Are they not meant to be completed in one sitting or am I just being too methodical?

How are you doing your dynamic lighting if you don't mind my asking?

Oh sorry, I was sort of in a rush. I was making the post at work.

But is it really necessary to chain me to this boulder?

[in]

I don't know if you stated before, Oddball, but what are you making this in?

Nevermind, found the answer on your twitter, heh.

Why not just art up the art on those dangerous portals more? The portals to early levels could look benign and inviting, with lots of NPCs walking into them where as the portals to dangerous areas could look mean and imposing, with the bodies of fake dead noobs serving as fair warning, etc.

That or maybe you could just have state controlled barriers to later portals where as new players can only see or only get to ones to the lower level areas.

I meant TOMORROW, tomorrow. JEEZE.

SHOW OFF!

Oh wait, that's the point of the show and tell...

Hey man, I'm that charismatic and handsome bald guy who was at gamejam talking to you guys a bit.

Game's looking pretty cool, man. I'm gonna try to have my game Pike & Shot some where playable so we can play that on Wednesday too; though I've been slacking since the weekend. Work's been draining and demoralizing lately. But we will persevere!

I'm interested in how simulaty your game is. Like, if and how much stuff like propeller affect your movement characteristics and such. I haven't seen much of your game yet, but I like it sort of looks like it's very algorithm determining behaviour of stuff style, like any good PC game should be! heh.

I like them myself. I thought the old ones contrasted with the default forum theme too much. These ones are nice and gentle on the eyes.