Airship Dragoon v1.4 Released!

Airship Dragoon has been updated to version 1.4! 

The hardcore, oldskool, GollopLike has had a massive update. The changelog is here!

Airship Dragoon is on Steam Greenlight! Votes very much appreciated!

The much requested map is now a thing! This displays spotted enemies and trooper information by mouseover and clicking on a trooper icon makes them the controlled character. No more scrolling through all the troops to select the guy you can see out in front.

And now there's motion captured animations including 26 death animations for a nice variety of having troops throw themselves to the ground in various spectacular and painful looking ways.

Here is a quick video of me explaining some of the fine points of the update. Apologies for the audio quality of my microphone, it's terrible and I think I need a new one.


It's a huge update which removes much of the hardcoding of objects to enable Airship Dragoon to be full modded. Everything can now be changed or tweaked from the damage weapons do, to the actual character models, to the names of the factions and their flags and icons. Full documentation on how to mod Airship Dragoon will be released shortly, and will include video tutorials. A map editor for creating your own levels will also be released.

And here's all 26 of those death animations!




The update is HUGE so there is no patch file this time. Simply redownload and install over the current version which you are using. Your saved game files will be safe! Which is nice ... :)

Note: The Desura version can take a few days to update as it goes through their system, but everywhere else  is live now.

Class based textures

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And as said at the top, Airship Dragoon is on Steam Greenlight, and if you use Steam, voting for Airship Dragoon would be very much appreciated!

Here's how it currently stands.

Valkyria Chronicles Style Action-Tactics Template For Open Source Torque3D MIT

Valkyria Chronicles style Action-Tactics gametype template for the Open Sourced Torque3D game engine licensed under the MIT license - which means that you can do anything you like with it. I was going to put the word REDUX in the title but didn't have enough space.

This is the REDUXed version of the series of Valkyria Chronilces style action-tactics resources on the GarageGames site I created way back in the distant past when dinosaurs ruled the earth ... or around two and half years ago, before I started work on Airship Dragoon.

Going over that old code revealed some ... odd decisions ... completely unnecessary server and client calls ... and various other things which existed before I had learnt the meaning of best practise. Whilst there have been significant improvements, the Action-Tactics template is still very much derived from that.

And the source code is all here on github.
https://github.com/SteveYorkshire/Torque3D/tree/ActionTactics

However if you just want to play through a precompiled demonstration mission without the source code - the script files are all there so you can still see how it all works - you can download it here.
http://www.yorkshirerifles.com/downloads/ActionTactics_Template.zip ~110MB
It's a zip, so remember to right click and "unblock" due to M$ silly non-informing security measures.

And here is what the whole demonstration mission looks like when played through. Looks best in HD but you already knew that.

Airship Dragoon Version 1.1 Released

Airship Dragoon Version 1.1 has been released. The patch weighs in at a mere 26.6Mb. All new purchases will automatically get the latest version.

• Fixes an issue with veteran information not saving correctly during campaign modes.
• Various tweaks to reduce overhead and improve performance but will probably only be noticeable on low spec systems.

If you've bought it direct and don't want to redownload the whole thing, install the update.
The update can be found here under the "Updates" section.
http://www.yorkshirerifles.com/webpages/store.html

Zulu Nation Uses Artillery Barrage ...

 IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE!





Vote For AIRSHIP DRAGOON on STEAM GREENLIGHT!
It would be appreciated ... thanks.

I Am The One Percent: Airship Dragoon is Released

Today I enter the hallowed corridors of those amateurs, tinkerers, modders and aspirers (aspirers? is that even a word?) who have actually finished and commercially released an indie game. I am the one percent.

After 2 years and 3 months (note to self, we have got to shorten the blinking heck out of development length next time around) of what seems somewhat akin to self-flagellation ... and even more disturbingly - 5 years and one month after deciding to make some sort of indie game - I have finally managed to release my first commercial indie game.



There she blows! A box shot of ... a box which doesn't exist obviously ... because it's a virtual product.

---------------------------------------------

But you can't have a release ... without a trailer .. so here's one of those ... looks best in HD but you knew that already.




Also, www.yorkshirerifles.com is now a thing.

A retweet of this, would be appreciated.

Airship Dragoon: X-Com style Steampunk Tactics. Finally released! http://t.co/simAWZWBt3 via @Steve_Yorkshire RT appreciated
— Steve_Yorkshire (@Steve_Yorkshire) September 17, 2013

It's early days on the whole shipping front. I've set up my own site shop with FastSpring (as used by numerous indies including Frozen Synapse's mode7games - and the soon to be released FriendZone American Robot Hand-Egg Simulator ... does that joke ever get old? ... er yes ... :S ).

I am negotiating with Desura at the moment, and once that is sorted out, it's time to mount an assault on Greenlight and spam the gaming press with review copies. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey - or embarazi as they used to say when I lived abroad.

I have set up an IndieDB for Airship Dragoon, for anyone who may use it.

The whole shipping/e-commerce/desperately seeking attention thing is all a bit new to me ... and like everything else ... in life as well as development ... I'm making it all up as I go along.

Eventually I will get around to doing - what is likely to turn out to be a huge - post mortem of the last 2 years and 3 months of development.

In the meantime, you may want to play Airship Dragoon which of course has a free demo.

----------------------

So, amongst all of this, I might actually get around to porting my old Valkyire Chronicles Style Action-Tactics-Hybrid over to the new Torque3D MIT version, and start umming-and-ahhing about which of the various projects whirling around inside my head will be my next game.

Softly softly catchee monkey ...

Game Looking Very Much Like A Game

Game Looking Very Much Like A Game

*wheeze * wheeze * It's been a hectic old month, and that is of course, one month more than I had wanted. But now we have music, instructions ... which players will probably just ignore ... and a fair few other things. It's finally looking quite "game" like.

Gameplay instructions are done, and that was quite a task to get the neccessary information across without it being confusing or overly long winded which is something the British are really great at ... being overly long winded that is ...

The settings dialog got a complete purge. There is now an "environmental audio" channel, so you can turn the wind/rain/ambience up and down depending on how much you want to listen to the music or not.

 

The whole game has had all of it's user interfaces completed ... apart from a couple of changings I now want to make to a couple of things ... and there's an intro system which isn't overly long and main menu screen.

Video: 0:23 min/sec.



There's also a clickable linkage credits screen.

And Tactical Battle Mode is pretty much finished. Literally the only thing remaining is some death/pain audio, as currently it's the stock "uhhhghhh" which doesn't sound very dramatic ... :/

And here's a decent play through of a saved game. The music skips a bit due to editing things down and my PC grinding to a halt every so often under the strain of recording ... which is when I realised that I was still using a 3 year old version of FRAPS and could really do with downloading the new one ...

Video: 12:85 min/sec.



The video shows off the various screens and options and my attempts to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in a battle against the Ai.

Last up a short video showing off my take on "beam" weapons. I wasn't actually going to bother making a video for this specifically but did so to show my method of attaching a staticShapeObject with an animated texture to the muzzle of a weapon and then scaling it along the vector whilst a raycast does the hit detection and deals with impacts, explosions, debris, decals and the such like.

Video: 1:03 min/sec.



I've also cleaned up a whole host of really random, esoteric bugs which I found occur in very specific circumstances. Really, I sometimes wonder where the hell these things come from - though admittedly a couple were clear why did I think doing it that way was ever a good idea issues.

The strategic hexes have been finalized and recreated. This time they are actually using the textures of the environments in which they are based. The whole "Citadel Campaign" has been fixed and is now finished. This is the "bonus" campaign, which was supposed to be the "short" campaign but actually ended up being pretty enormous in it's own right. Captured territory in amber.

