Messages

256

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 18, 2019, 03:30:31 am »

Dynamic water - done. In future I will also add lava, which would set nearby objects on fire and cool into stone under rain or in contact with water.

Still these liquid interactions are rather tricky and allow for a lot of possible implementation, with various drawbacks and game design shortcomings.

257

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 16, 2019, 05:27:17 pm »

My point was that graphic used for this effect was too much blurred compare to rest of graphic. Transparency can have impact on this but I do not think this main reason.

Well, it is a fog, it is supposed to be blurry and annoying to players. There are a few spells, like tornado to get rid of it.

Also, implemented rain effect, which would reduce sight, extinguish fires and prevent fire spells from being cast at outside locations. I'm unsure how much and when rain should go. Maybe the rain could be that one place where RNG will be allowed? I really want to avoid RNG and make game as fair as chess, but making it rain every 31st turn would look silly. Obviously rain should be controlled by biome, so there will be no rain in the desert, but a lot of rain in rainforest. Should rain spawn mist? How to spawn mist in deterministic way, without RNG? Then again, what do I know about raining? Or maybe making rain into a spell, casting which would change weather?

258

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 15, 2019, 07:55:13 pm »

Some thoughts about mist and fire. Overall I think its look bit out of place and do not fit good rest of graphic. It look bit too much diffused compared to rest of sprites.
Overall graphic is nice looking pixel art and this effect look like from some 3D game.

There is a number of reasons I decided to use non-pixelart effects.
1. Alpha channel allows to easily show objects inside mist and fire. And blends nicely with any object, as opposed to say dithering. In XCOM artists had to keep flames really small and close to the ground to avoid obscuring units. You just don't get that massive firestorm effect burning trees. Same with mist, which should be the height of a unit to actually block sight, otherwise it will look silly.
2. It is a common practice to use alpha-channel true-color effects in modern pixelart turn-based games, and even in some older, like Age of Wonders (it combines index painted pixelart with pre-rendered graphics), Master of Magic, Magic & Mayhem and Mage Knight Destiny Soldier for GBA.
3. Full color gradients and transparency make special effects stand out.
4. You just cant nicely model mist and fire using pixels. Especially with large sprites. It will have a lot of ugly dithering, and nasty gradient jumps. I also found it much harder to produce good looking pixelart effects.
5. There is a good amount of ready to use true-color stock art effect templates, both free and commercial. Just load them into particle editor and create what you need. In fact, I had to convert a few pixel art effects I took from OpenGameArt into continuous color, because, while the effects were okay, they were looking just wrong with that dithering.
6. I still use pixelart for a few effects, like the magical goblet for bless spell.


Also, there is an indie game called, Waves of Fate, they do use pure pixel art effects in it (down to scary dithering in place of transparency), but it looks okay due to generally non-realistic art style: https://store.steampowered.com/app/467270/Weaves_of_Fate/

Then again, many older pixelart games, like Final Fantasy Tactics, combine everything that works. Although I always thought that FFT's 3d landscape is the ugliest part of the game, after the pre-rendered intro cutscene, which was outsourced to that infamous Russian studio, which made Zelda Phillips CDI games. Still FFT's 3d magic effects were really beautiful, and impossible to achieve with pixelart.

259

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 14, 2019, 02:51:13 am »

Ok. Done implementing fog/tall grass blocking vision. Also fixed a ton of bugs. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.



The Fog of War regeneration mechanics is actually allows some choices with various drawbacks. For example, FOW can be regenerated at the end of players turn, at start of player's turn, both at the start and at the end, or when any unit finishes movement. Deciding how to implement FOG of war, I made a pros/cons table (such tables appear to be a common game design instrument).

End of Turn:
- Pros:
  - Player doesn't see enemy movement in territories he left.
  - Player can still see enemies which killed his units or casted Mist.
  - Player can see all terrain he uncovered during this turn. Makes it easier for player to remember stuff. Especially if player loads the game after few days.
  - AI handles it easily, noticing positions of your units.
  - Intuitive.
- Cons:
  - Effects like Mist wont blocking vision won't be immediately noticeable.

Start of Turn:
- Pros:
  - Effects like mist blocking vision will be immediately noticeable.
- Cons:
  - Player can see enemy movement in territories he left.
  - Player can still see all enemy movement in mist until the start of his turn. That will be just an annoyance.
  - Really hard to make AI handle it.
  - Non-intuitive.

