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[nu_muso]

Just found this. Crazy awesome pixelart and fun gameplay. Great job!

[kamac]

Hay tharr. Let's have a look at what I've been working on for the past month.

Reworked Monster's Den

This one turned out ugly in the first iteration, and I finally got around to repixeling it. Here's how it looks like now:



Ambience sounds

This basically means that there's some ambience sound effects playing based on the king of biome you're looking at. You can't hear them yet, but if you care enough you'll be able to pick them out when a demo/gameplay video is released eventually.

Peasants are invulnerable

Since the game is pretty much 1D, in the sense that units can only move left and right, whenever your island was under attack your peasants that were cutting wood inevitably died. Since the way game works at the moment, attacks are very frequent which resulted in having a very hard time trying to gather resources (that was also a reason I retired gold mines in favor of houses bringing in money over time).

The fix to that was to make peasants invulnerable as long as they stay on your home island. Invulnerability here means something along the lines of being in "ghost mode". So long as your peasants stay home, they'll be ignored by the enemy.


Two peasants dodging their deaths

More gore

The time has come to replace the old blood's placeholder particle system. It just didn't feel satisfactory enough watching peasants kill their bretheren.

Here's a fight between four angry slaves (the weakest Ancient's melee unit) vs. two knights (a strong Priests' melee unit).


(the knights won)

New idle anims

Second iteration here. Previous idle anims were a bit of a mess, featuring subpixel animation.


Old idle animation vs New idle animation

Island portal is retargettable

You now don't have to build a new island portal whenever you need to reach a different island. For now the retargetting is instant. Whether it will take some time in the future is yet to be seen.



Lots of AI work

Nothing flashy here, but probably the most important work I've done this month. I want the AI to be a worthy opponent, and with RTS games that's never easy. That's why I've spent some time looking at source code of a few starcraft bots, trying to figure out how they've done it.

Particular problem was finding the build order, which tells the AI what to build and when to build units or structures. I've read a few PDFs on this matter, but in the end decided to go for a simple solution, where entire build orders for structures and upgrades are saved in a JSON file.

Other than that, without getting into too much detail, I've improved how AI recruits units and manages armies (groups of units).

Next up

My short them goal now is to have a gameplay video, or perhaps a public demo out. Before that's done though, I must make sure everything works as it's supposed to.

[kamac]

Warning: Lots of GIFs below - give it time to load

Hey there. Time sure flies by. I could swear it was merely a few days ago that I made the last devlog, but it's been (nearly) a whole month already

Let's sit down and look at what I've been working on.

Reworked most priests' spells

In the never-ending struggle to reach perfection, I've revisited priests' spells. Many of them (like god's eye) were made with a different game design in mind. But as things slowly unraveled, I realized I needed to rework some of them to match current design.


Descriptions from top-left to bottom-right:

Holy Light - His Holiness' wrath manifests itself as condensed rays of light.

Prayer - Bestows His Holiness' blessing through humble prayer. Amplifies own statistics and spells.

Apocalypse - His Holiness' wrath draws forth a celestial object, purging all blasphemy.

Divine Mercy - His Holiness shows mercy to your units by healing their wounds through His humble priests.

Holy Flight - His Holiness grants His humble follower wings, enabling him to fly for a period of time.

A hot effect in the desert

I added that warping effect you have whenever you look above a hot surface (like asphalt) to the desert.



Hopefuly the desert feels a bit hotter now.

Conquest game mode

I was always a fan of games where you fight for and control territory. This game mode is supposed to provide a "higer dimension" for skirmish.

The basics are simple enough. Upon beginning a conquest campaign, you choose your faction (ancients, priests, ) and the opposing factions. Then, a galaxy overview is generated, with certain regions to control. After that it's a turn based game of choosing which region to attack, then playing the resulting skirmish game.

I have already a somewhat functioning galaxy generator. You can see the various configurations below.



Above pictures were taken with an orthogonal camera. The galaxy itself is actually in 3D - I have yet to decide whether the map overlay is going to be in 3D or 2D.


3D version of a galaxy

[wizered67]

The visual effects for the attacks are really great! Also the 3D galaxy looks really cool!

[Ohmnivore]

That galaxy looks splendid! It almost deserves its own other game

[TheWanderingBen]

That 3D galaxy is the bees knees! Great work!

[kamac]

Hey there.

Unfortunately, due to college kicking in harder than it usually does, as well as a bunch of other stuff, I had to take three weeks off this month.

But! I'm back now, and I've done some design on the new and upcoming "galaxy conquest" mode. Let's go over it.

