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[thuyquai]

News: Ground Breakers is released on Steam Early Access

Hi all, just want to show you our on progress game. It's a turn based strategy with random campaign (conquest them all kind of map) and each match is settled by a grid-based battle. Each units have 3 active skills and you can bring 5 units to a match.



And here is a gameplay trailer but it is... well outdated
http://www.indiedb.com/games/ground-breakers/videos/pre-alpha-trailer-with-soundfx

The new gameplay video is here:




Oh, and the showing off video, made when bored.
http://www.indiedb.com/games/ground-breakers/videos/ground-breaking-video

Key features:

1. Conquest the world by dominates each region turn by turn and defeats all opposing forces. Forces are corporation and organization run by unique AI, by unique I mean unique in personalities which will make them issue different orders and trigger different events.
2. Classic turn based tactic battle with grid map. Which force dominate more tactic points will emerge victory.
3. The battlefield (or I could say battle office) has multiple floors. Each floor will have numerous of tactic points and you will descend to the lower floor after all tactic points are captured or someone actively break the floor.

Will you able to capture this tactic point or it will belong to your enemy?

 

4. Units in Ground breakers are robots run by water. Each robot will have one set of skills and different stats. Some are hard to kill, some are grass cannons. Use skill raise your heat and when you overheat, you can’t use any skill. You will just have to wait for a few turn for your robot to cool down.

5. Each robot has a chip board which you can insert chips. Chips have different shape which you will have to arrange them in the board in the best way possible to maximum your robot’s abilities.
6. You will start the game with few robots (5 at the moment). To get more robot, you need to play a game and win some parts to craft new robots. Each robot has different recipe ans what parts you will get is pure luck.
7. Ground breakers will have cross-platforms online battle.

My goal is create a turn based strategy for multiple platforms. It's free to play with some small profit in there (like in maple story and LOL, thing that doesn't affect game balance).

So far we have created a single match play (but with many good feedback, we thing it's far from finish). Some lab and equipments.

I'm adding animations for units right now and hopefully finish it in 2 weeks.
I just want a place to hangout here :D

[thuyquai]

One of the unit can plan a tower that heal all units within range for 3 turns

[thuyquai]

New gameplay video. Is there a way to embed video here?

http://www.desura.com/games/ground-breakers/videos/new-gameplay-footage

[thuyquai]

Our new fantastic water battleground, check it out
https://www.facebook.com/groundbreakersgame
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=195789636

[Osteel]

Wow that water looks refreshing. :D

[thuyquai]

Here is some more screenshots



Ingame GUI:



One of our unit:


BTW, we have been greenlit since March
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=195789636

[thuyquai]

we are struggling with community building

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 1

We coming up with a compiled gameplay video since the alpha trailer is pretty outdated, hopefully that would hook someone into the game development . I'm currently at 30% but I'll finish it tomorrow. There was so many scene I want to keep since I kinda love my game too much for my own good.

To Unity dev: If you are like us, prefer the convenient and laziness of Unity asset server to Git (I know Git is superior in many ways but it need more actions and sometimes feel like a chore for me). Please remove AVG free on your asset server, it stop our asset from going in or out and will cause asset server to stop unexpectedly. Cheer!

If you are someone with a kind soul reading this now, could you tell us what information need to be added the most about our game. Thanks in advance.

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 2

Not much progress today since its holiday, still working on ingame footage video. One thing I noticed while working on the vid today is our game still has so many visual bugs and I kinda hate myself for that  . While normally after implemented a feature we edit some variables to make the function appear more often, we could also spot early bugs but the testing time will be really fast, play a full match will help us discover more rare bugs, so trying to record a video helps in some ways.

BTW we have this weird worm:

the tail shouldn't vibrating like that those, too weird  , we will need to make it more inline.

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 3

Here is the beta gameplay footage, enjoy

[Pixel Noise]

Looking good! I really like the idea - using robots as your fighters really gives you a lot of options for customization and attacks. I also think it could be fun to keep things sort of lighthearted, plus, you could definitely cameo all sorts of "famous" robots (Claptrap, R2D2, etc).

[thuyquai]

He, Pixel, we did make a cameo for claptrap and it did not end well, players seem to want to point out copyright a lots, so we have to change it to the new model:



Your idea sounds good, maybe we could also break robot down to parts to lets player build their own robot

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 4

Today we continue working on Map events for map snow, but lets me talk about map events first.

