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[danieru]

We've got influence maps 

[.Uberren]

Reworked the river mouth to fit in with the new cliff tiles:

Going to work on the actual river texture next 

[.Uberren]

Started working on the battle cinematic attack helicopters:

[Squidly]

So was this project dropped? I was really looking forward to it, I really need some more AW.

[danieru]

Muhaha! Nope not dropped. We are working harder than ever getting it ready for the Tokyo Indie Fest. We have been posting a few screenshots to twitter though.

[danieru]

Our last update was almost 4 months ago. Since then we have been working harder than ever. Which seems weird to say. You would expect months of silence to mean a team has disbanded. Instead we just never took time off development to post anything 

We rewrote from HTML5 to Unreal Engine. The game looks better, runs better, overall I am very happy with the rewrite. The rewrite did set us back several months. We were rushing to get something playable for Tokyo Indie Fest but we managed. Yet now the ordeal is behind us. So, onto the new!

This is what the game looks like now:


Path drawing now works. Plus there are damage predictors informing the player approximately how much damage an attack will do.

[RujiK]

Something looks different. Did you increase the bloom or glare or something? Looks kinda glowy.

[danieru]

  I just took a look at the code base and something is wrong! It has all been rewriten in c++. Who did that!? 

[danieru]

Ok, time to get this devlog going again.

Far too much has improved about Super Battlelands. I am not going to bore you with the story or the changelist. Just know that Super Battlelands is a little bit more the game I want it to be.

Here is the current visual state:



There is a menu system and even a propression system:



The campaign unlocks new maps as you beat the newest map. The combat system is much more complex. The AI is better than ever, pretty fun to play against I'd say. I presented the game at Tokyo Indie Festival and I learned a bunch of ways to improve the game.

I did lose a metric ton of progress by doing the rewrite. Maybe worst of which was getting out of the habit of updating the devlog. In hindsight the weekly newsletters were a bit much, monthly would make more sense I think. The daily updates here are something I want to resume though. I work on the game everyday and not updating is just a recipie to forget what I did in a day.

[Bombini]

Happy to see that you are still working on it!

[grandslam]

I am totally getting the modern day Advance Wars feel from this it looks sick ashell. have to admit I did not read the whole thread as it is hella long are there any plans to let you upgrade units?

[danieru]

Thanks Bombini. I see you are still working on Space Pirate, its looking good  

The fruits of today's work is to generate the skirmish map list from the code side map database. Which now exposes a bunch more maps.



@grandslam: What are you thinking of by upgrading? Units themself do not last long in the battle field if thats what you mean?

[nkm]

Looks good!
But how are you going to improve on Advance Wars?

nkm

[danieru]

Turns out I already has improved on AW  Just not in the way I expected.

What I've brought to the formula is a streamlined play scheme. It sounds trivial but when you get playing the entire experience just feels like a good water slide.  I sort of stumbled onto the scheme through a decision and 2 happy mistakes.

1. From the beginning I wanted attacks and moves to be menu-less. So instead of moving and selecting to attack now you draw the movement path and close the path with the cursor over the unit to be attacked.

2. In the Tokyo Indie Fest build I had a nasty bug. If players were fast they could issue a unit move while a prior unit was still moving. By the third day I decided to keep this bug, I liked how it eliminated the annoying wait between moving units. This required rewriting much of the Unreal side code to support decoupling the game simulation and the game visualization but that has been already.

3. At one point Ren's highly detailed battle screens got removed. It turns out that the game is better without the constant transitions to the battle screen so they have been kept out.

The net result is that Super Battlelands is hard to stop playing. A turn takes seconds, and the AI itself is even faster. Now when I play FE or AW I get annoyed at the micro-interuptions, they just feel slow. Think of Civlization with better combat and no AI wait.

So what Super Battlelands brings to the table is to make moving units fun. I still want to add those mechanics I've been dreaming of but the game does not necessarily need them.

[JobLeonard]

Funny you should mention Civilization! Your innovations sound similar to my wish-list for the Civ games, which are such a click-fest near the end. Although in the latter case it's also a matter of scaling.

Have you figured out a workaround for that? The ability to select multiple units and move them as a group perhaps?

[danieru]

The solution I think is to keep the maps a reasonable length. I did have a test map with 100+ cities but otherwise in a properly designed map every unit move counts. Most of the player's actions should be rewarding. Still moving units to the battle front late game can get boring, I will need to keep an eye out to see if it gets excessive.

The solution might be to keep high tier units cost effective so the player prefers to have fewer units to move.

[danieru]

Yesterday and Today I made the air units buildable at the airport, while removing the air units from the factory. Yup, bombers were buildable at the factories 

[danieru]

A few more screenshots I took in prep for redoing the website.








Gifs troublesome due to how often the camera moves. It is on my TODO list to rewrite the camera is it avoids moving if possible. Should make it easier for player's eyes to focus. That change will also make gifs much smaller so the compression isn't so painful.

[Bombini]

Can#t wait to give it a try 

[grandslam]

Still looks sick and still wondering about if you can upgrade units.