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[delete me]

Also:

I just played your game for almost 1.5 hours. I really like it.   

[electrolyte]

Ah, my bad, I left in the ability to raise and lower land outside your populants range. You can only raise and lower land if one of your houses or populants are in the view port. This stops you from going and drowning CPU players outside your range!

The final maps will be weighted, the 3 islands in the demo are put together quite quickly. Thanks again.

[Eli (Threeli)]

Ah, my bad, I left in the ability to raise and lower land outside your populants range.

Now thank makes more sense.  You've certainly got a more intense game on your hands now then.

[electrolyte]

Some updates to the engine adding more particle systems (v0.3). 'Fire rain' now has some impressive earth scorching effects. Sprite walk cycle animations have been tweaked. A new bitmap selecting system has also been added behind the scenes allowing different world environments such as snow, rain, desert etc. Great more work!

[J. R. Hill]

This game is boss.  Could you make the tile-selection cursor vaguely outline the tile?  I have trouble telling which tile I'm on with all the elevation differences...  Also there needs to be a rule about terror-forming on enemy territory because as it is I can just sink the enemy without even approaching them.

[Gainsworthy]

Ah, my bad, I left in the ability to raise and lower land outside your populants range. You can only raise and lower land if one of your houses or populants are in the view port. This stops you from going and drowning CPU players outside your range!

Ahh, that's the stuff! Already trickier.

Funnily enough, I left the game for an hour-or-so whilst I had lunch, and when I returned, the entire map was covered in land, positively full of red buildings, interspersed with swathes of ruined buildings and burnt land. Two of my palaces remained.

Needless to say, it was pretty odd.

[electrolyte]

Needless to say, it was pretty odd.

As in you through it was a bug or something?

[saint11]

Awesome, I'll check it out as soon I get to my PC! I looove the style!

[Gainsworthy]

Needless to say, it was pretty odd.

As in you through it was a bug or something?

Oh no, it was more astonishing. The mechanics going on behind the game allow it to play and change itself - and beat your ass when one isn't paying attention.

The swathes of destruction were the strangest bit.

Though it does bring to mind - what are your thoughts on natural decay? It seems that houses build land (when the flags go up?), but maybe land could sink if it's damaged, deforested and bordered by water?

Also I have no idea what trees do. They're super pretty though.

[zihnibabuz]

love art, love game 

[Paul Jeffries]

It's a nice looking, fun game.  I found it a little confusing at first (possibly because I've never played populous) and as has been mentioned before it can be hard to tell which ground tile you are actually over.  I also found it easy to disrupt the enemy just by sticking a bloody great mountain wherever they were trying to build, however the fireball, lightning spells etc don't seem to actually have much effect.  Sometimes I could terraform the enemy land and sometimes I couldn't, it wasn't entirely clear why.  However, I'm guessing that these are issues which will be adressed anyway as the game develops.

[electrolyte]

Friday, Day 224 into development.



So I decided to quickly do a little round up. Looking at Mine Craft today I realise how easily the game could have taken on some of its game play mechanics. The early engine for Reprisal was based on a 'block' generated landscape (see above image) and was very fast to create.

Wanting to move it towards the current angular less block feel did take a fair bit of thinking about, maths and code but from a design point of view I think its working a treat. I do however like the idea of making players mine or gather resources to let them build and terror-form land rather than waiting for mana collection. I'll be thinking about this a bit more as there is a possible angle here...

In other news been addressing some usability UI issues to help you locate which tile your on easily. This was brought up in feedback from this forum.

Hope to get my head down with a new playable release update soon.

[electrolyte]

++ Playable Island 4 ‘Big Freeze’ released [v0.4] ++
http://dev.electrolyte.co.uk/flash/pop/yiro9384j01/

Another beta island has been released to mark a new release of the Reprisal engine. Island 4 - ‘Big Freeze’ supports some early versions of new terrain types.



Various bug issues have been fixed and you will be able to play with a new power on island 4 - ‘Big Freeze’, but you will have to find that! Don’t forget you can gather populants by placing and gathering them with your ‘Waypoint’ marker power.  



Pretty tumblr Dev blog can also be found:
http://mlmgamedev.tumblr.com/

[sonicblastoise]

LURV IT. LURV U.

[electrolyte]

Thanks! :D

For those that are interested I've posted a video showing land in-game bits and bobs.

