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[JoeCool]

Hey there ,

we are currenlty working on a game called NeoWars. The game has actually a predecessor from 2011, called Neo Circuit. NeoCircuit was originally inspired by Tentacle Wars and Galcon. We are working on the game since December 2015 and hope to release mid of May 2016.

We are a two people team, a programmer and an artist with quite some experience. This is our real first full time indie endeavor.
Sound was done by a good friend, who is a professional sound engineer. Some gfx effects/shaders were done by a technical artist also a good friend. The game is developed in Unity3D.



Features

• Tactical gameplay on 3-5 different environments
• Campaign with 50+ Planets to conquer (Levels)
• Static and temporary barriers which can also be destroyed.
• 4 different permanent node upgrades
• Up to 35 different temporary buffs/debuffs for friendly and enemy nodes, barrier and the whole playfield with 5 different rarities
• Advanced enemy AI with up to 3 opponents on a single map.
  
• Buffs/Debuffs are packed into a gear set which can be gathered on a level success
• Destroyed nodes give some energy back to their remaining allied nodes
• F2P model for mobile version - watch videos and buy packs of gear (gacha system)
  
• 8 different layers of music depending on the playing situation and decent sfx

Additional/Planned features after mobile release (only if we can earn some money on mobile)

• Multiplayer planned if we do a Steam version
• Leveleditor planned if we do a Steam version

Platforms

• Android/iOS version - playable on tablets and phones
• Steam, (only if we can earn some money in mobile), as we will make more content and probably get rid of the F2P model

Storyline  
Four mega cooperations fight over a resource called Retron, in a galaxy far away. You are the commander of NEO MegaCorp controlling a mothership with high end harvesting equipment. Your harvesters land on the planet and need to conquer all available resource fields to control all the available Retron.

Be aware, your enemies have the same intention, clever commanders and mean tricks. You can improve your harvester with different equipment to make them more versatile, but so can your enemies. Build an efficient network of harvester and transfer your Retron where it needs to be, to destroy your opponents!

What happend in the last 5  1/2 month

• Core gameplay features done
• All buffs/debuffs working
• AI is playing not too bad and also using its gear
• Ingame level editor is working nicley, more info will follow
• Basic UI screens in its first iteration, all of them will change
• Music and sfx
• Most of the UI screens are currenlty reworked
• Some effects for the buffs/debuffs
• The commanders and all the dialogs/story around those
• Level editing and balancing
• Gear balancing (Gear is as set of buffs/debuffs/upgrades)
• Gear/Level unlocking and pacing of the wholehttp://neowars.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/NeoWars_07_1920x1080.jpg game
• AI improvement on Gear usage and defense/attack tactics
• Ads/Shop/Game Center ..all that mobile crap...

What is still missing

• More Balancing
• Story or at least some interesting dialogs
• Polish the f*** out of it!

If you are interesting in testing the version before release. We have setup a mailing list on the bottom of our landingpage. The game has also a twitter feed.


Some gifs to give you an idea about the progress:

A view more screenshots







Any feedback is very much appreciated and welcome! Thanks for your time!  

[JoeCool]

The editor we are currenlty working on, was made accessible in game from the start, as we want to release it as some point.Its needs some improvement still but its a good start. Biggest problem, which I will fix today is the repositioning on picking, which is frankly annyoing.

The current editor functions

• Loading and saving levels
• Placing, removing and moving around nodes and barriers
• Editing node parmaters (neutral and player/ai owned)
• Adding any type of buff/debuff or upgrade
• Testing with and without all boosters/debuffs/upgrades available
• Setting a specific level name besides the file name
• Automatically make a screenshot (without UI),scales it down for the level selection
• Switching landscape, currently only when no nodes are placed
  

Missing things

• Clear playfield
• Picking nodes without moving them instantly
• Uploading/Downlading levels to/from a server
• Improve the UI and make it more robust

Some editor footage  

[JoeCool]

Day 91

Hey tigsource, here is another update!  