The player has to blast a path through occuppied territory, building up their core of veteran troops as they go and storm the pirate Citadel at the other side of the board. Capturing forts as they go gives upgrades to weapons. All hexes and fort locations are randomized on start of the campaign, and all other hexes have a randomized enemy force defending them to give a little variety of opponents during tactical battles.

There's still a few more things to sort out, some coding to do, 2 more dirigible models to complete, the instructions for the main campaign to write and I have 1 post-it note of bugs for the main campaign to fix.

Virtualizing The Virtual

Virtualizing The Virtual!? Is that a double negative? And if it is, does that mean that the virtual is now physical? If so, I for one welcome our new Steampunk Turn Based Tactical Artificial Intelligence Overlords ...

So, there I was, playing away, testing my game. It was night, poor visibility ... also probably in real life too ...
I was defending a flag from pirate assault ... back in the game now, not in real life ... when I realized that sometimes it takes a while for the Ai to get into the attack, especially when visible distance on the battlefield is very low. I had got my troops into my chosen defensive positions early on, and now kept clicking for the Ai to take it's turn and advance against my forces. And it was taking a while ...

Which is when I hit upon the idea of virtualizing the Ai's move. First check that they can't be seen, then make simulate how far along their path their current tactic can take them distance-wise, make sure that they'er not going to be spotted by the player's forces, and dump them at the end of their phase, decreasing their Action Points as if their turn had been taken normally. For the player, no more interminable waiting whilst the Ai to complete something that they can't see. 3+ minutes for the Ai turn could become 45 seconds.

And if the Ai could be spotted during their virtual movement, then play their turn as normal, have the player's trooper spot them, and let all hell break loose as normal.

Needless to say ... it turned out to be considerably more of a pain in the backside to get it to work correctly. First up my test function - 5 whole lines - worked lovely ... then when I rolled it into the full Ai thinking process - 10000 lines - I had to invert the values.

Then they kept falling through the terrain and other objects - make a check for that - then they all try and jump on each other - check for that - then they fall off the end of their path somehow - check for that - then they have the falling through terrain issue again - recheck post virtualized move for that. But finally it all works. The key of course was to slap the camera on the Ai so I could see what was happening when it all went wrong.

And so here's a little video of something that will never be shown in general gameplay - the Ai moving in dev mode.





Also I finally finished off the last of my character art - so here's a video of all of the different factions in various conditions.

Character types:
Unarmoured - with hat
Light Armour - helmet
Stealth Armour - helmet and camouflage
Heavy Armour - tin man with Regime flag facings (not all flags finished at time of video)

In order:
Regime/Faction - Environment - Weather

British Royalists - Temperate - Clear
Austro-Hungarian Empire - Jungle - Stormy
Chinese Dynasty - Mountainous - Clear
US Republic - Arid - Cloudy
People's Collective - Urban - Clear
Zulu Nation - Mountainous - Stormy

Followed by repeats of the various regimes in various environments with various weathers.

You might want to up the quality level - no idea why it's defaulted to 360p when it's in 720HD ...




I finally also finished the flags for all of the regimes - though admittedly after that video had been taken. I didn't want the flags to be particularly historical, as that kind of takes the fun out of it being Steampunk.

This is what the Single Battle Mode options screen looks like now:

From the left:
That's a stylized Imperial Engle on the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Union jack ensign and crown for the British Royalists

Traditional Chinese (Cantonese) word for Dragon for Chinese Dynasty - I came up with this after many failed attempts to make a stylized dragon design that I liked ... then thought that using the script for the word might be nice. Colours taken from the Qing Dynasty of the Steampunk peroid. They did have a dragon picture on their flag but I didn't like it.

Soviet Constructivist Colour Scheme for the People's Collective. Always knew that degree in art history would come in useful eventually ...

Slight change on the 1877 version of the Stars and Stripes by making the twin circles of stars into solid hoops for the US Replubic faction.

And finally, because of alphebetical order the Zulu Nation.

I sorted some really annoying issue with the Ai not always updating their aim aniation - probably self inflicted due to the manner in which I've changed spawning and mounting - and also made a rather spiffing icon for my game.

This being a MUCH larger version of said icon ... obviously.

The Boys ... And Johnny Foreigner

We've had the Brits and now we've been modeling all the other factions. All 7 of them, with unarmoured and light armoured troops, with 4 LODs each, with 4 camouflage schemes for Stealth Armour. That's a lot of LODing ...

 Originally I had envisioned the idea of having seperate models for each class within each faction. There are 7 classes and 7 factions. My 7 times table is about the only one I could ever remember as a child ... probably because I liked the number 49 for reasons of no known certainty. 49 would have been a lot of character models ... even more with light, stealth and heavy armoured types for each one ...

Thankfully I scrubbed that idea as utterly impractical before I started, and stuck to the concept of each faction having 1 unarmoured model, 1 model with a helmet for light armour and stealth armour (with a camouflage texture depending on the tactical battle environment), and a global heavy armoured model with different texture for each faction, carrying the factions flag on it's back.

This all still requires 15 character models, 4 LODs each - so a total of 60 meshes - and 49 diffuse textures plus specular and normal mapping. All of which has been a bit of a slog ...

We've had the British Royalists for a while ... even though I scrapped the models and restarted from scratch for the third time to get mesh deformation. Being British, Royalist and Steampunk meant that they had to be The Redcoats. The Brits are actually the only team not wearing Steampunk eyewear - their goggles are hanging around their necks. Light armour is defined by the African Zulu campaign pith helmet.

And here we have the standard dresscap model on the far left, light armoured model kneeling centred, and stealth armoured model on the right in green camouflage. This texture swapping makes use of the built-in "base" skin definition and swaps it on spawn for the appropriate environmental material  - green (for both temperate and jungle), arctic, arid and urban.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was as close as I wanted to get to zi Germans without actually having zi Germans. I wanted a European faction, and the Austro-Hungary seemed the perfect choice, a regime which spans multiple countries - Austria, Bosnia, Croatia, Czechs, Hungary, Italy, Montenegro, Poland (who cannot into space ...), Romania, Serbia, Slovakia,  Slovenia, Ukraine and of course including parts of zi Germans. As all troops are randomly named with national/ethnic forenames and cities/counties/states as surnames this also gave a wide selection for variaition.

Light armour centre, unarmoured forage caps flanking the sides, wandering through a rainforest, Steampunk monacles aplenty. I did have a bit of a um-and-ah about the uniform, wanting light blue and not entirely certain about the trousers which are those "flying pants" with the winged thighs that stick out.

I turned to the interwebz for inspiriation using You-Know-Who's-Image-Search and the phrase "austro hungarian empire 19th century uniforms", with safe search on.

Now we've had unexpected things thrown up before when a search for ideas on User Interface Buttons - "steampunk buttons" brought the wrong type of button ... and the ladies who were wearing them.

These are not the Steampunk buttons I was looking for ...

And it happened again ... well ... actually it didn't, it did give my the 19th century uniforms ... just in an unexpected genre ...

This was not the context I was looking for.

Anyhow, in the end I decided on a fairly realistic colour scheme of the Austro-Hungarian cavalry - the red jodpurs/flying pants being a nice foil to the predominant light blue, and a flattened forage cap.

The Chinese Dynasty. Dee-nasty or Die-nasty? There used to be a terrbile American TV show in the 1980s called Dynasty which was clearly trying to copy and cash-in on the success of Larry Hagman and co in Dallas. Over in the UK we tended to refer to it as Dysentery :P ...

China meant being able to break away from the usual style of uniform and colour schemes and throw in yellow - technically it's light amber, to go with my repeating amber and black colour scheme that can be seen in numerous places through out the game (especially on the boobytrap warning fences).

