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[JobLeonard]

Will the merging stay this... explosive?

[danieru]

Explosions are a sign of a good game. This is a good game. Ergo explosions.

[danieru]

The rewrite into Unreal gave me a chance to design a better architecture for the game engine. Terrain modification is a major feature unlocked by that rewrite. In the old HTML5 engine all terrain was loaded once on start using a special shared object. Now terrain is a first-class game mechanic. It changes using the same code path regular game vents such as battles use.

This means that the map editor is nothing more than a special player interface. As such getting the map editor to this stage was pretty fast.





The downside is I still have all the interface work to do. My goals for the map editor are:

1. Instant swapping between designing and play testing.
2. Save out maps to the same format as all other maps.
3. Encourage players to start with small maps until they learn how good maps are designed.

[JobLeonard]

Nice

[I_smell]

I think the black outline shader you're using looks very sloppy, for an otherwise quite sharp looking game.

I know you're using it to help pick out the important elements of what's onscreen, but consider doing that with colours instead. Maybe grass and water doesn't have to have saturation turned up so high- you could turn that down, and turn the player elements up for a much cleaner composition, without all the black outlines.

Just sayin.

[danieru]

You mean that the outline is an poor outline shader? Or that no outlines would be better?

[danieru]

Nothing glamorous to report, just that edited map saving now works round trip. Edited maps can be saved and loaded.

On an unrelated note if you have not already seen it fellow tokyo developer Moppin released his game Downwell a few days ago. Do check it out if you're in the mood for a high quality game for your phone: http://www.downwellgame.com/

[danieru]

Super Battlelands is approaching two years of development so I have sent Feburary 7th my deadline. What gets finished is what will go into the initial release. 

Now I say this as if I just now decided it, when instead I have been working towards that approximate date for six months.

I have the OK from Uberren to release on itch.io when the build is ready. The map editor was a big feature I hated the thought of cutting. So I am glad it has been completed.

[JobLeonard]

Good luck!

[danieru]

Getting back into the Unreal Editor and just playing & tweeking has been invigorating! Past 7-8 weeks were spent deep in c++ fixing the gameplay bugs and hacking away at the save system. Pausing on the c++ stuff has been the best decision I have made in weeks!

Just today alone I have perfected the lighting, restyled the victory screen, and added an entire new main menu "world".

This screenshot alone makes me proud of these two years:


I hope the gameplay lives up to the beauty of Uberren's art. His art looks incredible, doubly so up close. I added the main menu world as an excuse to showoff the paintery textures to the player.

Click for larger image:

[shellbot]

This looks great. Following!

[Graphicalgeek]

Glad to see progress on this again!

[danieru]

Thank you for the kind words you two! Your words of encouragement really are the motivation to post here.

I was play testing over the weekend and thought this scene looked pretty tranquil.



Over the weekend I worked on the UI and audio. I figured out that I can reuse the material test level Uberren created as a main menu backdrop. Now every time the game starts it picks 1 out of 6 cameras.

You can see two of those random cameras below in the screenshots for the Settings and Credits menu.





Here is the entire material test level.

[JobLeonard]

 

[Bombini]

Keep up the good work!
Love it!

[danieru]

After nearly two years in development its ready! Tonight I released Super Battlelands on itch.io!

Please check it out. If you buy it I promise to fix any bugs you hit. Sorry I don't have a team of bug testers so I am worried something major might have gotten through.

http://0x143.itch.io/super-battlelands



Includes the map editor:

[JobLeonard]

Will there eventually be non-Windows versions?

[danieru]

Which do you need Linux or Mac?

[JobLeonard]

Linux!

[danieru]

Ah! A man after my soul!

Yeah sadly I stopped using linux about a year ago because of Unreal's instability. Hehe, I did four years of linux development then jumped ship for my games programming hobby. Ironic enough, during my time at Microsoft I was still going home to a linux machine.

Which is just a long way of saying: I understand you and I wish I could do my part to make linux viable, but it might a while for Linux support.