Worked on the planetselection yesterday, as the old one does not work for several reasons. Usability is bad, we do not have enough space for the info we need to display, like screenshot of level, number of enemies etc.

We decided to go for a more intresting approach which has also some downsides, but works much better hopefully.

Peer (our artist) came up with some nice mockups. Its now a simplified planet system with only one orbit and different planets. The data to provide those infos are simple CSV files where I attach needed medals, rewards, size, color etc. The rest is parsed from the level files. Not really optimal, but we wanted a fast solution.



This shows the screen with a selected planet/level:




The old level selection for comparison:




Thanks for taking the time to read. Any kind of feedback is very welcome!

[JoeCool]

Still Day 91
Hey there,

here is the result of today. The new and shiny planet selection  . Its okish, but some stuff is still not really good. The system name needs to be somewhere else, as it is overlayed by the play button when a planet is selected. The system selection looks still kind of weird, needs some polish. The planet info is nice, but its only 50% opaque, so sometimes planet names shine through which looks bad. Other than that I am quite happy.

What is still missing, besides polishing are the different material/colors for the planets and the sun. The locks also need some tinting, as we want to indicate what kind of reward waits behind a lock. Also the locks need a nice animation when opening.

[JoeCool]

Day 92

Good Morning,

today I am going to work on the gear system and on the gear selection screen. The gear is what the game sets apart from other games in the genre. The game has about 40 different gears, most of them come in 5 rarities. The gear can be used during a level to boost/upgrade your own nodes, debuff the enemy nodes or boost/debuff the whole playfield. You can also remove barriers etc.

A gear consists of an amount of booster/debuffs which are temporary. When you use a gear while playing a level its gone afterwards. Gears can be optained through winning levels, watching ads or buying via IAP.

This is the mockup from Peer for the gear selection, which follows directly after the player selected a planet, but only if its not a tutorial/staged level which uses a preset gear. Peer also provided the prefabs already, so I can start right away implementing functionality. Will see how it goes. Thanks for reading!

[jctwood]

This is jaw droppingly beautiful. What are you working in?

[JoeCool]

Thanks  . We are working in Unity with C# and Peer, our artist will talk about his tools very soon in here.

Still Day 92

Here are the results from todays work. The gear selection is kind of working, even though its very unpolished and the popup for the detailed information about the boosters is not in yet. I have also implemented a small debug menu, to manipulate the save game. Tomorrow is probably mainly polishing and doing the round trip from receiving/consuming gears and stars to having unlocked new planets and gear categories etc.

Also I am not sure if we should show all locked gear categories as it seems quite overwhelming for the player. Yes I know the text is barely readable, as the transparency of the backgrounds are not optimal. Peer will fix this soon .

[PepeDrago]

Hey,
thanks for liking it.
We're using Unity as our engine.
We're using a whole lot of custom made shaders, and some post color correction. We've got no real time lighting, it's all self illuminated.
The 3d assets done in 3dsmax.
The environments are created using a polygon optimized version of terrains I create with World Machine and Geoglyph, with the lighting baked in. That's probably the most exciting part of the art production I might do a little making of later down the road.
All the rest is done in Photoshop.We're still trying and optimizing a lot. If we can and if doesn't eat up too much performance, we might add more post effects like subtle tilt shift blur and bloom fx.

[jctwood]

Thanks for the insight! How are you rendering all of the UI is it using the Canvas system?

[JoeCool]

The UI is driven by the unity canvas system with a Screen space - camera setup and a special UI camera which has some sublte tilting scripts. 

The planet system is not driven by a canvas, but has canvas objects in its hierarchy, which uses world space. The text is only working because we use TextMeshPro plugin, which provides extremly good text rendering even with very small font sizes. Those small font sizes happen, especially when working with UI in world space.

[jctwood]

That makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing and I look forward to more updates!