I ummed-and-ahhed again for some time about the overall colour, and decided on a green leather vest as a not to the jade emperor. The above picture is a good illustration of how I work - slapping the models into the engine and then changing the textures on the fly to see what looks best.

Unarmoured Chinese Dynasty troops to the left and light armoured walking to the right. You can just make out stealth camouflage armour in the background. They have these small spectacles perched on their nose which are half fashionable, half granny glasses.

The People's Collective is a sort of revolutionary soviet style idea for a faction.  Not so much Reds Under The Beds more Reds In A Dirigible ... and not really red either, the British Redcoats had already commandeered red as their dominant uniform.

I ended up basing the unform on a 1930s Security Apparatus Officer. "Security Apparatus" - I think the modern translation is Murderous Jobsworth Despot. The helmet is from the same peroid, looking remarkably similar to Great War French helmets, but in shiny brass and with goggles to steampunk it all up. Everyone has a little Lenin style beard and the names are all Soviet.

The Ungrateful Ruddy Colonials didn't quite make it in as a faction name but the US Republic did. I had wanted the USA to be "damn Yankee" dark blue but was hestitant on using yellow again for trim. In the end it ended up as two tone blue, dark coat dominant to light pants with a Rough Riders style slouch hat. The helmet is a shiny brass hybrid of US doughboy hat and early prototype brodie helmet.

The US has more modern, nearly cyberpunk style, one piece, wrap-around type goggles and everyone has an Abe Lincoln beard.

Finally, the last - at least in alphabetical order - regime which the player can choose to represent in campaigns and battles is the Zulu Nation.

I had wanted to steer well clear of anything to do with lions, leopard spot cloth and the whole Africa cliche. Oh ... and Vuvuzelas ...

In the end I opted for a more informal uniform based on gentleman's attire. Shirt, waistcoat, pants, gaiters/spats and a tophat and monacle. I had wanted to include the Zulu colours of black, white, red trim, green and yellow.

Initially I had made them a lot more green ... but then they looked like drunks from a Saint Patrick's parade. Adding a lot more yellow brought them too close to the Chinese colour scheme and made them look like they were wearing the South African Foot-to-ball strip. Eventually I decided on a much plainer, white, back, green dominant colour palette. Light armour is denoted as a helmet, which is sort of an ancient Greek facemask with the plume removed.

All names are (ethnic/national) given name - (city/area) family name, including the Chinese and Zulus who normally would have family name first.

Still to do ... are the Dastardly Pirates of Pangea. The enemy the player faces in one off single battle mode and who serve as the insurgents in the Main Campaign if the natives in your captured territories become unhappy with you rule. Also still to do is the heavy armoured character which will feature the same model for all factions but with different coloured textures using the material swapping function. And 6 more weapons to model and then the Tactical Battle part of the game is done.

For the Strategy Overview Map part of the campaigns I need to create a couple of new dirigibles, texture them all, and re-texture the environment hexes. There's still a few GUIs to finalize, some audio to sort out, port it all into a final codebase and make a few more code alterations which I want.

And an absolute shed load of documentation on how to play it to write.

Reduxed Get Reduxed ...

I'm beginning to hate that word ... We'll soon head to thesaurus.com to find a new one with the exact same meaning. Anhow, things which had been redone ... got redone ... for the umpteenth time ...

Yo Dawg! I heard you liked to redux, so we put a redux in your redux!

FFS ...

Anyhow, following on from a previously posted blog in Septemger 2012 entitled "Make Simple Character Model Quickly ... 40 Days Later ..." where I struggled with character limb deformations ... I have ... gone back and started it again from scratch.

And after 16 days, I can live with it ... which ... admittedly is what I said about the last effort ... but then I couldn't. Anyhow, it now deforms nicely, animates much better and ... probably looks exactly the same to the casual observer. But hey, it offended me ... and now it doesn't.

So with a fully, clean, base character mesh I can now get on with making all of the other troop types. I've also got rid of a few more of the engine's stock assets which I was using, making my own backpack ... which turned out to be an ordeal in itself for some reason ... an aidkit model and replacing the decal for moving to with a big black and amber X motif which spins.

I've made various tweaks and improvements to my scripts, and am down to just one post-it note of bugs, tweaks and balancing on the Main Campaign.

I've also redone the 4 jungle levels which I had designed. After receiving feedback that they weren't very jungly I've bent the tree trunks, added a skirt of transparent hanging vines in 2D, increased the number of said trees in the levels and created a new broad leaf plant for the groundcover, which helps to make the scenes much more crowded looking. In other words, more jungly.

I've also created 4 urban environment maps. This brings the total levels to the final tally of 20. There's a video below showing one of the maps - which just happens to be the one without any avenues of trees. I always try and give each level it's own theme such as highground, valley, rolling hills, etc, and this one is tight corners. The urban maps feature buildings - which whilst they cannot be entered directly - have ramps and bridges and crossovers. I was going for a sort of grand European architecture vibe.



So next up, an Ale Festival on Thursday! And after that, modeling the troops for the remaining 6 factions, sorting out the remaining issues with the Main Campaign, doing a whole load of finalized modeling and ... er ... stuff.

Additional Environments And Gui Redux 9000

Finally I have managed to get round to creating some new maps for the different environments and terrains. Up to now I've been reusing the same map over and over again. Now I have one map for each of the available environments - save for urban which I'm still working on the models for. I am planning on each environment type to have a few different maps, and have managed to come up with a workflow process to create these without too much hassel ... which makes a change from my usual "make it up in a completely adhoc manner" which permeates my existence.

I've reused or modified base textures where applicable in an attempt to keep everything looking uniformed and together. I use the same rock texture throughout all environments so that the player always knows which part of the terrain is an obstacle that cannot be walked up.





Whilst making various new models I also finally got round to replacing the rather awful blue/black hatched deployment areas with some brass poles with flashing amber lights on them. It all looks much better and a lot more part of the steampunk aesthetic.

For the umpteenth time I have once again reworked the aesthetic of all of my GUIs, this time giving them a wood grain look which I think looks much better than the rough, patchy look which they previously had.

I also added two new buttons to equipment selection on the deployment screens. These allow for filling up a trooper with ammunition to the maximum weight or money, and also copying the current troop's equipment to all other unequipped troops of the same class, weight restrictions applying. This all helps making loadout a lot faster and easier for the player.

I'm still not best pleased with the mesh deformation of my - currently singular - player character model and intend to fully rework this. Hopefully it'll end up looking a lot better and I will then be able to get on with making troop models for the Pirates, US, Austro-Hungarians, Chinese, Zulus and Anarcho-Commies, as well as finalise my design for the heavy armour models.





I've also done extensive playtesting of the Main Campaign - the one with the dirigibles in it - and found it to be a bit too easy. I rebalanced the way the Ai regimes work ... and then it became too hard ... fuuuu-. After a bit more balancing it needs a good retest to make sure I haven't made it too easy again ...

I've been working off the MIT console refrator development branch and apart from a few issues with the development branch itself, I think the console refraction is fine. Info on that here.

Anyhow, here's some vidya of the new environmental maps, each one played in the most likely weather pertaining to that environment. Mountains are cold and cloudy, Arid is fine and clear and hot, Jungle is wet, humid and stormy.

Back To The Future - To Integrate It With The Present

No not the 1985 comedy where Christopher Lloyd mispronounces "gigawatts" as "jigawatts" and contained a cameo by Heuy Lewis as well as his song "The Power of Love" in the soundtrack. So no, not that one.

This one.

The "Main Campaign" which I first started way back through the distant mists of time ... or summer 2011 as it was called back then. The one with the dirigibles which move around, capturing territory and depositing troops for battle.

Currently we are - and that's the Royal we of myself in third person remember - retrofitting that campaign system to work with how the game later developed, so that it all fits in seamlessly with the functions for the "not so short campaign" and the tactical battle mode.

