Messages

1

Offtopic / Re: Shadows of Forbidden Gods

« on: October 22, 2022, 03:06:48 pm »

Is the game good? I have been thinking about getting it for a while, because the premise seems pretty interesting.
It is a shame that the hexgrid seems counter productive here. Is the map randomized?
Otherwise, a map illustration with a location list and a travel matrix would have worked much better.

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: October 07, 2022, 10:48:43 pm »

Wait!! That is factually incorrect. XCOM is a spinoff of Warhammer 40k franchise, and was designed by Rick Priestley!!!

Haha, I'm still trying to get the meaning behind the message before. Funnily, some things are not too off the mark. You will play the commander in Zodiac Legion indeed, and as a medieval commander, he is expected to get his hands (and sword) dirty.

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: March 25, 2022, 09:56:15 am »

Zodiac Legion is a game that was inspired by the movie “The Lord of the Rings”. In this game, players are given a character from each zodiac sign and they have to fight against other characters from their own zodiac sign. Players can choose between two different classes; Warriors and Mages. Each class has its own strengths and weaknesses. Warriors are good at melee combat and are strong in physical attacks while mages are better at casting spells and using magic.

Hi, and thank you for your summary, Mr Summary bot!
The game has little relation to "the Lords of the Rings" movie. Actually, when I started, I wanted to make a fantasy X-COM. However, there are a lot of things that don't work the same way at all when a large part of the warriors use melee, so we ended up with something quite different, and I would say our combat is closer from Blood Bowl or Descent: Journeys in the Dark now.
So the main X-COM element is now the interaction between the geoscape (kingdom building), and the turn-based missions.

Regarding the lore, we drew from multiple sources of inspiration:
I cannot deny being influence by Saint-Seiya when it comes to having champions with powers coming from zodiac constellations!
But we drew from mythology(some of the opponents are satyres and minotaures, but in a way, we could say we were also influenced by Games Workshop)  and history :
The Zodiac order is organized like the medieval chivalric holy orders, while its opponents are a loose confederation with characteristics from the hanseatic league or the Holy Roman Empire (ie, very loose organization, with strong intra faction rivalry, but huge combined power).

Regarding Zodiac signs, characters will indeed have one sign (the player has some choice in the matter), and these signs will function as sub-class archetypes (Taurus would lean into the barbarian archetype, while Aquarius would be closer from an elementalist), but you can customize them to some extent, by your choice of perks (some perks will be common to several signs according to their element or characteristics, other will be specific to a single one), or with their secondary ascending sign.

The opponents work differently, because it is easier to have them with fixed stats with slight variations than to have each opponent being unique (as it would be a mess to guess the abilities of each at first glance).

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: January 10, 2022, 06:36:46 pm »

Splattercat made a cool presentation video of our game here:

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: August 27, 2021, 12:41:47 pm »

Hey,
We added a small dungeon crawling demo to our Steam page if you want th check it out (and leave feedback, because everyone is very silent!).
It is still lacking in the QoL department and the pacing is still a bit off in some missions:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/812910/Zodiac_Legion/

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: June 18, 2021, 02:54:06 pm »

We also made a let's play video, showcasing the tactical part of the game (on one level):

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Offtopic / Re: This needs to be ripped for sprites ASAP.

« on: June 16, 2021, 06:22:39 pm »

yes, it looks great. It is interesting, as they must have had to redo because of the change of perspective.
I hope the maps end up bigger than in the trailer, though.

8

Offtopic / Re: Sabre Team (Swat game based on Xcom)

« on: June 08, 2021, 07:38:22 pm »

Yes! I remember playing it on my Atari STe. However, I also remember running into issues, but maybe it was my "unofficial version".

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: June 06, 2021, 10:04:45 am »

The game not got a trailer. It was first played yesterday among the Guerrilla Collective:

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: May 18, 2021, 10:03:24 pm »

Looks like it is completely different from my attempt

Will it have leveling up and classes, like Final Fantasy Tactics? If yes, how are you planning to mitigate experience grinding?

It is a good thing, because your attempt looks really impressive (with the extended terraforming).
Yes, it will have leveling up and classes. In order to mitigate experience grinding, I will use a system similar to the ranks in X-COM, but give them way more importance:
The character "standard progression" will be classless (kind of), characters will follow a "player defined profession templates" at early level (so you can decide how your archers will train, but won't allocate points for individual ones). Then become fully customizable as they become full brothers of the order.
Then, the highest ranked ones will have the opportunity to become champion or master of one of the 13 Zodiac order.
This will give them benefits on top of their skill (and potentially much stronger than their skills).
The benefits granted by the Zodiac order will depend on the magic research conducted, and the artifacts crafted/recovered.
So when Master Libra dies, another one takes the mantle and inherits all the benefits, but not the mundane skills of his predecessor.
But my intent is to make the end game (once a good part of the research tree has been researched) Zodiac powers much stronger than the regular skill up, so a lvl 3 Master of Leo will be slightly weaker than a lvl 8 Master, but he will still be much more powerful than a lvl8 champion, or a lvl 8 "standard brother of the order".
 