[JoeCool]

Day 93

Yesterday was mainly bugfixing and finsihing the round trip, which means the player can earn stars and systems (bunch of levels) and planets (levels) are unlocked accordingly. Its also properly saved and still can be resetted in the cheat menu, which is very helpful for testing things fast.

Gif of the first two level roundtrip


I have also made some improvements when conquering nodes. As you can see in the gif, when more players try to conquer a node, the indicator, which shows, how much the player already conquered is changing its position back and forth. This looks bad and is also quite annoying. Additionally when players stops conquering the indicator was faded out. Which led to people not understanding that their invested energy into that node was still there, but just not shown. Both issues are fixed and its actually a great improvement. Love those small things, which greatly improve the playing experience.  

Old Version:


New Version: (subtle but important improvement)



While developing, we do lots of different marketing activities, propably not very effective and useful yet because we have actually no idea, what we are doing. Nonetheless we came up with a our own marketing plan template, which are following more or less.  



Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions or feedback!  

[JoeCool]

Day 94

Yesterday I worked mainly on the Lose screen, where you get told, that you lost your gear and if you watch a video you can recover it. This is one part of the monetization of the game. We do not show ads to players randomly, they have to request to watch ads and get some cool rewards.

We also limit the number of ads a player can watch, as it hurts the economy of the game as well as the eCPM's you get from ad providers. We rely on Unity Ads for the first version, but will probably introduce other ad networks if the results for Unity Ads is not what we expect it to be.

Some words about gear, as I have mentioned it a few times, but not really explained what it is. The gear is the most important part about the game mechanic we changed in comparison to NeoCircuit.

There are different gear item categories. Upgrades which permanently upgrade the node until its destroyed, boosters which give you increased stats for certain amount of time, debuffs which decrease stats of enemies nodes and node and playfield one time effects which can change the whole dynamic of a level.

At the moment a set of gear can have up to 10 gear items, which only 3 can be accessed at a time. Only when used, the next item shows up. We are not sure if we should increase the number. There is also a cooldown of 10 seconds for each item usage. AI uses the same items but can have different kind of gears, so we can make interesting levels and situations.

Here is the list of gear items we currently have in the game.

• Advanced Production - Increases production of node by {0}% and connections by 1
• Advanced Attack - Increases attack of node by {0}% and connections by 1
• Advanced Defense -  Increases defense of node by {0}% and connections by 1
• Advanced Storage -  Increases storage of node by {0}% and connections by 1
• Disconnector -  Blocks incoming enemy connections ({0} seconds)
• Multiplier -  Increases number of connections by {0} ({1} seconds)
• Super Shield -  Kills all incoming enemies for {1} seconds
• Mass Production -  Increases production by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Assault -  Increases attack by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Defender -  Increase defense by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Rusher -  Increases speed by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Supersizer -  Increases storage by {0}% for {1} seconds
• MightyPower -  Increases speed by {0}% and production by {1}% ({2} seconds)
• Cloner -  Clone all friendly incoming viruses for {0} seconds
• Refiller -  Refills a node to {0}% of its storage
• Remover -  Removes all negative effects from a node and protects it ({0} seconds)
• RandomBuff -  Has a random effect on the node
• Blocker - Prevents any friendly connection to the enemy node ({0} seconds)
• Assassin -  Kills every incoming enemy virus for {0} seconds
• Saboteur -  Reduces production of enemy node by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Weakener -  Reduces attack of enemy node by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Trojaner -  Reduces defense of enemy node by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Minimizer -  Reduces storage of enemy node by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Slacker -  Reduces speed of enemy node by {0}% for {1} seconds
• Heavy Disease1 -  Reduces speed {0}%  and attack {1}% of enemy node ({2} seconds)
• Destructor1 -  Instantly kills {0}% of viruses in a enemy node
• Revolter1 -  Takes over the enemy node with {0}% of its storage
• RandomDebuff1 -  Has a random effect on the enemy node
• Neutralizer -  Kills the enemy node and spawns a neutral node
• Cutting Bomb -  Cuts all connections on playfield
• Barrier Bomb -  Destroys any targeted barrier permanently
• Super Freedom Bomb -  Destroys all barriers on the playfield
• Atom Bomb1 -  Instantly kills {0}% of viruses on all nodes on the playfield
• Refill Bomb1 -  Instantly refills {0}% of viruses on all nodes on the playfield
• RandomBomb1 -  Has a random effect on the playfield

