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[dez]

I second everything kruxus said. 

I might add that before continuing on animations and details,  why not just put everything aside and do some wild color and texture tests in photoshop.  Just go nuts.  See what comes out?  Basically do a visual brainstorm to make sure that the look will stand out just as much or more than the competitor. just imo.  Doesn't have to be 3D... just has to be REMARKABLE.

[and]

Playing with colour schemes:

[and]

An experiment gone wrong:



and another, perhaps a bit too colourful:



and finally, gone too far the other way:



Hmmm, I dunno about that last one actually.....

[and]

Or maybe something like this?

       or this >>>>>      ?

Thoughts?

Oh I also did this one but I think it's too grainy - I'm happy to be convinced otherwise

[dez]

they look good. 
I wanna see this thing play! 

[Netsu]

I definitely like this one the most

[DevWithoutACrew]

I like it a lot! When can we start firing some six shooters??

[michaelplzno]

The art is really moving to the next level since I last saw this. Posting to follow. 

[FuzzySlippers]

Love this concept. The world needs more Western games that aren't shooters.

[SamLouix]

This looks great. I think you should keep the 'Dull' colours. They look a lot more interesting than the, in my opinion, tacky bright colours!

I've sent you an E-Mail, because I'm interested about writing music for this!
http://eclipsejapan.jp/

[and]

Hey everyone, thanks for the nice words! I've been working on the AI and procedural level generation over the last couple of months, so I'll be showing that off in a week or so! Hopefully, so long as I can find all of the horrible bugs...

Now, since I haven't been keeping up with this like I should...

I like it a lot! When can we start firing some six shooters??

I'm hoping to get it into people's hands late December, early January, for balancing etc. Probably let the 'public' get ahold of it towards the middle of 2015.

The art is really moving to the next level since I last saw this. Posting to follow. 

I'll be uploading plenty more art over the next couple of months, so stay tuned!

Love this concept. The world needs more Western games that aren't shooters.

Agreed. Although there will still be some shooting hopefully...

This looks great. I think you should keep the 'Dull' colours. They look a lot more interesting than the, in my opinion, tacky bright colours!

I've sent you an E-Mail, because I'm interested about writing music for this!
http://eclipsejapan.jp/

I don't think I got the email, unless it's in there somewhere and I can't find it. I'll probably end up doing most of the music and sound myself, but I'm happy to be convinced otherwise if you've got some awesome Wild West style music!!

[quixotic]

Very interesting stuff. I would be interested in knowing more about the gameplay!

[and]

Hi everyone! Sorry it's been so long since the last proper post, things have been a bit hectic in my real life job, so I haven't really had time to update this thing.

That's about to change right now, as I'll now be posting twice weekly updates :D

I've been focussing solely on the fundamentals of the combat over the past few months, and I've finally settled on what is now the 5th iteration of the moving and shooting in the game. This is obviously a key part to the whole experience, so I wanted to make sure I was happy that it was challenging, satisfying and unique in the kind of tactical decisions the game forces you to make.

One of my main aims with the gameplay is present the player with various ways to balance risk versus reward on the different levels of the game. In the combat sections, this means making things clear enough to the player that they are able to infer how much risk a certain action will have. This is to allow them to make a reasonably informed decision as to whether or not they want to take that risk. Are you a gambling man?

Hopefully, this will all make sense in a little while.

Iteration 5

Sexy Debug Art

Before I talk about where it is now, I should probably tell you a little bit about where it started from.

Originally, the plan was for the game to be very much a Wild West Roguelike, except that you controlled other characters too. The initial pass at combat had all movement happen at the same time, so you would tell each of your characters which direction they were moving in and then the game updated (so your characters all moved and all the enemies moved at the same time). You could also shoot, but only in a straight line in the direction that you were facing. This actually worked quite well, but didn't really allow for a lot of depth and relied heavily on the layout of the levels to create variety. The biggest downside though, was how fiddly assigning movement to each of your characters was. It just got a bit tedious. I also wanted to give the player direct control over each of the characters, and not having immediate feedback mapped to each click or button press just felt a bit duff.

So, back to the drawing board? Well, sort of.

