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[Nugsy]

Ohh those new sprites are wonderful! Will there be new sprites for the ground/walls too?

I really like the Advance Wars series, so it will be great to be able to play something similar on PC with some friends!

[Craig Stern]

Thanks guys!

I haven't read through the whole 4 pages so I might have missed this, but what are you making this in?

I'm making this in Flash, with an eye toward possible iPad/iPhone/Android ports.

Ohh those new sprites are wonderful! Will there be new sprites for the ground/walls too?

Yes; there will be new sprites for just about everything.


New points of progress:

--there are now three classes of physical attacks: slashing, piercing and crushing. As a general rule, flying units are weak to piercing, armored units are weak to crushing, and unarmored units are weak to slashing.
--the shadowling's teleportation ability now functions properly, allowing the unit to pass through walls.
--the game now has a working surrender function ( shift + ctrl + S ).
--the game now remembers your previous army build-outs, and will automatically build your army accordingly when starting up a new match.

[Craig Stern]

I've added a few neat useability improvements:

--as in Fire Emblem, units whose turns are done now get grayed out so you can easily see who has yet to finish going. (This was originally implemented for placeholder units, but didn't work for units with bitmap graphics--now it does.)
--hitting space bar auto-scrolls the battlefield over to the next available character on your team, who is then autoselected with their move area displayed.
--also similarly to Fire Emblem, you can now click on enemy units to see their move range displayed onscreen while you continue planning your move. (Below, you can see the Blue player checking on the move range of an enemy archer while selecting a destination for her swordsman.)



--Additionally, there are your garden variety bug fixes and balance tweaks. For instance: due to feedback received during the last playtesting party (which was this past Saturday), I've decided to increase the amount of energy characters regenerate from spending the turn resting from 3 to 5.

More to come!

[RCIX]

I still want a mode where characters look like tiles from the periodic table of elements >.< (not to say what you have doesn't look good)

[Craig Stern]

Small update for today: I've customized the right-click menu with all of the major functions previously useable only with the keyboard: Next Character, Toggle Minimap, End Turn and Surrender. It's a small thing, but important to my goal of making the game playable solely with the mouse.

I still want a mode where characters look like tiles from the periodic table of elements >.< (not to say what you have doesn't look good)

If there's enough demand, I suppose I could implement a "tactical view" mode, but that's not very high priority tbh.

[Craig Stern]

Due to popular demand, I've added a new match option: Ally Pass-Through. When enabled, all characters can now pass through (but not land on) spaces occupied by members of their team, as in most tactical RPGs.

[Craig Stern]

I've now coded movement path arrows a la Fire Emblem to make the route of a character's movement more visually distinct when hovering over destination tiles. There's some tweaking left to do with it graphically, but the basic system is there:

[Craig Stern]

Finished the graphical tweaking: the move arrow now appears at character's feet rather than hovering over them.



As with everything else that still has placeholder art, there are going to be legit sprites for the move arrow segments eventually.

Additionally, I fixed a persistent (and annoying) bug involving certain listeners which prevented players from changing their names after playing a match. Good times.

[Craig Stern]

Update on the AI front!

CPU-controlled players now successfully generate a randomized turn order for their units, then move their units randomly around the battlefield in that order. Enemy units move correctly, obeying their step limits, using bridges, avoiding obstacles, abiding by whichever character pass-through rules the player has selected, and just generally obeying the game's movement rules.

I mean, granted, CPU units are still dumb as rocks: they still don't use attacks, attempt to advance toward particular battlefield goals, or even try to keep their backs away from enemy units. And their players don't move them in any sort of intelligent order. There is a ton of work left to do on enemy AI. But I feel good about today's breakthrough. This was a huge chunk of the groundwork necessary to get things moving. Once I get enemies attacking, I'll be able to move onto the higher-order decision-making portions of the AI.

[Craig Stern]

There has been further work on bug fixes and unit balancing. Multiplayer matches are becoming more and more enjoyable. The next big feature I want to code is environmental damage from getting pushed into water, lava and chasms. (Related feature: environmental damage from getting a boulder or other battlefield object pushed onto you.)

In the meantime, I've coded a couple of hotkeys that automatically take screenshots of the game and save them to the game's Data folder encoded as lossless .png files:

F10 - take a normal screenshot of the screen
F12 - take a screenshot of the entire battlefield at once, including portions that are offscreen

The second of these, especially, should be fun for memorializing your cleverest, most brutal tactical maneuvers mid-game.

[Craig Stern]

Well, crap. My artist just abruptly quit after signing a deal with some company that required him to drop all other projects. Which means that I need a pixel artist again. Know any talented pixelers out there interested in paid work doing the art for an awesome tactics game? Have them drop me a line.

In the meantime, coding continues...

[Pineapple]

 

[Nugsy]

Crazy artist person!
I'm sure someone will be willing to help you out.

[Craig Stern]

Thanks for the support, guys. I'm searching out a new artist as we speak.

New update: you can now push, pull and throw non-flying characters into water, lava, pits, etc. Depending on what type of tile it is they were thrown onto, they will take a certain amount of environmental damage each turn they remain.

Because non-flying characters can't actually move across these tiles, they won't be able to climb out unless they're next to a space they can normally walk on. This isn't a huge problem for characters that have been shoved a single space into water or lava (provided that the enemy doesn't then move a second character in the way to block them from climbing out). For non-flying characters who've been thrown multiple spaces, however, you'll need to use a Mentalist to telekinetically pull them to safety, or else have your Engineer build bridges out to wherever it is they're stranded so they can climb out.

[cynicalsandel]

This looks amazing. I love RPGs, Strategy, and Tactics games. I love seeing indie developers working on them too. I've been watching this thread, but I never had anything to say. I still don't, but I'm trying to show my support anyway.

I hope you find a new pixel artist soon!

[Craig Stern]

Thanks! I've gotten a really good response so far; I hope to have chosen a new artist by next week.

[Craig Stern]

I've got some nice little updates to the game:

-- You can now click on the minimap to automatically pan to the area of the map clicked. It's very fast, and makes navigation around the battlefield (which was already pretty easy to begin with) even easier.

-- The game now has options to impose a turn time limit on each player. The time limit can be 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes or  20 minutes, depending on how fast you want the game to go. (Or, of course, you could choose to not have a time limit at all.) The turn timer itself is in-game and working. The timer is designed to prevent players from taking forever deliberating during their turns; as such, it automatically pauses during character movement and attack animations, then resumes. When it reaches 0, it automatically kicks control over to the next player.

-- I fixed a small computer AI bug. (Exciting, right?)

[Pineapple]

I would recommend that you include some options going as low as 5 seconds, for people that want to play insanely fast.

[Craig Stern]

5 seconds?! Sheez--I can barely select and move a single unit in 5 seconds, let alone select an attack afterwards!

What do you all think: is 5-second mode something you want in a game like this?

[Pineapple]

Personally, I would never play at such a setting, but

might. If there's no downside to including it, then why not?