Most of them come in 5 rarities with different balancing parameters. So we have almost 180 different gear items you can use in the game. A gear itself is a pack of gear items which we define. We are going to have around 5-7 different gear categories which can be unlocked in the game. The items can be tested in our level editor, for easier debugging .

Here is a gif showing some gameplay with gear items:

[JoeCool]

Day 95 and 96


I realize more and more that this stage of development is not that interesting from devlog readers. The main design descision happened, the game core is finished and we are actually working on the UI, content and balancing. Nonethless I will continue to write as its a good training for myself and we still looking forward to some helpful feedback, especially when we open up the playable version to tigsource!

Progress
Sunday was lazy, as most sundays are for me. A little marketing and a little programming on win/loose screen but mnost of the time I actually enjoyed the wonderful weather.

Today I finished win/loose screen from a programming perspective. Its not done from an art and polish perspective but it works and does it job for now. Peer does focus on makeing the screens nice and fun in the upcoming days.

The unity ad system is in, really easy to integrate. We are using it for rewarded ads, so people can choose to watch an ad, and if the do not want to, that is also fine.
The player ca double his rewarded gear on the win screen or respectively reclaim his gear when he/she lost the level.

Playable version
We are getting closer to a version which we want to open up to a few more people. We hope we can achieve this till mid of march. If you are intrestested, please sign up on our landingpage.

Here is the obligatory gif of the progress from the last 2 days.

[JoeCool]

Hey, long time no see fellow tig-so(u)rceres  

Day 97 - Day 111

Besides a few days of vacation, we were too busy working on our game to care about our devlog, Mea culpa. Lots of stuff happended.

We did a lot of smaller and bigger improvements. We let some people play test the game and this was the list we assembled. As you can see most of the things are fixed. It improved the game tenfold really. We have still some serious issues open, which will be fixed in the upcoming days.

• Touch Collision Sizes too small, especially on smaller devices
• People don't realize that a number is too low and a node is about to die
• Dynamic Barriers and Barriers not clear enough
• Bottom notification that enemies use boosters not clear
• Indicate better on which nodes a booster can be dropped
• People do not understand the numbers and how they get reduced and grow (also due to energy ball/virus issue)
• Production has to be visible (Crystal Pumping effect or something similar)
• Line direction indication is missing now, we need a replacement for that
• Make Energy Ball/Viruses much more visible
• Android Bug -> Dragging booster, sometimes doesn't work
• Feedback which nodes can be connected should be clearer (marking is not enough)
• People wished for a more dynamic camera in the game, too static overall
• Backgrounds should be a little bit larger to cover everything when zoomed out

Important gameplay change
A few days after the playtest a friend came by and played the game with his son. Hey told me, that he really likes the game, but winning and loosing is decided on a very certain point in a level, because a double negative event occurs, when loosing a node. This was such a precise analysis of a problem the game suffered for a quite long time. I am happy to have friends like him .

We thought a few days about the problem and came up with a solution. When a node is destroyed the remaining nodes of the same owner are filled with more energy. The feedback is displayed through a lightning effect, probably not optimal yet. This small change turned the dynamic of the whole game in a positive way. Loosing an important node, does not mean loosing the whole level anymore.


Here is the corresponding gif:

We have also finished the rework on the UI. Lots of smaller improvement, tooltips for the gear. Its nearly complete on the shop is missing.The editor saw a lot of small improvements as well. We have more terrains, we can color the terrains differently and we can also rotate the terrain. Dynamic barriers now have a starting time to make asynchornous barrier behaviours and so on.
Here is a gif of the current state of the editor:

We have also recorded some new videos:

[JoeCool]

Hi there,

Day 112

As we focused mainly on game play mechanics during most of the development cycle, we are now adding more narrative with the commanders which Peer did in just a day with Mixamo Fusion + Poly Reduction.