Making Things Modal

The game circa March/April 2014 - old art style

For the 2nd iteration I simply scrapped the idea of the simultaneous turns and implemented the same turn structure as something like Worms, where you move one character and then the enemy moves one character. This was immediately better to control and felt like it provided more opportunity for variety and tactical depth.

At this point, I also introduced the idea of action points and aiming time.

Each step that a character took would use a single action point and, when you took a shot, the accuracy of that shot increased the more action points you had remaining. This worked really well, particularly with the kind of risk/reward decisions that it left the player facing. This was definitely something that I was keeping in the game!

The issue now though was the turn structure. There are pros and cons to a Worms style turn structure. On the good side, the less people you had left alive, the more of a tactical advantage you would have because you would get to move more often than each enemy character. The downsides were quite big though. For one thing, when it got down to 1v1 it was pretty much a matter of luck who would emerge victorious. More importantly, another of my aims in the game was to have you invested in your characters, but with this turn structure you were guaranteed to lose at least 1 character every time you fought (unless you were extremely lucky). There were additional issues with overwatch and some of the other special abilities I wanted to have in the game too, and it also felt a bit stop/start and more like you were simply reacting to the enemy rather than planning and being able to try out a particular tactic.

Right, that's enough rambling for one day. I'll get onto iteration 3 tomorrow.

Until then folks!

[aberrantmike]

neat

[and]

So, onto iteration 3. The only change here was the introduction of a more XCOM style turn structure. You move all of your characters, then the enemy moves all of theirs. This worked. This was great! It just felt right. The combat felt unique and interesting and it was really satisfying when it all works as planned and you get through the combat without losses.

So, that was it. I was settled. I started working on the design of the other parts of the game and on developing a new art style to replace my bad placeholder art.

Getting Ahead of Myself

Still work in progress, but this is the new art

I hadn't really planned on coming back to the combat design. Obviously this was pretty naïve of me to think that none of the other aspects of the design would impact on it at all, and that it would survive perfectly intact without any other changes.

Remember I mentioned that one of my main aims with the game was for you to build up your investment in each of the characters? I think I may have also mentioned the importance of things being clear and the chances/risks of various choices in combat being relatively easy to infer?

Well, therein lies a conflict.

While I'm working hard to create a unique experience with this game, there's no point in denying that it falls broadly into the genre of a squad based tactics game. With that in mind, there are certain expectations that players will have going into the game. Sure, some of those can be broken or subverted in ways that make the game more interesting, but there are certain things that will just feel as though they're missing. One of those certain things is having a variety of weapons.

Now, even in the early prototypes, I had 3 weapon types in there: rifle, pistol and shotgun. But the only difference between these was their range and the number of shots you can take before you must reload. However, the expectation, particularly in a game where you'll have lots of relatively playthroughs, would be that there are more than 3 weapons in the game. So, how do I add variety to those weapons?

I tried introducing variations in the ranges between weapons of the same type, different number of shots between reloads (this worked fine, but was perhaps unrealistic – if that matters), different benefits to particular special abilities (overwatch or suppression for example, this actually worked well and is a keeper), different weapon degradation rates (still undecided on this – feels a bit like it's just adding complexity rather than depth maybe) and finally different accuracy over different parts of the range (for example, rifles tend to be more accurate at longer range, shotguns close up).

This worked really well for feeling like there were lots of options around weaponry, and there were some nice trade-offs between the different options. However, it totally screwed up the feel of the combat.

It now made it extremely difficult to work out what kind of a chance you would have for a shot before you moved to line it up. It also made it impossible to work out what chance the enemy would have to hit you if things didn't go as planned. In summary, it completely undermined the ability to plan tactically in combat. The game felt rubbish.

So, I did what any reasonable human would do. I panicked.

Right, I'll leave it there for now. I'll be back tomorrow to finish this off.

[and]

Into The Heart of Darkness

I actually didn't understand at the time. I didn't take the time to actually look at what was going on and work out why it felt terrible all of a sudden. What was it that had stopped working?

This was when I went to iteration number 4.

This was basically a half-arsed attempt to try anything to make it feel better. I'd convinced myself it was the shooting only in a straight line thing, so I removed that and made it so that you could target anyone with line of sight and in range.

This was terrible.