In fact the "not so short campaign" has been renamed "The Citadel Campaign" - because you're objective is to battle through increasinly well equipped enemy territories to besiege the "Pirates of Pangea's" mighty citadel. The "Main Campaign" is now the 'Pangean Campaign' and takes the shape of the player and 5 other factions controlled by individual Ai's fighting to conquer the pirate infested and procedurally generated supercontinent of Pangea.

The majority of the changes for the "Pangean Campaign" - save for the GUI being updated - are in the background, with the Ai now replicating the player's progression accurately with troops increasing in experience dependant on current levels, casualties and expenditure. In fact there's a frightening amount of mathematics for Ai strategic decision making and expansion/contraction of veterans, finances, dirigibles, territories and equipment which I worked out over multiple Post-It notes ... having a minor disaster when I ran out of Post-Its and had to use real paper.

There's also been various balancing to functions and a whole host of bugfixes. Looking back at some of the early custom code and script base did give the occaisional raised eyebrow at how different the logic system had changed since the introduction of the "Citadel Campaign" and the Tactical Battle Mode with their more intertwined functionality. Territory once owned by the player but which is lost to opponents slowly returns to it's "unknown/fog of war" state as the distance between it and player territory expands.

I also created a set of difficulty modes for the "Pangean Campaign", including a hard mode where the whole of the continent is infested with the pirate faction.

Whilst I had been hoping to finalize all of this and be "feature complete" by the last day of 2012, the Xmas season has rather put a dint in my work schedule, what with having to go outside and occaisionally see other human beings and the such. Also I got a considerable amount of fine scotch at prezzies.

So all that remains of the "Pangean Campaign" functionality is the creation of a "buy/sell/mod Dirigible" GUI for the player - the Ai already have functions to decide on how best to approach all of this for themselves - and make certain that the results of a Tactical Battle between the Player and an Ai Faction are carried over to the Strategy part of the Campaign correctly.

The Tactical Battle Mode is nearly complete save for one small tweak I want to make so that the Ai can properly utilize artillery/airstrikes in the same way that the player can. I originally intended to have mechanized assault gun style tanks available, but after initial testing they were clearly too unbalanced and I cut that particular feature whilst making personal armour more effective so that the array of high explosive weapons available still had something useful to counter.

Whilst I am expecting to be "feature complete" some time next month, this is by no means "art" complete. The vast majority of the models and textures on view are placeholders. I am still hopeful for a fully finalized demo version of the "Single Tactical Battle Mode" available late February or March - possibly with an early adopter version of the game which is fully featured with campaigns, and missing a few finalized art assets (eg: probably a low number of tactical battle maps) that can be updated on completion.

Still hopeful for a final full release on or before the 1st of June - which is exactly the day in 2011 which I started, and would make the whole development cycle 2 full years exactly. If it hadn't of been for 3 rewrites to major parts (2 rewrites and an improvement actually) and a whole load of messing around with mesh deformations it would have been considerably sooner.

But anyhow, live, learn and improve ... hopefully ...

Short Campaign: 96 Battles Later ... Not So Short Then ...

 So Short Campaign turns out to be ... er ... not so short after all. But was ruddy good fun, especially after I fixed the usual gazzillion bugs that you find during a month of extensive playtesting.

I played through my Short Campaign ... and it took 96 battles to win.

... so ...

... err ...

Short Campaign turned out to be not so short after all.

It's been a solid month of playtesting ... with the accompanying solid month of fixing a huge number of bugs that a solid month of playtesting throws up, and an equal amount of tweaking.

For my Campaign test, things started off well, a little too well. Then after 30 or so battles, I found a bug that meant the Ai was never deploying any of it's veteran forces. Whilst my force of veterans and equipment was growing, I was still fighting againstthe halfwit conscripts who can barely hit an elephant at close range. That fixed and things began to be a bit more challenging.

The Ai had a few issues with finding cover under certain circumstances - fixed. The Ai had difficulty re-equipping from the dead when they ran out of ammunition - fixed. Enemy gunners didn't have the correct amount of ammunition on deployment - fixed.

And also made a whole load of tweaks. Some of the most expensive equipment didn't seem to have the firepower to justify the cost - fixed. You get what you pay for but no one piece of equipment tips the balance decisively. I also redid a number of Guis to make them somewhat more ergonomic. The deployment screen now has battle terrain, weather, conditions, objectives and modifiers viewable with less clicking. Conscripts can be added to the deployment force singularly or en masse now.

I also added range-based-passive-phase-fire to the classes. So gunners and snipers could only return fire on the enemy's turn if the target is over 200m away. Recce and Fusilier can only return fire up to 100m, and Sapper, Grenadier and Militia (Conscript) get 100-200m. I found it creates another tactical decision, both in deployment - low visibility prevents Gunny and Marksman using passive fire - but also in battle - do you leave a Fusilier to cover the other classes incase an enemy walks around that hedge just in front of your Sapper and is too close for him to defend himself? Or do you move the Fusilier up doing his own job?

I had started off with the concept of limiting the number of veterans to just 16 as a way of acting to create a further strategic variable. You've got a lot of one class, say a class which can only return fire in the passive phase at long range, and when some conscripts survive they get promoted to a close combat class which you are short of. Do you sack one or more of your experienced veterans to make room for the new - but inexperienced - guys?

And then there was the actual gameplay, and the type of interesting procedural stories you get from unscripted gameplay. Just throw in a bazzillion variables and watch it go.

---------------------

Late on in the Campaign, after I'd fixed all the bugs I had found, my mixed force of veterans and conscripts was attacking a large enemy base on a hill. Numerically I had the slight advantage, experience wise they probably shaded it and equipment wise we were equal. This was the third or fourth time I had attempted to win this particular hexagon shaped territory on the Strategic Campaign Map, and I needed it to allow for an extra avenue of attack on the final series of enemy territories to win the not so short campaign. Previously I'd mainly used conscripts in the attacks due to poor weather conditions and a lack of close-quarter combat troops. Now I had sunshine and clear weather which favoured my available types of veterans.

   I'd moved my force up to a low bank which gave them cover and split my troops into Support  (Marksmen and Gunners) and Assault groups (mostly conscripts with some veteran Grenadiers). I also had a Recce and a Sapper for spotting boobytraps, and Sapper dualed as a mule carrying lots of aidkits and spare ammunition. I only had one of each of these classes available

   I'd had everyone pouring a bit of fire from behind this bank to suppress the enemy, Recce and Sapper had been spotting and diffusing boobytraps. I'd started moving my Assault team round to the side so that they could run up the hill and attack, when a sniper round critically wounded my Recce. Luckily Sapper was near enough to despense first aid and medivac him. Unluckily it meant he wasn't part of the assault anymore.

   My Assault team broke cover and rushed halfway between the objective and the bank, taking cover behind a series of hedges whilst Support group peppered the enemy. All good so far ... right up until I set my first trooper out. He spotted a large number of enemy that had been obscured and took fire from the far side of the map. I decided to throw my flanking manoeuvre out wider to avoid a crossfire and that's when my lead officer was vapourized by an IED. Sapper was still back with the Support group, Recce had been medivaced, so no one in the Assault team could spot boobytraps. And that's when the conscripts which made up the bulk of my Assault squad freaked out, taking a massive morale loss from the officers death right in front of them.

   Most of them fled blindly in panic back towards the bank, narrowly missing an earlier detected but not diffused IED. A couple stood in the open impotently firing at enemies either to well concealed to be hit or out of range. And then it was the enemies turn to pick a few of my panicked troops off ... which made the surviving conscripts freak out even more.

