Submissions from 2015-03-11 to 2015-03-12 (7 total)

I simultaneously hit a major milestone and problem in my most recent game. The basic plan is to make a turn based strategy game similar to Shining Force and Fire Emblem. I've been working on the movement for a couple of days and finally got it working how I want it to.

The Good

  • I wrote an algorithm that steps around a character and finds the spaces within their movement range, taking into account terrain.
  • I wrote a heatmaping algorithm that allows all the troops assigned to a hero have an easy, computationally inexpensive way to move towards and keep with the leader of their squad.
  • I wrote a bunch of code that handles movement exceptions (squads can move across members of the squad but not stop in the same space. Heroes can swap places with any of their squadmates. Enemies block movement. Etc.)
  • I made some test graphics and got everything working together.
It works slick so far. I assigned 200 troops to a leader and can move him and have all 200 troops find the best way to follow him in less than a tenth of a second, less time than it takes for the movement animation to finish.

The very, very bad:

I'm writing it in Haxe using HaxeFlixel. The problem is that when I target Flash it hangs. Even with only one troop. There is something about the different way that Haxe compiles to Flash versus the Neko emulator that causes my algorithm to hang. I love Haxe, but these types of errors are really difficult to track down.

I added to the conversation about where to set up the camp. If you reject the first campsite, the npc walks to a different location and asks again if it's a good spot to set up camp. It's not the full on voting that it will be, but I'm just doing the basic flow of the mechanics. Every little thing I add contentwise is still requiring quite a bit of extra coding to be done in either the event system, the conversation system, or the ai system. In this case, I had to add a way to trigger an event from the conversation (when you say "No, this is a bad spot to set up camp"), and a way for the event system to hear events triggered FROM conversation. I already had a way for events to create a new conversation - but they were always centered on a specific npc, and in this case, I needed to generate the conversation elsewhere (the location of the new camp). So I added an argument to the "create_conversation" action which will center it on a tagged location from the map editor.

It sounds more complicated than it is :P But I wonder if I have too many systems.

This is probably par for the course for the start of the game, but the goal is that by either act 2 or 3 I will mainly be adding content to the json files and not spending too much time in code.

We're throwing around the idea of giving old man Muju an auto attack so we did the first version of his attack animation.

attackofthemuju.mov3mb

Nothing too big. Just small fixes and maintenance to code.

Today I added type of resource bonus that gives the player a specific amount of resource every day, instead of increasing its gathering rate. I also fixed some a couple more bugs related to bonuses and improved Help view a bit.

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Yesterday's update can be found here.
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Added a demo and some fixes/features for Mass Warfare!

Woooo!

We were supposed to meet today for SLG kickstarter, but things got mucked up. Oh well. There's always next Wednesday.

Also I totally broke my streak yesterday. Fantastic day long migraine. Oh well, I'm still optimistic.

Woops!

I've been doing bits here and there but haven't delved into my primary project for most of that time. I had a week off from work where I hammered out some good code, but going back to the office really killed my momentum. And momentum is hard to build back up.

I'm off to Rezzed tomorrow for 3 days, then have a small project to get out the door in the days after that. THEN hopefully I will be able to get back to smashing out my game and on the road to becoming a legit indie dev.

In the meantime I have done some work on a demo game for an article I am writing, the next in a series on developing games in Elm. It's a simple space invaders game but it's still something I guess.