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[ericmbernier]

So much awesome in the art style. Following.

[muppetpuppet]

More bloodshed and combat
(scroll down for the video)

Basically the game is build on 4 basic stats for units, (health, stamina, defense and attack, each related to a resource and unit alchemy ingredient, blood, essence, bone and steel)

in the first combat iteration, I had a full unit stats interface. Which was both confusing and cluttering up the valuable mobile screenspace. After some prodding I revisited the idea and wiped away the Idea to expose the stats to a user. So I went looking for a combat feedback interface that would give enough information and control to retain a strategic approach but also was immediate and clear.

As you can see even without the unit alchemy, resource management and special abilities the interface is starting to clutter, and already confusing.[/size]


So Introducing  the evil eye
These dudes look pretty confident going in. Or sneaky , who can tell yet.

Basically the evil eye pops up on an Unit if its engaging an enemy, or being engaged. It won't tell you any stats or detail, but it will tell you if your unit is scared or confident about the looming confrontation..

On top of that the Evil Eye is a button that will retreat the unit from the engagement, and cause him to flee and abandon his squad (to fight another day).

In the future the Evil eye will also allow the player to assign special abilities to the evil eye, not just fleeing, but for instance giving the unit a beserk mode, buffing him but also draining his stamina.

The Evil eye now serves multiple functions in the game design.

1. it gives the player enough info at a glance, does this unit stand a chance or not!
2. Allow the player to control individual units only when needed, flee being the default control (regular controls are squad based)
3. gives urgency to the combat interactions and creates a bit of twich and respons during and preceding combat.
4. removes the need to forward more detailed info to the player , especially when he doesn't need it. De-cluttering at least a sizable portion of the interface.



Its a very very simple gameplay device, but I feel it works quite well for a mobile oriented RTS.


video:



Got a quite a heavy squad roaming the map killing units.. At the end you'll see them running out of steam, and at the very end i retreat my remaining units.


Well.... onto unit Alchemy for the next iteration. (oooh, and yes unit death anims will be replaced by  a cool effect later, not just sinking into the ground, emm working without textures here;) 
Tomas

[Games Inquirer]

Great progress, keep it up 

[muppetpuppet]

So lets have a look at resources and reliquaries.
There's 5 flavours of resources  to be found, blood, essence,steel, bone and a fifth souls.These come in reliquaries, ancient containers and links to the real world.

These resources are normally hidden, but can be summoned by the Father Longlegs unit (or the denmother, not yet decided)..

Once a summoning ritual is performed a relevant Reliquary is raised from the sands.. Relevant to the location and tile (little hints in the environment will indicate what could be found)..

A relic will provide either resources at a fixed interval, but only as long as father longlegs or sub-unit is performing the ritual.. There is also the option to immediately claim the full resource and convert it to a special ability ingredient for the unit creation alchemy..


In the Screen I've placed in order the first designs for the reliquary, expect a video with the summoning ritual and raising animations soon.

there's the "tree of knowledge", "battlefield relic", "bone totem"," Saints reliquary" and finally the grave.. Now the first four stand for essence, steel, bone and blood. The grave stands for the resting place of a soul (I'm thinking a bit of crusades lore, foot soldiers, knights and kings from that era).. Each grave is protected and for instance a Kings grave will be a End level objective.

Once the grave is raised it can claimed for an intact soul. An intact soul will be a unit template, a shape,creature type and base abilities related to the strength of the soul .

Once you have a soul, you can mix it with the other resources to create a new creature to be summoned, a twisted shade of the original knight, footsoldier or king. A chained shadow.

[woodenrabbit]

Just discovered Oberon's Court and it looks fantastic! Very intriguing!

[Excy]

Holy crap this looks beautiful, I love the design of the enemies. Keep it up.

[rundown]

an original style. I like it!

[muppetpuppet]

Thanks, working hard on a first playable alpha version.  Sort of running against the wall of UI design.  I keep making interfaces and then removing them.  Especially as combat and other base systems are in place..