   Eventually I ended up back where the assault had started, behind the bank with the Assault team. Sapper used the last of the aidkits to heal the wounded, the conscripts had regained their composure. Now the real problem was a distinct lack of ammunition. I spent some time dividing up the remain rounds and added a now unarmed Marksman to the Assault team as there were no more 50cal rounds left. Most of my dead troops still had plenty of ammunition, but they're corpses were stuck in a crossfire.

   Not wanting to fallback to the Deployment area and have a dirigible rescue my guys, I tried again, this time heading for the smoking earth where my lead officer had died. There wasn't going to be an IED left there now so it was a safe route up the side of the hill.

   I headed out of cover, much wider than the first ill-fated attack, and had everyone sprint through the enemy fire, past the scorch blast left by the boobytrap, and scavenged equipment from the deceased. My Support team chewed their way through the last of the ammunition to give covering fire, and I suddenly had half my men sitting behind that bank playing cards and checking Twitter feeds for the rest of the battle. So it was all down to my increasingly small and barely armed Assault force.

   Storming up the hill I noticed a lack of incoming rounds, infact, I could see some of the enemy Ai starting to loot their dead for spare ammunition and weapons. As I'd never had a battle last long enough for both myself and the Ai to run dry of bullets I was pretty bally chuffed to see this in action in real-live gameplay rather than laboratory conditions of dev testing. As my Assault team's ammunition dwindled to naught there was a sudden close-range grenade duel on the hill but I was to the enemy dead first and rearmed. A final push to the top cost another dead conscript from wherever the hell that damn sniper at the other side of the map was hiding, but I seized the enemy's colours and won the battle.

-------------------------------

It had all been rather exciting, and nerve wracking, but showed me that my whole gameplay idea and the methodology of how I had been creating it was just what I had been after, 14 months ago when I first started.

And here is the final Campaign map. As you see I had tried my best to avoid cities as much as possible as they always have the largest number of enemies to face. I'd started off from the left, worked my way right up to the last few which are protected by the enemy Citadel's influence (more troops per hex). And that was when I got a bit stuck. Each hex captured which borders the hex you attack gives 4 troops, and for the final attack I just never seemed to have enough and so had to open up a new front all the way up the right side to attack from all available angles. If those 3 cities in the top(ish) centre had been other types of terrain I would have gone through them instead, but they simply were too much of an obstacle.

And here is the final tally. As you can see Sapper survived! Recce recovered from his medivac but was killed later. Out of all 77 victories, half of them were  aided by the bug mentioned above when the Ai only fielded basic forces. Total War Cost is blank because it was an idea I had at the end and thus only just implemented it - it shows exactly how much you spent over the whole war. Tax payers like to know these things ...

And finally, a short video demonstrating starting the campaign and then saving mid-battle and then reloading it with progress restored.

Long And The Short Of It, Working Campaigns and SaveGames

Long Campaign, Short Campaign, Save Game ... cos you can't really play through the whole thing in one sitting ... well, you could if you never have to ever do anything or go anywhere, but must people occaisionally have to.

And behold, there is a Short Campaign.

Don't have time to conquer an entire continent in a procedurally generated, airship fleet commanding showdown between the world's Great Powers, yet don't want to play through a one off, single tactical battle, but fancy something with a bit more longevity?

Then maybe the Short Campaign is for you. Also known as "The Citadel Campaign", "The Dastardly Pirate Citadel Campaign" ... and possibly a few other things until I work out the correct name which I shall ultimately call it. One thing is for certain, it has Dastardly Pirates and a Citadel ... actually that's two things ... Two things are for certain, it has Dastardly Pirates and a Citadel ... actually it doesn't have a real Citadel because I haven't made the model yet ... so you'll just have to pretend for the time being.

The Short Campaign comprises of a triangle of territories (hexes) reaching 8 or 9 at it's deepest point. They're all under the control of the Dastardly Pirates who send out flagons of treason from their Citadel Fortress right at the back, and it's up to the Regime of your choosing to blast their way through enemy territory and storm that Citadel.

Blank/blue territories are captured ones, and the player's regime gains cash and extra troops from wrestling them from enemy hands. Seizing fortifications allow for class upgrades. The deeper into hostile territory the player pushes, the more skilled and better equipped the opposition becomes. The player can only launch attacks from territories which they occuppy, and each adjacent captured hex gives additional troops for the assault.

And this is where the main part of the game is now fully functional. Yeah, in bold and everything.

From the "Campaign Overview" section, you select your troops, equip them, and then it's straight to the "Tactical Battle" mode where you direct your chaps around in hot turn-based squad tactical action! The end result it recorded, your veterans are upgraded or if deceased removed, successful conscripts get promoted into the veteran core, loot gets gathered, and the Campaign world is updated to reflect the changes, territories change hands, progress is made ... or not if you got your bum whupped by the opposition in the Tactical Battle.

And when the Campaign reloads, updates the changes, and it all continues. It's very much in the mould of the original X-Com "Geoscape" to "Battlescape" and back again - except you're fighting for possession of territory and territory change hands depending on battle results. And it all works - exactly as I'd envisioned (or at least hoped it would) when I first started, 13 months ago.


HUZZAR

In fact, 80% of game logic is complete and bug-squished. Obviously there's a bit of tweaking that can be done here and there, but it works. The Short Campaign Mode works in it's entirety, the Single Battle Mode works - though I've only one map at the moment and I've yet to introduce the Armoured Cavalry class option, and the old Long Campaign Mode (the thing with the airships) works save for 3 known bugs and a bit of tweaking.

And I've knocked up a save game system which works across all 3 game modes. Because of the various jumping back and forth in the Campaigns between "battle mode" and "campaign overview mode" it took a bit more effort than just saving out the current missiongroup. It's going to get a slight tweak to incorporate the difficulty level when displaying available saved games to restart, but apart from that it works as desired. Each game mode has 10 saves.

There is now also now a difficulty setting for campaigns, so the player can choose their own level of challenge.

In the video below is it all in action, abridged obviously as time and filesize are premium in both uploading and watching these sorts of things. There's also a little hiccup when I attempt to save from the "tactical battle" part first time as I had fix a bug and re-execute the gui to get the info to display correctly ... note to self: don't write a save game system at 5am ...

The combat is very abridged, just a little taster but if you've watched any of my previous videos you'll know the gist. As it's early on in the campaign both my troops and the Ai's are lowly conscripts with the most basic equipment, and thus have trouble hitting the broad side of barn. In the end the Ai throws in the towel and flees the battle area after taking a few casualties.

The Ballad of Brave Sir Robin RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!

Typically my blogs are written as full blown stream of consciousness style, which tends to be rather amusing, off the cuff, overly long and it also tends to mean that I forget to mention stuff that I've actually done, hence -

- 13th month anniversary blog part TWO!

Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die, O brave Sir Robin!
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin!

Oh Brave Sir Robin, Thou Art Inspiration To Us All!


Alas we cannot all be as brave as Brave Sir Robin ... which is why I've introduced the RUN AWAY  Mode.

It was something X-Com had, the ability to flee with your remaining troops in the transport at abandon the ones still outside to fate worse than getting set upon by a pack of Chryssalids ... actually that usually was their fate ...


Give back Rudi Unger!

Now in my project your troops are dropped by dirigible into up to 3 Deployment Areas of your choosing (left flank, central, right flank). If the battle isn't going well you can now retreat to the Deployment Areas and abort the mission, saving the troopers inside the Deployment Areas, including any critically wounded casualties that are lying inside them. Troops and casualties outside of the Deployment Areas are captured, never to be seen again. As it's going to have a SteamPunk vibe they'll probably end up being condemned to live out their days forced into doing something dastardly and unchivalrous like teaching 12 year old schoolgirls how to bake crumpets. Surely for men of honour there can be no greater shame!