[JoeCool]

Day 113 - 118

The game is getting close to its beta state. We are planning to open up the beta in a few days to everybody who is interested.

We worked mainly on balancing, bugfixes, some polishing and added the shop for mobile devices. We do not want to be that greedy F2P game, so we are planning an interesting twist, which I haven't seen yet around. I don't want to share it today, as we haven't fleshed out the plan completely yet.

We also worked on our dialog system. You can see the characters in action in this little gif.

Thanks for reading.

[JoeCool]

Day 119 - 130

Closed Beta

In the last days we worked on bugfixes and improvements. We finally opened up the game for a closed beta test on 28th of March. We currently support Android, iOS and WebGL and will soon open up the beta to the public.

Since then we got some great feedback which we are currently working on. Mainly bugfixes, usability issues and rebalancing  of the levels as the AI got so much better over the last days so levels got also much harder to beat.

People would also not understand how certain gear works. We are currently trying to give better visual feedback to underline their functionality and best usage.

One example is the defensive gear, which only has an impact if you are not counterattacking the current attacker. This should be much clearer now, as we show a shield effect as soon as the defensive gear is active and deactivate it again if the player attacks back.

Story/Dialogs

We have also started adding more dialogs/story to the game, which is not easy if you do not have a professional writer working on it. The game is not meant to be a story driven game like Banner Saga, but we wanted to bring some narrative into the game to prevent to look like a game with a stupid level grind. Its hard to find the right balance, as we will have lots of players, who will probably just ignore all text.

This will be a quit a struggle in the upcoming days, but its also a good learning experience, as we have never done it ourselfes.

Balancing

This is harder than anticipated. We have a  quite clever AI now and its really fun to play against it. But we are totally blind how hard things are now if you play the game the first time. The closed beta test revealed that only a few poeple were able to beat the levels which need a little more understanding of the gear system.

So we will give the player a little more varity of gear as a start, have all the gear accessible from the start, so people can browse through all the cool gear which awaits them in later levels and as already mentioned improve the visual feedback of some gear, which currently seems hard to grasp.

We are planning now to make the first 25 levels a lot easier, so the player gets into a kind of flow. By then the player should have understood all the systems and tactics well enough to increase the difficulty step by step.

Trailer

Peer is working on the trailer. Its not an easy taks as the game is looking always the same kind of. We have different background and node constellation but in the end its the same over and over again. To make an interesting trailer out of this is hard work. We have really underestimated the needed effort here.

Nonethless, we have some first results, but it is still a way to go. We have some problems with compression, intro and outro are still missing and audio is currently just ripped from the game, but we are getting there step by step.

Here is the first trailer test:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxmAoOvSwKw&feature=youtu.be

[JoeCool]

Day 130 - 136  

Closed Beta
Closed beta is a big learning process for us. Send out mails mainly to friends and family and a few people who registered on our site. Still realizing people do not have much time and motivation to play the game and you need a lot of patience. We have 60 peoples on the list, and 3-4 people who wrote some feedback. But very few people really dig into the game and give awesome feedback.

We also fucked up the beta 2 release, because the savegame changed. So people had to delete their old versions before they could install and play the new version. And people will not read e-mails, so apprently this was really bad from our side. We should have made the savegame update compatible , but I was a bit too lazy and thought people would read their e-mail.

We are going to open the beta probably in the next 3-4 days. We need some more bugfixes and the intro needs to be redone before we dare to open it up.

Leveldesign
Leveldesign is getting really really slow. Playing every level 1-2 hours and while building and then playing them again and again in the broad context of all levels. We have communicated 50 Levels, we have 40 levels done, 30 okish balanced. So 20 more we need to invest a lot of time in. We will also add some "elite" levels which will need a certain set of gears, otherwise winning will be not possible. Those levels are not dependend on completing the campaign, but will give players an opportunity, which want a bigger challenge.