For instance I wanted the user to be able to design the stats and abilities of the unit. But then I lose the advantage of visual features indicating a certain strength.  (dragons  being all-round,knights being offensive but vulnerable etc etc)

So doing some real game-design work on the go.  sacrificing some ideas, for clarity and ease of understanding..  Adding other features and trying new stuff out.   

So keep watching, or join the facebook.com/oberonscourt for regular updates.

[muppetpuppet]

To 60fps or not?
So today was a shocking day, after developing for several months on my new nexus 7(2013) and being used to averaging 60-100fps, I decided to spend a few hours doing the annoying task of making a new IOS build.

As the only device I had handy was an old Ipad 2, I was shocked to see framerates around 60fps , peaking at 80 fps, not much below the android quadcore. Now the build I was testing was the latest build which is only missing final combat audio, the new special abilities and the cutscene/dialogue system.



So its safe to assume perfomance will drop a bit, but not a lot. But it brings a dillema, what to do with 60fps. We're talking a RTS here, so 60fps is excessive, although it feels soooo smooth.

The main choices are.
1. keep it at 60 fps, and present 60fps gaming on a mobile device, but it will drain as much battery power as any other hi-performance mobile game, which is usually very annoying. (it 'll run through my nexus's power in less than 2 hours)
2. cap it at 30fps, and have a nice stable framerate, but it won't tax your battery as much. (no idea on the actual gains, but it will be less than 50%, probably 25-30 % less drain, perhaps someone with more hardware knowledge can chip in here)
3. add some stuff, more objects, more units on screen , anti-aliasing etc etc.

Now the top two can be made user controlled, (in a settings menu), but the bottom one, will definetly tax your device more, and once level design/campaign design starts there's no going back on the unit-cap.

So what's your general feel, worth improving visuals and gameplay, or cap it and save some battery time?

A new alpha build

Here's a new video of the latest gameplay. (running in the sandbox level, as per usual)




Don't mind the fps here, its recorded from pc, and it just detonates the fps

In Production
So currently I've found a great voice actor do most of the voice acting and narration. That means hopefully the game will be fully voiced soon. Also the general music and audio is coming along nicely.

The final game-play coding to be implemented are , the special abilities. These come down to the following abilities a unit might gain in combat and that can be deployed as part of the player's strategy.
Sacrifice, Unit goes boom on combat
Vampirism, Unit gains health from combat with weaker units
Berserk, Unit sacrifices stamina and health to deal a single lethal blow
First Strike, Unit receives no damage, if enemy is killed
Intimidation, weaker units have chance of fleeing
Taunt , enemy units are drawn in towards the unit
Campaigns and dialogue.

The last part of development before beta will be the dialogue system, which will feature animated portraits and narration by Oberon himself.  And like mentioned voice recording is underway. Once that's done I'll start working on the first campaign and placeholder cut scenes.  So the end is insight, and a Christmas release is probably in the stars..

Cheers.

[muppetpuppet]

So what App icon to choose,

Its come down to these two options, Anybody here got an opinion on either?
I'm myself not sure which one is the best or most appropriate, the simple and icon one, or the one with both creatures thats a bit more storydriven.  

Recognizability vs storytelling, very hard choice.  Especially as the icons are bigger in both appstores,  so do you aim for that or do you aim for the homescreen (which are both bigger nowadays)


   




And here's the big versions

[somin]

I think just from looking and not knowing that much about the project I prefer the first one. Just from the overall readability and composition.
The second one with the two creatures made me think of multiplayer, not story.

[muppetpuppet]

Here's my new app icon,

And some screens of the latest build








It's quickly grabbed  shots so sometimes obscured by interfaces, hope you don't mind

[surt]

I personally prefer the second icon better communicates the game is about conflict.

Must say I do love the look of this game.

[muppetpuppet]

Yeh I know what you mean, but the majority of comments on the facebook and other communities went for the simpler icon,, that said the PC-version is going to probably have the complexer dual monster icon..

I've just decided to do some roguelike interior dungeons which you can enter from a campaign map.. Hope to show some progress on that soon..

[ericmbernier]

I prefer the first icon, for its simplicity. You can't go wrong with either of them though.