Currently my Deployment Areas are just a blue/black striped transparent box which obviously needs changing to something with a bit more graphical gravitas. I've created a new in-game options button which brings up a whole list of options such as "graphics/audio options, save game (not working yet), Quit, etc" and "Abort Mission" is found under here (rather like ye olde X-Com).

Selecting it brings up a warning detailing that you will fail the mission (thus losing any territory if you are defending it in the Main Campaign game) and informing you how many troops will be rescued and how many will be permenantly lost to enemy hands. You can cancel if you think the losses are too great, or go ahead with the rescue and have a dirigible pick up the survivors. Rescued troops will retain all of their experience from kills recorded during the battle but will not get their additional mission experience bonus - to stop the player starting battles, withdrawing all his forces and then getting a free EXP point. NO cheating for you!



Run Away!

The ability to soil your pants and flee waving your arms in the air whilst screaming like a little girl startled by a large and hairy spider discovered hidden away inside of her lunchbox upon opening it is also mirrored in the enemy Ai. If you've been handing them an utter thrashing and they have become hopelessly outnumbered they will also think about legging it and extracting as many survivors as they can from an unwinnable situation.

 During playtesting I noticed an annoying little issue ... your troops automatically stop moving when they spot a new enemy so that you can decide on a course of action such as attack, move elsewhere or keep going. However when walking over rough terrain it is possible for the trooper to get repeated glimpses of an enemy Ai who you don't want to attack or can't attack due to your weapon's limited range. When this happened the player's trooper would stop every few feet and the player would have to reclick the destination to get them to move and then it would happen again. So I created a simple "don't stop moving" toggleButton. The player can now manually stop their trooper as normal, and when new targets are spotted the target indicator displays them to inform the player of the potential danger without halting the trooper. If the enemy Ai makes their reactive fire test the player will stop as normal and come under passive/reactive attack. Annoyance squished.

And I've also done some tweaking to the troops/equipment/deployment screens. Most of this is about throwing in extra warnings when you attempt to deploy a squad with guys either missing ammunition for weapons or not equipped at all. There's a fair few changes I still want to tweak into the deployment screen, mostly ergonomic/aesthetic, but it all works fine for now.

And now, back to Brave Sir Robin...

A Year To The Day! Nope I Can't Count It's Been 13 Months

Apparently no blog for June then ... because I was waiting for the year long first anniversary of the start of my current project to post. And then it turns out that I can't count ...

So, this is the 13th Month Anniversary Of Starting My Current Project ... doesn't exactly trip of the tongue does it?

First up, let's get a little overview from the first blog back in June 28th 2011.



Wow, things have changed a bit ...

Turnbased squad tactics gameplay, somewhat in the vein of Laser Squad and the original X-Coms.

Check! We've got that and it even works and everything. Infact the only bit of the actual "battlescape" part of the game that is not fully functional is the Ai picking up other weapons (something which neither LS nor X-Com had). To be honest I do have an Ai pick up weapons function but it's a horrible illogical mess and needs rewriting so I can iron the remaining bugs out - and that got delayed only because I ate something a bit dodgy during the week and have had my head stuck in a bucket. Think pea soup and The Exorcist. No, booze was not involved.

My liver function test showed that I was suffering acute hypochondria and that my organs are all fine (or they lost my test results and gave me someone elses ...) but I've got some gastro-reflux-thing which definitely didn't like whatever I ingested during the week, cue demonic possession and pea soup.

The other thing not functional is the "armoured cavalry" support option, but that was always designed to be added right at the end after everything else was done, so no loss there. When existing it will be a large tank, unable to spot enemies by itself unless they are also a large tank, incapable of reactive fire, baffling expensive (like the real things), but capable of blasting large areas into little bits and being compeltely immune to electric weaponry, a specific of the Recce class. This is where the Sapper class and their myriad of explosives and flame weapons will come into play properly.

I spent most of the last month finding and fixing bugs in gameplay, as well as lots of tweaking and balancing. There was a whole load associated with the sapper and recce classes and their interaction with booby traps which required rather a lot of testing.

But now it all works and it works intelligently.

All three battle types of clear/assault/defend work. Ai will actively seek cover, defending Ai won't just hang around at their defensive position and take long range shots. If they're under attack and don't have the ability to reply in kind they'll move to a safer defensive position and then scout back to see if the situation has changed some time later. If a defending Ai isn't getting any part of the battle they will scout about their area to flush out lurking attackers.

I've given each class of trooper a new "reactive range", so now snipers don't spin round and take passive reaction shots at point-blank range, something which always seemed a little odd in playtesting. Sniper and Gunny class only commit to automatic reactive fire during the opponents phase at ranges of 200+, Grenadier and Sapper take the mid-range of 100-200, leaving Fusilier and Recce with the close-range 0-100. This all helps represent the type of weapons that are class specific and gives more of a tactical dilemma when ending the player's phase. Do you really want to leave that Recce trooper out in the open there? Do you really want that sniper next to that doorway that anyone could come out of without warning?

I've also tweaked the whole promotion system. Promotion is now easier because ... well, death is also rather easy and your troops can be have very high mortality rates if things go wrong. Stats also increase more than before as the first few promotions didn't seem to give too many advantages for the effort that they took. Panic is now much more likely for lower ranks and conscripts if higher ranks become casualties.

And that's about all I can remember of the last month ...

What I was hoping to have achieved by now was to have more finalized artwork done, but alas gameplay tweaking/fixing has occupied all my time. When I'm done with the fixing I'll give it a little roadtest on integrating the whole tactical battle thing with teh overall strategy campaign just to make sure that there is no HUGE PAIN IN THE BUM PROBLEM AWAITING FURTHER DOWN THE LINE.


And eventually we'll get back to this bit of the game - and stick the two parts together with duct tape

The strategy part works fairly okeedokee by itself save for a lots of tweaking for balance issues (I need to find a smoother way of limiting dirigible numbers because in testing they could really get out of hand) and an Ai versus Ai bug that I noticed aeons ago but never got around to fixing where the correct result was not always recored. Obviously this area also needs it's artwork finalizing too. However finalizing the "main campaign" isn't my immediate priority as I intend to create a "short campaign" mode where the player battles his way from the base of a triangular arrangement of hexagon territories to eventually capture the enemy citadel. The player will be able to pick their own route, carving a swathe through enemy territory, attacking fortifide positions to unlock extra equipment/weapon upgrades or by passing them to move on to the next level closer to their goal. More on all of that some time later.

So ... to recap ... it's been a full year to the day ... er ... and a month from starting! A lot of crap code has been written, a lot of crap code has been rewritten until it wasn't crap, we learned new things and then forgot them, we wondered why we did things in a certain way and then undid them only to find out that we did them that way because they wouldn't work the other way, we completely forgot the yearly anniversay blog.


It's been a year and a month and we now feel a lot less like this.

I Break Everything And Then Fix It! Oh The Exciting Life Of Indie Deving!

I had a liver detox diet, lost the strange bicycle tire which had appeared around my torso, eat more fruit than anyone had ever eaten before, took up skipping - which is knackerising - bought a few crates of ale and a bottle of baffling expensive rum under the guide of death metal celloist (it was a very pretty bottle),

sat about in the garden because it had finally stopped raining in the Shire of York after the wettest Spring since 1907. And even found time to break everything that I'd done dev-wise whilst trying to fix it.

So I ended up changing my art style again ... immediately after I'd decided on what it was going to be ...

So it is now more "painterly" and less "abstract".

I'd done a bit of refractoring my working level, shrinking the size of the hedges a little and opening more gaps between them. I'd also noticed that I'd been getting a fair few failures on pathfinding with the Recast resource. My terrain is very bumpy and I'd set >1500 custom class CoverNodes about and done pathfinding between them with an automated script to test around 7 million paths. Initially I'd a rather worrying 2.5 million failures, and after a bit of saving throws in my pathfinding scripts, I'd got that down to <200k, and then thrown in a simple "move to nearest node where you can actually get a path" incase that 3.7% failure rate occured in game.