It kind of worked in that you had to try and get line of sight on the enemy, but at the same time it just undermined the clarity and the planning, which is what I wanted out of the combat, even more. I'd basically turned it into a bad version of “XCOM in The Wild West”. I figured, at least that was a pretty easy sell if I wanted anyone to be interested in the game.

And then, someone else did XCOM in The Wild West a lot better.

THIS IS NOT MY GAME!

Copyright is Creative Forge Games and/or PlayWay

See the article here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/08/11/hard-west-kickstarter/

And then I sort of gave up.

I was on the verge of writing a “this game is dead” post (I actually did write a “maybe this isn't the best idea” post on here) when all of a sudden I was being yelled at by one of my playtesters.

“What have you done to the shooting!?”

I tried to explain that it just wasn't working like I wanted it to to before, and there was no point in working on it now anyway when someone else was already making a better version of what this was probably going to be. I mean, they KNEW what their game was! I was changing mine all the time to try and make it awesome. What kind of idiot iterates on ideas until they work (or don't work as in this case)?

This point of view didn't seem to go down all that well.

I was convinced to actually think this through and have a look at the design of the thing. Just the simple act of breaking it down into the systems and mechanics and why they were in there allowed me to understand where I'd started to go wrong and how I'd managed to make matters worse.

So, where are we now?

The Day Today

Shooting patterns!

I did three things. Firstly, rather than going back to shooting in a straight line, I introduced shooting patterns (as pictured above). These are the basic patterns in which the different weapon types can target enemies, and these are visible during combat. Because you're no longer shooting just the way you're facing, it makes it easier to work out how many steps you'll have to take to get your shot in. It also allows for a bit more variety between different weapons of the same type in their shooting patterns.

This works a LOT better. It feels like its own game again and it gives you some really interesting tactical choices during the combat.

The second thing I did was a little more drastic. I decided to remove the impact of range.

Now, there is a trade-off here. On the one hand it's pretty unrealistic, but we'll get to that. On the other hand, it makes it a lot easier to work out what sort of a chance you're going to have to make each shot and it allows me to add variety to the weapons in a way that doesn't undermine your ability to work out your chance to hit.

That would be the third thing I did, which also kind of partly solves the issues with range now not impacting on accuracy. The third thing I did was simply introduce different drops in accuracy based on aiming time and weapon. For example, accuracy drops drastically with each step if you're using the rifle, but not much at all with the shotgun. So you can run right up to someone's face and still have a good chance to hit them with the shotgun, despite having no time to aim, whereas if you try that with a rifle then you're pretty much committing suicide.

This has the nice knock-on effect that players use the weapon types as you'd expect, lining up shots with the rifle at range or charging in with the shotgun. As of yet, nobody has noticed the removal of range a having an impact (although this is based on a small sample size).

Simply removing something that I kind of took for granted has added an extra dynamic to the combat, and I'm really happy to say I think I might actually be able to stick at around iteration 5...

...oh, who am I kidding! I'm certain there'll be more changes on the way, but I do feel as though I've really got the fundamentals down now. Something to build on rather than something to replace.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that deep dive into the design of the combat so far in Among The Willows!

Next up I'll be talking through either permanence and replayability, world building and travelling around or characters and the levelling up system.

Let me know your preference and I'll get my typing fingers out.

Thanks for reading!

[kruxus]

Interesting read! I really like the patterns idea.

One way handle range would be to just have two states, in and out of optimal range. The out of range state would just give a flat penalty. If you visualize the pattern for the player you could pretty easily show range too. Might be better to keep it simple though.

[and]

@kruxus

Yeah I do quite like the idea of 2 states. There's a few ways this could work, perhaps you have to wait a turn for the other state or, as you say, there is a penalty for using it.

It's definitely something I'm going to think about and try it out in testing!

[and]

Working on some new trees for the forest biome - which do you prefer?

[kraed]

Oh, wow, this is some really interesting and promising stuff. The gameplay sounds very intriguing!! It's been fun reading about the design.

As for art style, really really nice work on the characters. Would love to see a lineless version, that thick black line throws me off a bit. Try toying with that, maybe it could give interesting results. (no outline, thinner, transparency, colors closer to the character's clothe, etc).

I prefer tree B.

Best of luck!!