Each battleground in this game will have auto hazard event (with exception).
For example:

• Water map has TIDE, which means water level will rise and fall, and unit that stand on water will have reduced movement.
• Desert map has cyclone that throw every units on its path to another position
• Spring map has springs (the metal one, not the season name)
• And Snow map has hailstorm which lower everyone heat and free who is too cold

And player's controlled event we will call Battleground's Skill. Skills could be acquired when player upgrade their technology. Each floor will have 1 BS for 3 floors.
For the snow map, first floor provide Break the Ice skill, which break the random set of Ice tile and dealt damage to units stand there, we actually done this already.

We working on the second floor where player call out a yeti, whom hate skills and will throw snow ball at anyone using skill. It may look like this:

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 5

I'm working to finish battleground skill for map Snow today.
The third floors skill will call an array of snowballs that roll from left to right or vice-versa and dealt damage to units stand on its path.

If it's only left or right, player could easily hide their units beside enemies to not get hits. But since it may come from both sides, you probably have to willing to take damage and see if it'll benefit you more than enemy.

This image lack on hit effect those, we are working on it:

So that conclude the events and skills for Snow map, moving on to Volcano map.


My teammate Tuan, encounter a weird bug today. After an unit turn to visible then turn back to visible state, they will lost material. Turn out unity deleted their old shaders after moving from Unity4 to Unity5 so the code can't find the shader. This is not a first time the migration cause us trouble, it happen quite often and probably will happen more, their auto upgrading sucks.


btw new unit model is incoming:


the idea behind the animation is that this robot use arrow to attack. And each circle will multiply it's power to fly farther an faster.

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 6

We added a background for Volcano map today, have a look if you will:






Also we re-adding obstacles in our map. After the remodeling of our map, I temporary disable obstacle system but now we want it back. And I have added many rules for auto generating procedure.

• First you random what kind of texture you want for each square. And they must come as  a group and a texture type must be next to some specific textures to make it looks logical.
• Second you have to random the height of each square. We start the map with all Height 0 square, then we pick random group of square to raise it's height to 1, then we pick random group of square from height 1 to raise it and repeat until we reach height 4. So most of the square could be traveled to from low to high, but some doesn't have steps so your unit could only reach it if you could Jump
• Third, you have random decoration objects on top of them, like grass could only appear on dirt, cactus on sand and so on... to make it more variety.
• Finally we dim some of the texture as non-walkable texture and test to make sure you could still reach enemy or tactic point with a walkable path. If you can't, remove an obstacle until the path is available

So that's it for today.

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 7

Bad progress today, I was stuck with the mistake I made yesterday about non-walkable texture generating.

Finally we dim some of the texture as non-walkable texture and test to make sure you could still reach enemy or tactic point with a walkable path. If you can't, remove an obstacle until the path is available

This doesn't work as expected, some squares are dimmed as non-walkable but your unit could still step on it. Maybe logically it's a walkable square while it looks like non-walkable square. So the problem may lie in the "remove an obstacle until the path is available" process. We removed it in the list but did not update it's texture to walkable again. Will have to recheck tomorrow.

The red lava squares are non-walkable.


P/S: I used A* to test a path from spawn point of each side to tactic point

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 8

We fixed the walking on lava bug. It's just a small bug that caused by putting "<" and "<=", nothing worth sharing here.
Back to the sandworm things.
We used Unity's http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-HingeJoint.html  to link all parts of the worm, so we don't have to calculate each parts position per frame.

But there was a problem, the parts tend to rotate pass the joint limits and result in a vibrating sand worm. So to combat the problem we have to put the vibrating part off screen, make the worm jump higher than the camera.

Here is it's trajectory path:


And the final result:




We will make another worm called Fire Worm for lava map, stay tuned!

[thuyquai]

Update Post Greenlit 9

Its me again, the guy talking to himself .

We are moving on to making tutorial since our core single play mechanic is somehow finished.
I made tutorials for many games before, and its bad. Usually players just want to skip it. Or find it too boring, and they will just complaining about game rule after skip it.

So this time I'm gonna make it a tiny campaign which everyone has to finish it in order to access main menu. And it must have good feeling when play it. We will probably introduce some core characters here as well.

And its tutorial so nothing fancy to show for now.

[ProgramGamer]

Hey, I saw your first post and if you're still looking for feedback I can maybe provide some if your game runs on a Surface Pro 3.

Update Post Greenlit 9

Its me again, the guy talking to himself .

Not anymore you're not!

[michaelplzno]

Interesting project. In your video why do a bunch of the tiles shake around? It looks like some sort of physics bug to me but it might be a feature?