I'd improved my Ai, getting them to make decisions about when they should try and hide from the player. Previously they'd either stopped at distance if they were "support" or advanced if they were "assault". I've always been a fan of turn based strategy/tactics games ... which is why I'm making one obviously ... but sometimes their Ai has been a bit ... daft. Steel Panthers I'm looking at you. I added in a whole load of new thinking to make the computer act more in the way a player would, but still using it's randomized battle plan.

Suddenly my Ai were filled with awesome and powered by buttkicking, so it was time to remove all the little helpers I'd given them previously to make them more competitive, like maxing out their stats, they now get the same chances for decent stats as the player.

Which all goes to make battles more competitive, varied and fair.

Somewhere amongst all of this I'd noticed a few bugs so I'd fixed them, and thus managed to break "many things", again mostly pertaining to the Ai. After a fair bit more hitting IDE with a mallet I got things working again as they should do.

I'd also made a start on creating some player characters - or at least a "base character". I'd looked at some of the meshes that I'd got from Evolver for use in Blender some time ago, and studied one of these as a base for rigging and animating a custom character. I'm doing a SteamPunk vibe, so everyone "struts imperiously". I'm still using Ye Olde Blender 1.44 with DTS exporter 0.964, though I export with collada for the foliage/trees/bushes so I can use vertex painting.

I'd also made a whole load of improvements to my GUIs, such as adding a new button for reserving a shot at half maximum range if you don't want your little chap to be wasting shots on things miles away that he's unlikely to hit. In "loadout" I'd also added the ability to equip one chap and then have his equipment cloned to all unequipped troops - money and individual strength/encumberance permitting - which is incredibly useful when you have a bag of Conscript Militia who can only use basic equipment until they get promoted ... should any of them survive the battle.

Still to do is a bit more Ai thinking tweaking, a bit more environment tweaking, creating some finalized models for troops and weapons, testing the assault and defend gametypes, doing the art for GUIs, and errr ... general stuff. My bug fixing list gets smaller, my todo list doesn't seem to. Oh the exciting life of Indie Deving!

tl;dr good things happened, bad things got fixed, I'm eating a lot of fruit.

Feedback To Player When Nothing Is Happening

Waiting around, scratching yourself, wondering what the hell the Ai is up to ... if anything? Has it crashed? Locked in a loop? Waiting for input without telling you that it wants you to do something. Who knows?

---------------------------------------------------------

I had noticed occassionally decals would not work as expected but didn't think much of it as it didn't seem related to the stability issues I had been experiencing. I'd ripped out my custom explosion stuff and gone back to using automated functionality, and whilst this had fixed my disappearing decal, it hadn't done anything for stability. Eventually I noticed that things were getting deleted, random things like GUIs, decal data, SFX, and other things which was causing the stability issue.

Now I'd had previous experience of this a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away - and knew that it was trying to clean something up, failing to find it, and then eating something else.

There had been an issue ... located somewhere between the chair and the keyboard ... that had crept in very early at the start. However it hadn't surfaced until 6 or so months later when I'd had the Ai team in and working with near complete functionality.

I was attempting to delete a decal in the Ai's move routine which the Ai didn't even own, when I should have been using the decal management system to simple remove it.

BY ODIN'S HAT! Either extreme crunch or a sudden outbreak of sobriety had caused such a faux pas.

And with that fixed, stability issues disappeared.

So onwards and er ... onwards!

After replacing all my custom explosion stuff - for the umpteenth ruddy time - I'd also rolled back a few other changes which I'd recently made. Ammo packs went back down to their original 5 from changed 10. This means that ammo might need monitoring on the high rate of fire weapons and various rocket/grenade launchers. The fact was packs of 10 rounds really seemed to stop bullets being a resource and I might as well have just gone for infinite ammo - which I very much do not want (apart from in the handfull of hugely expensive rechargeable energy weapons). I'd made various tweaks to weapon and ammo weights, ranges, stopping powers, and scrapped the original idea of grenades exploding at the end of a turn in favour of immediate detonation. There were far too many instances in testing of hurling a frag and then getting shot when trying to step back into cover afterwards - thus making grenades a liability rather than another tool of the arsenal.

I'd sorted out a whole load of Ai related thinky-thinky about equipment, decisions on using grenades, swapping weapons and finding more ammo if they run out. Which all took far too much effort to synchronize and stop them from changing their minds halfway through doing something. Various tweaks to initially equipping them were also made and some dodgy mathematics fixed.

All of which brings me to having the player wait for things.

When one of the player's troops comes under fire during their active turn, control is momentarily removed and then given back when the incoming projectiles have either impacted or burntout their lifespan. During the enemy Ai's turn, there's a lot of waiting around obviously - which does tend to happen in sequential turn based games, in fact it's supposed to happen or it wouldn't be sequentially turn based ... er ... obviously.

So I've developed a camera and information system to give the player feedback when they are in "passive mode" and do not have direct input control. This starts as a basic GUI announcement that it is the opponents turn, and some basic information about what is happening. At it's most basic this is a simple "Hidden Movement" announcement, telling the player that stuff is a-foot, but none of his little chaps can see it.

This progresses to giving feedback on things that are in the field of view of any of the player's troops, such as an enemy going beserk and shooting indescriminately, fleeing in panic, or walking into a booby-trap that the player had placed at the beginning of the battle. The camera moves to whichever trooper is the most relevant, displaying their Name, Rank and Class, and information about what is happening. This can be about that particular trooper being in danger, to returning fire, to viewing something passively such as enemy panic or new enemies spotted. Eventually I'm considering tweaking the "Hidden Movement" part of the passive phase so that the camera shows a random part of the map as scenery, rather than just lingering on the last trooper that had any information to pass on to the player.

All designed to keep the player up-to-date with pertinent information and views of the action during the phase when the player has no control.

And here's some vidya of it all in action. It starts off with me planting a shed-load of booby-traps ... which the Ai then avoids by using dual flanking manouevers ... ah bugger. This just happened to be the tactics it chose, the opponent not having any clue where booby-traps are until unless spotted by a "Recce" or "Sapper" class (Sapper's can defuse booby-traps by walking into them). The enemy do however walk into an IED on either flank and there's a bug displayed in the player info where the name of the viewing trooper is not displayed with the information (since fixed!). At the very end there's a little demo of me fragging the main group of IEDs and watching them set each other off with secondary explosions.

The majority of the video is just gameplay, with an emphasis on the camera and feedback system during the player's passive phase. It features "Stormy" weather type which has visibility of all troops reduced to 100 units. (There are 4 weather types with troop visibility ranging from 300 down to just 50 units/metres).

Next up, finishing off the Ai's decision making about which equipment to use in various situations, having the Ai take more advantage of cover, and use a wider dynamic avoidance rule when moving as they do still tend to knock into each other on corners. Also required is an end of battle screen featuring stats on how each trooper did, their current state, promotions, the chance to recruit new core troops from any deployed militia which did well in the battle, and an overall battle rating.

After that it's about sorting out armoured cavalry (also to give the sapper class something to act against as an equaliser with all of it's explosive class-based weaponry), make sure the whole thing loads and saves correctly, and then it's about time to make some proper maps/battle arenas for the post-alpha game.

Something That Vaguely Resembles A Game ...

 Does exactly what it says on the tin! I've got a full blown ... if rather rough ... battle with the Ai on the go - and it all works! Well, apart form the bits when it crashes - but I'll see about fixing that later.

