next »

[SephiRok]

Conquest is a simultaneous turn-based online multiplayer strategy game placed in a dark and distant future.



Some of its distinguishable features are:

• Simple yet deep gameplay
• Simultaneous and fast turns
• Randomly generated maps
• Competitive online play

The feedback thread can be found here.

---

The last few days have been pretty frantic. The IGF has been interesting to keep track of, and our motivation for the game has increased again.

We haven't had much plans for Conquest before -- if it'll stay freeware, go commercial or opensource, but in the last few days we've decided to give this whole game development thing a more serious spin: form an actual two-man company and go commercial with the game. We plan on the game being gold-ready for the next IGF where we'll hopefully burst some bubble. At least, we want to see what we can achieve.

So right now we're looking for a company name ... the "filling the void" slogan has been running around a lot, as it describes the kind of games we feel there isn't enough of and which we like to play (which also means make); online multiplayer competitive (or at the very least coop) games.

[Lynx]

Looks interesting.  I think you might get a better looking map if you added some more hex tiles that connected to each other, so instead of having hilly terrain be all in one hex and fading out toward the edge, you have a range that connects southwest, northwest, etc.  With it all being in one hex, it doesn't read well.

[SephiRok]

Yeah, but doing fluid transitions with 2D and randomly generated maps would be very tricky -- or rather, would require a lot more textures and then puzzling them together.

On that note, we've been porting the game to 3D. Most technical work is already done, but we're not sure we'll actually go full 3D because it greatly impacts performance and it doesn't necessarily look better. The only thing you actually gain in such a game by going 3D is that you can merge heightmaps at the borders.

Here's a shot from a week ago when everything was fully 3D (note that this is unfinished quality):



Now we've switched back to 2D units, but instead of the drawn ones from before, we use the new models pre-rendered -- which means they look even better.

We might also go back to pre-rendered terrain, but keep this perspective. No more neat transitions, but a lot better performance and we can render lots of trees and other objects.

[Lynx]

That does look pretty nice!  The land stands out much better as being hilly land, and not various objects in the foreground.

[SephiRok]

Rolled an update with all the annoying bugs fixed, and some nifty new functionality in. Allying with AI and AI allying together is also half in, but didn't make it into this version. In the dev build the AI still nukes you mercilessly even if you sign a peace treaty with him.

We've been looking at entering the 2BeeGames indie contest, but they have this amazing rule:

Netplay is not permitted; the Game must be self-contained and not include client-server APIs. If your Game has online multiplayer elements you may describe same in your Game Description but it will not factor into the judging of the Game for this Contest.

So I guess there won't come much out of that, but I mailed them just in case.

[SephiRok]

We decided to go fully 3D. It just gives us the biggest flexibility. Here are some newer screen shots.




Some things still need more tweaking (like the units), but there's also a lot of other ideas around that we'll try to implement as long as the performance does not decrease too much. Some of the ideas include:

• Event animations (eventually unit as well)
• Trees
• Water
• Day / night cycles
• Weather effects
• Destruction
• Special city textures based on climate

The first 3D version can be expected at the end of this month or perhaps sometime next month (if we don't enter the 2BeeGames contest).

[Lynx]

Very smart looking.

The black-and-white seems a little drab, but as you say, you've got plans to work on 'em.  Maybe color regions on the unit hulls to be replaced with the player color?

[SephiRok]

Yeah, we'll give it a try. Our 3D artist is busy right now so it might take a while, though.

Let's hope it doesn't turn out too colorful in the end. The unit backgrounds are already a lot more than what we've had before. I still like our 2D graphics a lot, even if the terrain doesn't look as professional. It feels cleaner, simpler, smaller, faster. I'll miss it.

I can already see that in a couple of months I'll have to buy a new pc just to be able to run the game with more than 40 frames on highest graphics.

[SephiRok]

Not a whole lot has happened since the last post, at least not in the category of showing off.

Most changes have been bug fixes and internal improvements. The biggest thing being the addition of create game/server to the main menu screen. The server executable no longer has a GUI per-se, it only acts as a dedicated background/console server. This makes it a lot more user friendly to create a custom game and will hopefully also bring single-player closer to the player.

This feature though will sadly not be in for our entry in the 2beegames contest, as it will come with the 3D update, which is still not polished enough to release. That means we'll enter with the current 0.13.1 version, not that I have any expectations at this point or for this contest. The exposure is still worth it. That is, if they do not refuse it, hehe.

Our artist is still grounded to a laptop, but hopefully some shiny screen shots will come early next month.

[SephiRok]

Here are a few screen shots depicting how the game changed over the last couple of months:

First iteration
Updated models

Current (Bloom, Clouds, Grid)
Current (Bloom, Grid)
Current (Clouds, Grid)
Current (None)

Opinions? All input is welcome.

Note that in the latest four shots at the bottom the cities and units are textures/images instead of models. It's not decided yet on how we'll do it.

[m3xican]

there's a huge visual improvement from 052 to 054, even if maybe the bloom is a bit too strong so the terrain is too bright.
Anyway, well done!

[SephiRok]

What do you think about 031 compared to 054?

[m3xican]

031 looks like a brighter 053, that's all.

[SephiRok]

Okay, version 0.14.0 is off.

Summary of the most important changes:
* 2D -> 3D
* Most graphics redone
* Lobby
* Rewritten net code
* 64-bit Linux version

A link to the change log, the download section and 3 hot sceen shot:


(Is there a less terrible site to post screenshots with cool automatic thumbnails and no registration?)

And a quote for the end (if you're still not convinced to give it a spin):

The Conquest engine has changed to an attractive orthogonal 3D perspective and now makes use of modern graphics technology, namely vertex and pixel shaders. Though there are still a lot of things left to do (like destructible terrain, particle effects and animated models), we decided to release in this unfinished state in order to get feedback on performance, stability and compatibility.

So if you do give it a try, telling us about any issues or epiphanies you experience would help us a lot.

[SephiRok]

A shot showing graphics progress of Conquest throughout development so far:

[davidp]

any way of getting into beta?

also, posting this at slogamedev.net would be extremely nice for the scene

izgleda fenomenalno.

[SephiRok]

I'm sorry, but at the moment we do not really need any testing, things are still changing and evolving (mostly representation-wise). Perhaps if you hang out on our IRC channel #conquest-game on quakenet, we'll poke you if something needs urgent testing, but I can't promise anything.

About slogamedev.net, I would prefer you'd post something if you'd like, I'm short on time as it is and don't actually have a public version to show either.

And thanks. :)

[SephiRok]

IGF feedback (with comments): http://www.conquest-game.com/board/news-f2/igf-2010-main-competition-feedback-and-results-t128/