Generating the galaxy, part 2

In my previous posts, you can see that I began to work on galaxy generation, which will provide you with a new map for each playthrough.



Once the galaxy is generated, we need to give the player something to conquer. We'll let him conquer planets. The circle around every planet will symbolise the planet's owner.



Now, since the game will play a bit like mushroom wars, but turn based, we know a planet holds units of various types. The player needs to be able to move his units between planets, but how can he know which planets are accessible from a given planet? We need to generate links between planets that can access one another.



Welp. We don't really want those connections that go outside the galaxy, between arms. First, we'll outline the galaxy...



Now we can detect whenever a connection intersects with the outline with a bunch of segment intersection tests. If it does, we don't allow it.



It looks better, but it's still not working entirely yet. We can end up in a situation where there is no connection between two groups of planets. Such problem can be seen on the image above. I'm still working on fixing that.

The game will be turn based in the galaxy phase, where each turn consists of three phases.

1. Recruiting - Each planet you control brings in a fixed amount of gold every turn. During this phase, you can spend your gold on recruiting new units, which will spawn at the beginning of the next turn on the planet you chose. Recruiting mages will require a number of planets controlled (1 planet for 1 mage, 3 planets for 2 mages, 6 planets for 3 mages and so on), and each mage will start with a random spell from his respective arsenal. He or she will unlock more spells with each battle won by him/her.

2. Moving units - During this phase you can plan how your units will move between planets. This involves planning an attack on an enemy controlled planet.

3. Execution - During this phase, all of your planned unit migrations will be executed, and any resulting battles will be played.

A battle can be either of two:

1. Capture - The planet was unowned. Battling sides are placed on two ends of the planet's island. Whoever's units prevail wins.

2. Attack/Defense - Either your attack somebody's planet, or they attack yours. In that case, the defender's units are placed in a small settlement and the attacker's units are placed outside of it. The goal is to take down or defend the statue in the center of the settlement, respectively for attacker and defender.

Planet's defenses increase automatically with every round the planet doesn't change owners. Defenses decrease by one point every time a planet changes owners. Max defenses will be stone walls and defense towers, while no defenses will be just a bunch of houses and the statue in the center.

Afterword

I feel like this game mode can turn out to be quite the fun, and it's definitely smaller scope than the RTS one. Always a plus.

Cheers!

[Pixel Noise]

Keep working on this galaxy/game mode - it's looking awesome, and I agree that it is both interesting, and probably a bit more manageable in terms of scope, etc.

[sneakysly]

I am really digging the aesthetic. The water and galaxy especially looks great! 

[kamac]

Hey guys. Thanks for all the kind words.

Let's see what has been done, and what yet remains.

Generating the galaxy finalized

I've made the generator produce reasonable galaxies most of the time. The connections usually look tidy and make sense. What's more, I've added two more galaxy color variations!



The colors at the end of each galaxy's arm indicate to which player given planet belongs.

Planet info

Whenever you hover mouse over a planet, you'll see which units are on it, and other info like the planet's name!



Sending units to other planets

Drag & drop to plan movements between planets. Units can only move to planets that are directly connected to the one they're currently on.



"AFTERWORD"

I've been wanting to speed up the development for a while. My goal is to have a working and fully playable build of the game at the beginning of next month. I'm aware this might not work out, since this month will be cluttered with exams in university. I'll try my best though.

Until next time,
Yours,
kamac

[kamac]

Hello everyone.

A month has passed, and it's time to go over what I managed to get done. Unexpectedly, the exams only truly kicked in for a week, so I've been able to spend the rest of the time on development.

Almost everything's working

Three months since I started working on conquest mode, almost everything's working. And to think I thought I could get it done in a month .

I've changed one thing. Unlike before, every faction has their own turn. Apparently executing every faction's moves at once, in one turn, raises some unexpected problems I haven't foreseen (what happens when two planets attack one planet, but that one planet attacks one of the attacking planets? etc).

Let's see how the game works, step by step, in GIFs.

First, you can spend the gold you have on recruiting units.



Second, you can plan a move of your units between planets.



Third, you end your turn, and see your units move between planets. If any conflict arises, you move onto the planet to resolve it.



After a conflict has been resolved, the resolution is shown back in the galaxy. Units recruitment is progressed, your turn ends, and the next faction does it's turn.



Planet defenses

I mentioned planet's having various defense levels, depending on how long they haven't changed owner. Below is how those levels look.






What's next

As I said, almost everything's done. What's not done is the AI for conquest conflicts. Adding it in shouldn't be very troublesome though, as I'll adapt the AI from previous game mode.