Well, it took 8 months but it's something that vaguely resembles a game. At least the single battle part is, which will eventually be squeezed into work with the larger Strategy-Flying-Around-Conquering-Stuff part.

But anyhoo, it works "just as planned" ... only rougher 'cos there's various parts which need tweaking, changing or just downright fixing.

I'd struggled for some time ... and pontificated considerably longer ... about how to get the Ai opponent to choose a team of troopers from the available resources of cash, veterans, 6x classes, and class-level based equipment. Initially it seemed easiest to make pre-defined teams with minor variations ... right up to the point when it became clear that this was obviously a rubbish way of doing things.

After a few morale boosting sessions where I charitably lined the Chancellor of the Exchequer's pockets in a country pub ... and trying to kill a seagull that oblitered the procedurally generated algorithm I was dreaming about, it all became quite clear.

I created a simple yet awesome system which procedurally generated an opposing force within the constraints of available cash, veterans and class levels based on weather, strategy, objectives and multiple squad tactics. No, I don't remember how ... it was all a dislocated haze, but then for Stevie, Real Life ™ gets fainter and fainter everyday ... (I find it helps if you say that in a strained and high pitched voice)

So there it is, an Ai team playing to the strengths afforded to them, using one of 8 different tactical approaches. These are fairly regular sort of tactics and are as follows:

1. Extended Line - sweep down across the battlefield, advancing on the enemy ... it worked in the Great War! Oh wait ... no ... no it didn't ...
2. Frontal Assault - group everyone together and go straight for the enemy ... and hope they don't have to many MGs, mortars or anything else that makes a mess out of a large group in open terrain ...
3. Hook and Line Left - central support group with flanking assault group to the left.
4. Hook and Line Right - guess what this is the mirror image of?
5. Horns of the Buffalo - Zulutastic. Dual assault groups flanking on either side with a central support team.
6. Pincer Movement - twin flanking assault groups.
7. Flank Support - twin flanking support groups engaging at range.
8. Skirmish Line - like extended line but made up of long range support gunners, keeping their distance as much as possible.

Needless to say, weather and terrain conditions are taken into account when the Ai are choosing tactics and classes. So if it's pitch black and everyone is tripping over each other in the dark, there's a lot more chance of their being assault groups than support groups, and likewise, if it's a barren, featureless desert with visibility stretching for miles/kilometers/leagues/cubics they're not going to create vast numbers of assault squads armed with pistols. This doesn't mean that they won't occassionally pick a less suitable tactic - just that they are a lot less likely. History is filled with plans which "seemed like a good idea at the time".

Anyhow, as I mentioned, it plays like a game ... except when it doesn't and crashes. Upgrading to the newest version of the engine might help - still using a customized previous version ...

I've still got 4 post-it notes full of bugs to sort out. And the player really does require a lot more feedback on what is happening during the enemy turn. At the moment reactive fire works fine, the camera mvoes to the player's trooper being targeted and positions itself so you can see who is shooting at him. Ideally this also needs to track visible enemies whilst they move. Talking of visible enemies, spotting works fine, showing and hiding opponents as they move in and out of sight, so no rotating the camera around an obstacle to try and spot an opponent that your team members cannot see.

Reactive fire works both ways, requiring the passive team to successfully spot and have enough initiative (based on distance, stance, angle) to either fire first or fire as the opponent moves.

The Tactical-PlayGUI (as opossed to the StrategicOverview-PlayGui) is the only one which still requires to be overhauled, and there's a definite need to highlight the start of the player's next turn as I've spent a while staring at the screen before realising that I had control of my buttons back.

I also need some sort of victory/loser screen detailing what your troops did and what sort of performance you had.

I'd been concerned over a few things and had halved the weight of ammo for fear it was too easy for playesr/Ai to run low. Turns out they don't actually use that much (either human or Ai) in any of my test battles. Also, battles are over a lot quicker than I had expected. Initially I was a bit disturbed at the ease I won my first battle 10-3, but then lost both my next battles 5-10 and 7-10 respectively when the Ai used different tactics and the terrain was less open. With both forces equal it's a fairly nice challenge.

Gah ... enough typing ... video of a battle, with the boring bits edited out. Features plenty of spotting, reactive fire, some healing and some panicking in both teams over the deaths of team-mates.


Easier to see what the hell is going on in HD but you knew that ...



Next to do is improve how the Ai decides how to start each turn, which weapon to go with when they have multiples. They already do pretty well when deciding on grenades or bullets. Currently I have the "Meeting Engagement" gametype working pretty well, but also need Assault and Defence. Also tanks/armoured cavalry needed or the Sapper class isn't going to have too much to do with it's specialized explosives. Finish up my save/load solution and eventually cram it all into the strategy part of the game so that the campaign mode works fully. And of course art ... which all comes last after the damn thing works properly.

Data, Data, Data, 28 Items, Multi-Purpose Ammo, Artillery

Item data overload! All items finally done, at least the data and how they all work in game - still placeholder models ---> Art is last on the list. Also multi-purpose ammunition, for people who are tied of not being able to use similar bullets in multiple weapons.
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Weapons, items, armour, artillery ... done, finally. Or at least the data and testing for them all it done, if not the final 3D modeled form of them - that's for last on the list of "What Needs To Get Done And In Order To Have Done Everything". So everything is still placeholder in the visual department. No pics this time, but cue vids.

So, here's a quick recap.

There are 6 classes.

Each Class has 4 levels of items.

There's also a "generic" class of 4 items everyone can use without penalty.

Ammunition of a each caliber can be used in any weapon of that caliber.

There are booby traps which can be placed before the battle for the enemy to walk into, and thewse can be detected and captured by the Sapper Class.

Most items are weapons of some form, some are equipment, and some are defensive (like armour).

Light armour is ... er, light. Heavy armour is ... er not light. Stealth armour is camouflaged. Whilst thinking up various defensive equipment for the classes, I also thought it might be fun to have some "non-conventional". I decided on a certain type of armour, which defended the user not by stopping damage, but by reducing accuracy of the firer by dazzling them. For a visual, I decided on some sort of energy shield, and was drawn to the old WW1 battleship "razzle-dazzle" camouflage schemes - only with a bit more colour in it and a moving pattern.


Amongst the variety of standard and conventional weapons I thought up a few exotic ones such as a badly spelt "flammenwaffen" - since renamed Flammenwerfer - a lightning gun that fries things - unless they're in a faraday cage ... say totally metal heavy armour ... in which case they don't do any damage at all - various rifle grenades, portable mortars, flamerockets, sniper rifles and machine-guns ... there was also the Railgun, which punches a hole through everything for 200 metres, reducing damage as it goes.



And artillery, in fact a few different types of artillery, each with different damage, blast radius, accuracy, but also a concussion radius to stun. There are rockets which are all noise and no trousers but scare the hell out of everyone nearby and cause large morale loss and panic. More standard artillery strikes and heavy mortars, guided flame bombs, and also carpet bombing by dirigible.



And for all of this hurty-hurty stuff, I needed a healy-healy system. So aid-kits are dual purpose, healing wounded squad members as you'd expect by increasing health - but also being available to create medivac. I rejigged the damage system so that disabled squad members who are not killed outright will fall wounded and slow bleed to death ... unless you can get someone with an aid-kit to heal them and call in medivac. Eventually they'll be a nice screen for this medivac but right now there isn't. Medivac-ing also boosts everyones morale a little as it's good to see your mates saved to fight another day.



And throw in a shed load of bug fixes and general improvements.

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My original deadline of completion by 1st January 2012 will be missed by a mile - but I'm still vaguely on course for completed gameplay with placeholder art. After a few rewrites that were costly in time, and the occurance of total burnout around October that caused an end to continuous crunch, it's still not a bad effort and should be completed early in the new year.