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[iggie]

Spice Road

Update 21-11-2013
Happy to say Spice Road is complete, polished and out the door! On sale now after a long and winding development.

http://www.aartformgames.com/games/spice-road

Update 24-09-2013

Check out the latest Spice Road video trailer & please upvote our Greenlight page!
Spice Road Video Trailer + Greenlight

Update 16-05-2013
For all Strategy/Town Building/Economic Sim fans, the Spice Road Demo is now freely available for download.

Free Spice Road Demo


Beta version available to Preorders:
New features in Beta 0.200 - 32 Upgradeable Skills and Abilities + Sandbox Freeplay Map Generator.

// Older post below

New Screenshots





Please feel free to critique anything and everything on my log, that's why I'm here

[Hima]

I'm confused. Judging from the name, I thought this will be a tycoon or sims-liked kind of game. But then you have this soldier that could kill his friends 

Which mean I can't wait to hear more about this .

[iggie]

Well you do have to defend yourself, and strike out new trade routes through bandit infested deserts and forests

[Destral]

An interesting theme. Are you going with the actual Europe-Asia trade routes, or is it a more general 'anyworld' setting?

[William Broom]

I think this is an awesome idea. The setting is one that I really like but is not explored very often.

[iggie]

  The setting is an alternate world, using the culture and technology of the Napoleonic 18th Century, but mixed in with the Medieval Silk Road feel - it is the world as it could have been if the naval routes hadn't killed the land routes.
  There are even a few shades of the colonial wild west of the same time period, especially when it comes to town building and roaming bandits.

[Alec S.]

This game looks pretty cool, and I like the art style you've got going.  I would say that I tend to have a reflex against playing any games with "Tycoon" in the name.  If you put Tycoon in the name, people are going to have a certain expectation of a type of game play that it sounds like you're not going with.  It's like putting "Tactics" in a game's name.  Even if the game is tactical in nature, it shouldn't have "Tactics" in the name unless it's a turn based strategy/rpg hybrid.

[iggie]

malec2b - I know what you mean, I am trying to stretch the genre's a bit. It is much more of a Tycoon game than an RTS, and also is quite a Sim. The actual trading is not too overbearing, with as much emphasis on diplomacy and combat.

So while the game remain officially unannounced I can still change the name, so what genre is Tycoon+Combat+Trading+Sim ?

[William Broom]

Why can't you just call it 'Spice Road'? Game titles that include the genre of the game are always boring anyway.

[shrimp]

Will the game have badass alternate history mongol raiders/allies? It better have...

Name wise you could give it something pseudo-historical, like "The Karakorum Trading Company" or something better (by analogy to the Dutch East India Company). There must be some more Victorian trading company names that can be Silk-Road-ised.

[iggie]

Cool ideas, I would love to have mongol raiders as a playable class for some scenarios
The combat is much more raider/ambush focused rather than simple territory grabbing, so raiding is an important gameplay technique, and mounted lightning raids on villages and caravans are a good way to go about it - making a quick getaway before the colonial troops arrive!

I'll take "Spice Road" as a working title for the time being - I've got about 100 alternate titles I tried while thinking up ideas for this so I think I need to just move on and let my subconscious mull it over some more.

[shrimp]

Sure man, I know how it is, I was just getting carried away

[iggie]

After a crash course in animation I got my musket soldier in engine. I am always surprised just how hard it is to do animation!







Now with some placeholder units working I can get back to making some buildings.

[Plasticware]

Reverse the arm motions - left arm should go back when left foot goes forward, and same for the right. This should help your animation a lot.

[iggie]

Ha! Thanks Plasticware Nightmare, I was paying so much attention to the keyframe positions I got my arms in the wrong phase to the legs. I'm glad I posted the video Also reminds me to preview the anim more often in more than just front/side views.

[Nate Kling]

there's something really interesting about that style of graphics.  Looks like it could be an interesting game and the walk cycle is looking good already!

[iggie]

Started on buildings, on reflection I think 3000 polys is too many, and I'll leave more of the twiddly detail in the texture in future.

Only the red roof one is new - others are placeholder...

[iggie]

I've done my first press announcement on this game, and in the end I dropped 'Tycoon' and went for the much shorter title Spice Road

Otherwise I have been marching through building lots of meshes to populate the towns, and have begun translating my GUI mockups into actual code. I have dropped from 3000 to 1000 polies on the town models - but hope to get more detail and variety in the textures later.


View Full Size

Now I feel like I am going to get deep down into the coding forest - building tables and forms, buttons and panels, maps and inventories - and it may be a while before I come to a place where I can catch sight of the gameplay again. Apparently this is quite normal in game dev, a long doldrum of building before it really gets playable. Ah well, lots to get on with

[iggie]

I've been making horses, not as tricky as I thought they would be - although I know the anatomy freaks will hate them.

In a turnaround on my normal modelling work-flow I modelled from hi to lo poly on this one rather than carefully handcrafting the polies one by one to make the lo-poly mesh from scratch.

I needed to add a couple of extra polies around the leg joints but other than that the automatic mesh reduction from MeshLab did the job well.

[Mogget]

Those are some fine horses you have there, good sir!
Now you just have to get the animation right.