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[Belimoth]

I have been distracting myself from real development by coding the game for the Game Boy Advance but that is over now. Retro console development is a siren song.

[Gregg Williams]

I have been distracting myself from real development by coding the game for the Game Boy Advance but that is over now. Retro console development is a siren song.

I think I've been making save throws vs that idea for a few years now... A clean small assembly instruction set on a nice little fixed hardware platform sounds fantastic. Just also very unproductive in the Nuyen department.

[Belimoth]

I know, right? I find myself heading down that road whenever I get sick of garbage collection/cross platform inconsistencies/other high level programming woes.

However this project is supposed to be the one where I wade through all that to finish a design so I'm trying not to think about it.



I've hit a bit of a wall trying to build an economy system that I like.
The very first iteration of this design had more card game elements. Cards represented a group of units, say 5 swordsmen or 4 spearmen, and could be used infinitely with a cooldown. The first stage of a player's turn would be adding a card from their deck to their hand. Hands started empty and were visible to the other player.

The card game aspect of it died a little at a time. There were "spell" cards and those got cut pretty quick because they were just thoughtless imitation. Cutting group spawning killed it a little bit, and it was never very developed to begin with. Couldn't squeeze enough meaningful choice out of it.

Not having pre-game deck/army building of any kind opens up the playspace more I think, and I like that. But now to have the variety of units that I want without becoming unmanageable there has to be another layer of rules...



An idea I am toying with now kind of revisits the deck/hand dynamic and also resembles your typical strategy tech-tree thing. You can buy units the same way you do now, but first you have to buy the ability to buy each type of unit. Using the same currency? Another currency? I don't know.

I think fitting the system to the existing unit dynamics is probably the wrong way to go about it so when I have it figured out I am going to revisit all of the unit designs to fit them to the new system. For now they are just primordial ooze.

[Belimoth]

Other work I am doing perpendicular to that: working on ideas for more interesting terrain features so that opening moves can be more interesting than "spawn a unit and move it to the nearest flag." Fighting player optimization is the goal here.

If anybody has any ideas Re:the above or is better than me at strategy games I'd love to hear other perspectives.

Also sorry if any one followed this expecting ＩＮＤＩＥ  ＶＩＳＩＯＮ no refunds.

[Gregg Williams]

Since your getting rid of pre-game army building, perhaps it makes more sense to further strategize the map, by making it necessary to control certain buildings/whatever to be able to summon/construct certain units. Kinda like Z I suppose. Want that calvary? Best capture and control the stables. Economy could be eliminated and instead unit creation takes X turns to complete. Allowing for enemy captures to inturrupt production and so forth.

What's your plans of the networked side of things?

[Belimoth]

I like the idea of interrupting things in-progress, that's the direction I am going with capturing control points. Would make sense to extend that to other things.

I am suspicious of factory-style unit production because

• Then I am making Advanced Wars: Medieval Edition.
• It seems like a way to solve both of the problem areas (economy and terrain) at once and consolidating mechanics is my last line of defense for design problems.

It's definitely on the table though.



Right now the game is structured for hotseat multiplayer and allegedly I can already make it do networked multiplayer with a few lines of code I've commented out. My plan was to release a public online version as soon as I've got a nice server that has a lobby and can record games for me.

For the final version I haven't figured quite out how I want to straddle the line between "real-time" and "play-by-mail" styles of play. It will depend on who wants to play the game and how the pacing turns out.

I have an idea for meta-gameplay that involves players accumulating territory by winning matches that also would serve as a ranking system, but I haven't ironed out the kinks enough yet.

[Gregg Williams]

Factory style unit production certainly is less realistic in ways, but it of course has been used tons in games to.

Age of Empires / every RTS?

Heroes of Might and Magic had the same concept to, just no timer to produce a unit, and instead X units of that dwelling type would become available to buy or get for free every week.

Anyways seems like your making good progress, puts M.I.N.T to shame sorta

[Belimoth]

Master of Magic too, which I can't help but think about constantly.

You are hilarious

[Belimoth]

08--n7.r6-79.84 did a mockup with snow colors, so I put them in to see how it looks.



Cool.

EDIT: Wow, that's tiny. Replaced with 2x.

[Belimoth]

Stronghold-style terrain flattening:

[Belimoth]

Showing the terrain from anything but a top-down perspective has a lot of consequences.

Possible fix for smooth cursor movement:

[Belimoth]

Guys I never want to deal with layering 2D tiles ever again.

EDIT: That's my way of saying that the new perspective is done.

[Gregg Williams]

Just switch to hex

[Belimoth]

My heart might stop if I did that.

[marvinhawkins]

Looks good. Looks like you're making some nice progress dude!

[antoniodamala]

Neat progress.

[Belimoth]

Dear TIGSource,

How do I solve this problem?


I have a few bad ideas but no good ones.

[08--n7.r6-79.84]

I tried to add a stroke to Lance Cavalery, but it didn't solve this problem:



Can this character hold two tiles? This has its own logic - a man on a horse takes more space than a man without a horse.

And btw, do you like idea with character portraits?

[Belimoth]

The multiple-tiles thing has been suggested by a few people now so I've been trying it out to see how much I'd have to fudge the rules to make them work. The outlook is bleak on that solution.

The closest I've gotten to a nice solution is using combinations of stroke + shrinking the tall sprite + position the small sprites higher in the tile + larger tiles, but that doesn't solve the problem with occlusion by terrain. Still needs a lot of thinking...

I can't find any games that use the same perspective and don't use diamond tiles >_< Maybe it can't be done.

I like the portraits! Would be cool to use for dialog in the story mode.
Could even use them to be generals on the overworld, they have too much personality to be just disposable soldiers.

[Belimoth]

Still chopping up assets and ironing out the rules, gonna have a cool update pretty soon.