[muppetpuppet]

Thought my old design for Oberon was a bit meh, made a new Oberon (in his captured/frozen state).. A bit more animalistic to go with the rest of the theme.. Him being the fox/weasel of the game..

[muppetpuppet]

Really didn't like that last one, how about this?

[muppetpuppet]

REally why no video bbcode

[muppetpuppet]

So I've decided to add mini-dungeons to the game maps.. Allowing you to enter the different ruins and keeps on the main map..

These dungeons can unlock extra resources, or enemies.  Additionally some dungeons will allow the user to perform various rituals, such as chaining unformed shadows to your army, ascending existing units, or permanently buffing units..

Also you will meet some elder shadows that inhabit this underworld, such as cleaners, mechanics, or glutons..  Cleaners being insane elder shadows that devour any other shadow they come across,  the mechanics are hive mind, shadows that control the walking lands, and the glutons are shadows that have feasted to much and expanded to amorphous blobs

Anyhoe, here's some samples of a few dungeon themes

[muppetpuppet]

HI guys, besides Sinterklaas (offcourse),,  I've been hard at work.  I've tried to also take a few days of to not work on Oberon's court to get some distance and evaluate some gameplay choices (which was very fruitfull).. 

What's happened in development then:

1. reliquaries are no longer just random statues that pop up from the ground. I had a tracking minigame in mind, but with a bit of perspective that just felt like a cop-out,and a bad idea.  So you will now find fields of graves that will provide the blood reliquary (and resource,  and you'll find essence pools that provide the essence resource.  This way you'll be able to scout for resources and claim them more easily creating a better gameplay path through a map.



2. As I mentioned in a previous post,  i've been trying to put all the metagame stuff (managing your persistent army/collection)  in mini-dungeons.    This means you'll find the following (amongst others) items in the mini dungeons.  These will come in the shape of rituals to perform or elder shadows to meet. 
 -chaining a new shadow from its crypt (adding units to your army collection)
- upgrading units, (ritual)
- destroying units (you have a unit cap both in active units, and units in your collection) these are the mechanic elder shadows, searching for a way out of the underworld, and you can offer them one of your units as test subject.  (there's a bit of an over-arching quest feel to this, to reap the real reward)
-finding steel reliquaries
-finding bone reliquaries  (only blood/health and essence/stamina resources can be found on the main map now)
-receiving special abilities from custom encounters (based on the unit you send into the dungeon)
-random enemy encounters
- a few story driven encounters
-traps

The mini-dungeons are the largest remaining bit of actual coding and modelling/animating to be done.

3. I've also been working on removing the map-screen, you now have portals in the gameworld that will transport you to a new map, creating a bit of a roguelike feel to a campaign.   This is now working and finished, but required a lot of refactoring.

4. refactoring the load system, this was required for the seamless teleportation between maps.  Now the entire game system is loaded on startup and never unloaded. In practice this means the initial load time will be a bit longer, but the loading time between maps is a few seconds tops.    This as i'm keeping all the assets and pools in memory and then rebuilding a new map on the fly, but not destroying units and other pools.. 

This has cost me the most time so far, as it also meant creating a good level description system, such as what flavor/theme is a map, does it have a cutscene/intro, what enemies and what level enemies does it contain, what dungeons are accessible  etc etc.
]


5.Portrait mode.
I've been trying to get a good portrait mode working, so you can play it easily from your iphone, and are not required to flip your phone on the go.  This required some experimentation with the swipe sensitivity and Field of view for instance.

6.
beyond that I've been working on creating more variation in the level environment, so more mountains, plains and distinct set pieces. 

7. I've got a label!, as I'm self publishing I felt I needed a label, for this and future projects. Introducing Boof Games


And finally Oberon's Court has been nominated in the Slide DB GOTY awards under the catagory best upcoming RTS. If you'd like to help out please vote, its very appreciated if you do.. Just follow the link and click on the vote button, no registration required.
http://www.slidedb.com/events/2013-app-of-the-year-awards/top50  (select upcoming and then real time strategy) or directly on the gamepage: http://www.slidedb.com/games/oberons-court

So that's an update. Hope you liked it, and make sure to post and ask questions.