You can watch it here!

[sonicblastoise]

Haven't played much more past stage 1 yet, but I had to throw my 2 cents in after my unintelligible lolspeak post before.

pros
-art style is catching. I like the way the sprites move and the interface is colorful and easy to look at. Great use of DOF to create a focal point, something I like to see since it's a decidedly retro-style game (but it doesn't mean that it cant' have modern effects/mechanics!)
-gameplay is super-simple. Easy to control, but even though others who have said they couldn't understand how to complete objectives, I had little trouble getting there. Still, I can see how the lack of helps can make the experience kind of confusing.
-dynamic change. I like how the towns and cities grow by themselves based on the amount of land you give them. It feels alot like an old win95 game called "Baldies 95" (back in the day when games had the OS attached. LOL!) which required both land and people to have them grow and thus produce bigger and better things. It gives me a sense a mystery and wonder, hoping that the little huts I help plan will eventually turn into mighty fortresses.

cons
-interface is a bit imprecise. also theres this issue of being able to raise mountains and then flatten them to create a huge amount of flat land for half the cost of raising it square by square. I don't know if its intentional, but it might have been missed, because it does make sense that point-raising would raise the land around it a la SimCty 4. But it seems exploitable.
-it's too...easy? Well. I dunno. Haha

misc.
-not much gameplay. It's a prototype/WIP, so I imagine you're still fleshing this out. I'm aware that the primary mechanic is this indirect control of what happens, but I'm hoping that it incorporates some amount of direct control or perhaps an evolution of your town/fighting force (or peace force) via a series of choices outside each individual map. I guess the closes thing I can imagine is how SPORE allowed you to characterize your "tribe" via its actions, and thus unlocked new actions (but locked you into a path). It adds a sense of consequence and maybe could introduce new gameplay choices for the player.
-no opposing gods. Right now the game is pretty easy once you get the hang of it, and because there are no real dynamic elements aside from the other tribe, you can take your sweet time building a pretty unstoppable dudeforce. Maybe a note from "From Dust" can be taken to introduce a kind of dynamic obstacle that messes with your towns, like a volcano or tsunami that will periodically try and shake things up, that you have to "defend" against.

There you go! Otherwise, this is looking great and super fun so far. Played it for quite a bit last night!

[electrolyte]

Thanks for the feedback, In response to one of the points raised ...

no opposing gods. Right now the game is pretty easy once you get the hang of it, and because there are no real dynamic elements aside from the other tribe, you can take your sweet time building a pretty unstoppable dudeforce. Maybe a note from "From Dust" can be taken to introduce a kind of dynamic obstacle that messes with your towns, like a volcano or tsunami that will periodically try and shake things up, that you have to "defend" against.

Yep the other tribes will be unleashing their own powers against you. I'm just working on the A.I for this. The routine will allow the CPU players to show an 'interest' in a part of the map and then depending on the CPU's own mana score will take action by unleashing a power. The biggest thing will be getting the balance right as it will be kinda bonkers when your up against 3 CPU players! Rest assured there will be a lot of play testing.

[electrolyte]

Started working on the CPU player’s A.I for controlling and unleashing their own powers against you. This is going to dramatically ramp up the toughness factor to conquer islands with each CPU player having their own play style. I’m not going to go into too much detail and bore you all with the in’s and out’s but the A.I looks for ‘intresting’ areas of the game area and weighs up what it should do depending on what it finds! Watch this space…

** Update made to demo link [v0.5] includes early A.I routines **
http://dev.electrolyte.co.uk/flash/pop/yiro9384j01/

[electrolyte]

Been more updates in game play. 'Twister' power is almost finished off and will be in the next beta build update. This proved very difficult as plotting dust points and converting to Isometric coords needed some serious head scratching maths!

Tweaks have also been made to the A.I. and now providing a more challenging game. An additional land type, Desert, has also been added. Expect to see this in the new Beta update due to land within the week!

[electrolyte]

Build 0.6 released … with ‘HD’ 800 X 600 game view!
http://dev.electrolyte.co.uk/flash/pop/yiro9384j01/

The full conversion isn’t finished so some of the dialogue boxes may be placed weird and out of place.

With the new size conversion almost finished it’s been coded in such a way that in theory any width and height can be supported with the game adjusting it’s display and hud.