Also I am a bit burned out in regards of new ideas. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated  .

Website
Peer was very effective the last few days. He finished the trailer as well as a new website. The website is done with the shore theme from wordpress which is really good. We tried different one but this was really good and quite flexible. We oriented us on IndieGameGirl's landingpage design. Which is quite good and it is so much better than the old website, at least from our perspective. New and shiny NeoWars website.

You can still register for beta. Release will probably be End of April earliest.

Trailer
The trailer is done. We are happy with it, even though we know it has quite some flaws. But at the moment we cannot invest more time and money into it. Peer has worked on the trailer for quite a while, trying different things. We are do not have the experience of making top notch trailers, but I am really impressed how good the result is. The music from our Sounddesigner JCO really helps to make this trailer awesome.

[JoeCool]

Day 137 - 142 

I know the audience is not that interested in our game, but we keep posting here, as we love TigSource and maybe somebody picks up some learnings or likes our game, even though its not that unique and does not have pixel art.


Closed Beta
We were really lucky this time, as we posted in the toucharcade forum and got a frontpage feature. We would have never expected that. Because of that, we delayed the open beta test, as the frontpage brought us over a hundred new motivated testers which signed up on our website. People play the game and we see quite a lot of sessions played, nonethless our feedback channel is not optimal yet. We have setup a survey, but it was only filled out 4-5 times with over 150 people testing. So we decided to add a feedback button into the game where people can directly post what they like/don't like. We have to see if this is working. Fortuantely we have some good friends with lots of experience, one of them sent us a 3 page improvement list and we actually fixed 80% of the issues he has brought up in a single day. That was really rewarding and made the game so much better. Can't be thankful enough having friends like him.

Leveldesign
We have 50 levels in the game, but balancing is still a big issue. Haven't done a full play through yet and we have to do alot of them, before we are going to be able to release the game. We still need to invest a big bunch of time.

This is a quite crazy level, which features temporary barries (they close every 15 seconds). Players have to be realy fast and use the right gear to conquer it.


Story
It was a big mistake to make bold claims about story driven campaign. I thought it would be not too hard to make a few cool dialogs, but its really hard. Its already tough in our own language (German), but its even harder in English. We might be hiring somebody for it, as we are struggling so hard for weeks now. Will have to see how this ends.


Monetization
As we don't want to be the guys fishing for whales, we thought let's try something we haven't seen yet. Its a hybrid between F2P and Paid. Its not just a remove ads button, it's more! The idea works like this.
The Retron bar, below, will fill up when you watch an advertisment or purchase an gear pack. As soon as bar is full, we switch the game to a "PAID" mode.

That basically means, the player paid for the game. Balancing changes, players gets much more Retron to buy gear. Rewards are automatically doubled. All rewarded ads are removed, all IAPs are removed from the game. All packages can be bought with Retron. Additionally we show a nice low poly picture of our faces with a thank you message to the player.


Marketing
The TA article was nice, but after 2 days not much was left besides some interested people, which is ok, but not sufficient. We are now trying to find more forums like TouchArcade where players give direct feedback to games and want to play beta versions. We also using crowdfire to get more twitter followers. Not indiegame devs but real players instead. We started today with a bigger approach, following 1000 players each day and test how the feedback is. As soon as people follow we sent them a message to hint the beta test, trailer, website etc.
We are also started to maintain a list of possible interest YTer. This is quite a small audience as its a mobile game and the game targets a quite narrow group of people.


Polishing
We have hundred of different small items we want to polish and did polish already. Its a neverending story, added small things like a short sleep before explosions to make them feel better, made camera shakes a little stronger, added lots of tweens to UI elements to make the game look and feel more alive etc. Its going well, but we are still far from done, as every day new issues are added to the list.