After that, I might do a gameplay video, or might just release to early access. The game would stay in EA till I added at least two more factions, some biomes, and perhaps some features I still have in mind.

Since I started a day job, the development might unfortunately slow down a tad compared to the last month, but I still have full intention of releasing MnP in the near future.

Thank you for reading, everyone! See you soon!

[Pixel Noise]

I'd definitely love to see a trailer or game-play video. I think that would be a smart thing to do, pre-release, or timed with release.

[ANtY]

yeah, record some gameplay video please, I want to see it!

Also - the thing with planets, etc. surprised me quite a lot, how do those medieval peasants travel between planets?

[kamac]

Also - the thing with planets, etc. surprised me quite a lot, how do those medieval peasants travel between planets?

Why, they teleport of course. It'll be visible on the gameplay video in every planet fight

[kamac]

Hey.

Just popping in to give an update on the lack of progress. It's been half a year already! Unfortunately with a job and college, it turned out to be impossible to continue development. Each day I'm short on time and energy. I thought it might be fun to devlog this news for future reference.

I still intend to finish this game one way or the other. Throughout those months I've been noting down ideas whenever they came to my head. Later on I'll pick whatever route feels optimally fun, without clogging myself with too many features.

See you around

[kamac]

Hey guys.

I wanted to let you know that I'm back to working on "Mages'n'Peasants".

I spent a good amount of time thinking about gameplay design. At first, the game was supposed to be about building a settlement and fighting other settlements, with different factions and spells and units. Unfortunately, the scope was too big! I'd never have thought that that would be the case. Back then, when I was just starting out, I thought I had a good idea of what's achievable by one man and what is not. Turns out, I was wrong and set out to create too much. There was a lot of content to make. The biomes, the buildings, the mages, the spells, the units. The amount of work was multiplied by the need to manage a custom AI for every single faction. So I gave up on that.

I moved on to the idea of space conquest. After having spent several months working on it, it seemed to turn out okay. The gameplay I had somewhat a plan for, but there were other issues I haven't addressed; I'd still have to write lots of AI. Indeed I had gotten rid of building manager part of AI - the module that was responsible for constructing and managing structures - but galaxy overview strategic planning module took it over. Besides this, there still was a lot of difficult content to create, like spells. To top it all off, a new issue emerged, now more apparent than ever - lack of familiarity, or at least a good explanation of why things work the way they do. Why are there mages? Why are men hacking away at each other with spears and swords when they can explore the stars? How do I explain the damned monsters I put in there? At that point I knew I had to make some drastic changes to the game again.

And this is where we are. I took a step back and reengineered what Mages'n'Peasants will be. I removed the mages and I removed the galaxy overview (since it looks so nice, it might be a material for it's own game where it belongs), and focused more on building the settlement - your village - and defending it from what lurks in the dark.

If it's not that, I don't think it can be anything else.

^{Also, I have now disregarded creating more pixelart and focused on implementing the basics - the buildings and the units - using placeholders. That way I can quickly grasp if I like where something is going and throw it out if I don't.
I probably should have forced myself to do it way sooner}

I'll keep this devlog updated, and I won't stop till this game is out

[eigenbom]

Wow this looks awesome :D

[noio]

I think I'll just stick to the old style for now. I'm alone on this project, and making high resolution sprites would require a lot of work, and animation skills, which I don't have atm.

Smart choice! Plus working at a limited size might actually help you improve your animation skills. It means you can do more animations in the same time and each animation (to me anyways) feels less daunting.

^{disregarded creating more pixelart and focused on implementing the basics}

Also smart. Though as long as you're having fun creating the art and it drives your creativity there's no problem with that either. Seeing each little bit of art come to life in the engine has always been my main motivator. Sometimes it's no fun working on a game that's all just placeholders. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[kamac]

Wow this looks awesome :D

Thank you

I think I'll just stick to the old style for now. I'm alone on this project, and making high resolution sprites would require a lot of work, and animation skills, which I don't have atm.

Smart choice! Plus working at a limited size might actually help you improve your animation skills. It means you can do more animations in the same time and each animation (to me anyways) feels less daunting.

Oh wow, noio's here!

Speaking of animations, here's how they used to look like when I was starting out:



Here's how it looks now:



And here's a most recent one. It was the toughest nut to crack, there's much going on:



I think the most important thing I've learned here is to use the trail that follows a fast movement. Sort of like this:

[noio]

  This just looks great! It's such a cute motion with the oversized arrow.