The number of masters will be limited to 1 per sign (and probably 1 champion, but I am not sure of that). I will also remove kill XP, because I don't want to give incentive to random killing, so it will be entirely based on the number of missions, their difficulty, and their outcome (or the time spent training at the stronghold while other completed the mission).

[Spoiler]

11

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: March 25, 2021, 12:41:10 pm »

Spoiler:

Astonishingly good looking project! As for implementing the hex tiling, check Age of Wonders games. Especially the first AoW, which had walls for castles and dungeons.

I myself currently got dragged away with all the refugee life issues and the camp management now threatening me for filming a fight (they believe that all happening in the camp must stay in the camp). Although I have finished my own C-like language (called NewC), featuring an extended macro processor, which fixes all the issues impeding me from using the old CPP. Had to do that, since I really dislike C++, but still for the voxel editor I need custom types, like vec3 and bounded checked arrays with O(1) push. I can't do the voxel editor in Symta, since performance is really so critical. The NewC is not so much a compiler, than a very tricky rewriter (I'm not that crazy to implement my own optimizing compiler), replacing `vector.x` with `vec3_get_x(vector)` and `auto` with proper types. Obviously it is totally incompatible with C++, doing the right thing in the wrong way, breaking every single C++ textbook good practice, and encouraging the use of macroprocessor instead of templates. In fact, that is one of the reasons I had to re-implement the macroprocessor, because the C's one, while turing complete, is just too clunky to use for anything beyond basic `#define PI`

Anyway, I have rewrote the core voxel format several times, implemented the OBJ importer/exporter, developed a few voxel editing techniques, and got some insight into deforming the voxel models without SDF. Which I could use maybe for Spell of Mastery 2, since it really requires GPU.

TLDR: parsing C using C is much easier than writing a voxel editor, which is much easier than implementing a video game. Like an order of magnitude easier.

Thanks! I did play all the AoW (except 3) a lot actually. I am sorry about your refugee camp issues. It is a real disgrace that we in the West created so many, then handled the problem in such an inhuman way. I hope your situation will get sorted soon enough. In which country are you now? The Netherlands?
Regarding selling your code, you can just call it an engine, and you should be able to do so, but with everyone using Gamemaker, Unity or Unreal Engine, it is harde to compete (the one I use, Moai, got completely destroyed by the competition of Unity, because it lacked tutorials, documentation, and things like the asset store, which come with a large user base).

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Offtopic / Monsters in the Dark: the making of X-COM: UFO Defense, on Kickstarter

« on: March 12, 2021, 03:43:32 am »

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/davidlcraddock/monsters-in-the-dark-the-making-of-x-com-ufo-defense
That could be of interest to some of you.
It has already reached its funding goal.
It is a shame that some of the new material is gated behind a 75$ paperback special edition.

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: February 21, 2021, 11:39:48 pm »

TheEdmon made a pre-alpha preview here:

Beware the loud music at the beginning.
I could comment on the issues of the game build, but they will be self apparent. I hope you still enjoy it!

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Offtopic / Re: Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: February 15, 2021, 10:57:52 pm »

Thank you!
Regarding trying the game, it should be featured for the next Steam demo festival (so before summer). I just need to cobble a "prologue" with some geoscape elements around the tactical levels.

[Spoiler]

15

Offtopic / Zodiac Legion, another fantasy Game inspired by X-COM

« on: February 15, 2021, 08:59:30 pm »

Hey there!
I didn't know about @Nikita_sakov's game until a very recent date, so I started writing my own fantasy X-COM game a long time ago, around 2014.
In Zodiac Legion, you lead an order of arcane knights, dedicated to protect the heirs of the ancient Empire from the wizards of the league.
As magic depends on astral configuration, and the last emperor went a bit overboard with its use, it had been depleted for centuries, but there is a new conjunction, and it starts flowing again.
Given that magic had became a fairy tale, and the Empire had split into several small kingdoms, the Zodiac Legion has been terribly underfunded.
You are tasked with recovering and studying ancient tomes to harness the power of the zodiac constellations, and find the way to craft new artifacts of power.

Spoiler:

The Zodiac Legion

Spoiler:

The opposing forces:

Spoiler:

The geoscape prototype:

Spoiler:

What I wanted to convey from X-COM was the progression, from a low magic force to a high magic one, and the sheer brutality, where you can go home with 8 dead out of 12 characters, and feel like the mission was a success.
However, it is also an age of heroes, so once a character gets strong enough, he can become one of the Zodiac Champions, and get access to one of the recovered zodiac artifacts.
Ascending and moon signs will grant access to some powers from other classes.
We will have small "commando" missions where 6 characters can be teleported, and larger ones that can be done with a group of 12.
Unlike X-COM, there will be a single fortress to design, while the secondary outposts will have very stripped down options (because we imagined it as Castle Grayskull, ie, the seat of power of the Zodiac Order, and the lose condition of the game).

Currently, the tactical battles need some polishing (LoS clean-up, more victory conditions, different AI for different opponents and missions), but it is almost "done".
The geoscape, however is in a state of constant flux.