Both Start and End of Turn:
- Pros:
  - Some combined pros of both approaches.
- Cons
  - Really hard to make AI handle it.
  - Non-intuitive.

Each time unit finished its movement:
- Pros:
  - Very intuitive.
  - Spells like Mist immediately take effect.
- Cons:
  - Less tactical depth: player cannot move a scout close to uncover enemy units, then move that scout away and nuke the enemy with some area of effect spell, that would otherwise harm the scout.
  - Computationally intensive on large maps.

260

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 12, 2019, 02:02:09 am »

Implemented fire, lightning and explosions burning grass and flammable objects. Also added a bugfixes to the demo at https://nikitasadkov.itch.io/spell-of-mastery-demo

Remaining major features:
1. Collapsing structures. This one require introducing material strengths. Metals can have large overhangs than soil.
2. Water/lava dynamics. Moving water is actually an important tactical feature. Say flooding a cave full of enemies. Or in multiplayer maps player can create bottleneck by flooding trenches. Fantasy setting makes it easy to introduce such feature, because there could be say a flood spell.
3. Passable objects blocking vision, like smoke screen or tall bushes, which could be especially useful to burn down.

261

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 06, 2019, 07:12:05 pm »

Cool! But it looks like you put lib directory instead of src or a link to github into the .zip

Edit: ah, now I get it. It's your own runtime and your own lisp. Very cool.

Yeah I'm a big fan of Lisp, so I decided to write game in Lisp. Spell of Mastery is actually my second game. The first one was Warcraft 2 engine implementation in Common Lisp (SBCL). It was fairly complete with working AI and all spells implemented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k8jkeFfnl0

262

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 06, 2019, 03:10:01 pm »

Made a playable preview release:
https://nikitasadkov.itch.io/spell-of-mastery-demo

Suggestions are welcome.

263

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: January 27, 2019, 01:44:42 pm »

Aw that's a good one!
Man, i wish XCOM:EU2012/EW (not Long War 1) was moddable til 2020s or 2030s instead of 2019/this year.

I checked this XCOM reboot when it came, and found that the reboot is completely different game from original XCOM. It seems devs looked over screenshots from original XCOM and made unrelated game with the same name. Nice graphics, but everything else is static and scripted so tightly, you may as well watch a TV show instead. It is like visiting paleontology museum vs traveling with time machine to see real dinosaurs. Even worse story happened with System Shock reboot, where devs showed nice demo, made selfies with Warren Spector, collected money and ran away with them.

264

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: January 25, 2019, 06:28:34 pm »

Thanks, I understand your decision.
It's just not a game for me... I don't care for e-sport mechanics.

Yup. It is hard to make a game that will cater to everyone, so for now I'm trying to make something unique.

I also plan adding different campaign modes, beside scenarios and XCOM style: one roguelike, and the other similar to what you see in Cortex Command. In future I hope making it into a very modable open source engine, which could be used to implement any similar game, from games like Final Fantasy Tactics like to Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft type games.

265

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: January 04, 2019, 01:07:19 pm »

Naive implementation give 1s lag each time you open/close door.

Yeah. That will get even more involved if you remove map height restriction. And suddenly you need to use something like octress to traverse the map. For example, I use use height=32, and that already forces me to use a lot of hacks, to avoid traversing every tile for FOW and pathfinding. Gollop was genius to implement that for Amiga! (an 80ies computer)

The "I don't use RNG" is a complete deal breaker to me. It's fine in a card game, but a combat strategy? Sorry, but no.

1. Random decisions are still allowed for AI. If AI has two similarly powerful spells, you will never know which one AI will use (unless you manage to lock AI's ability to cast that spell). Or say what route AI units will take to attack player.
2. Maps are randomly generated, with items also placed randomly.
3. Player creature and spell selection is also slightly randomized. There could be no elven mercenaries available at that time, because they are at war with dwarves. Or shortage of ingredients for that flight spell.

So there RNG is still here, just the non annoying kind. So if you want to polymorph that orc into a chicken, you will always get a chicen and not a dragon. So yeah, it is more of a puzzle game.

And the game is designed with multiplayer in mind, so RNG is a no-no for that. Unless you want players to insult each other about being lucky n00bs.

Although I still plan to add additional RNG-mode for players wanting that kind of experience of having to miss 50% of time. But that is of lower priority, because there already a lot of games with such RNG.

266

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: January 03, 2019, 04:55:50 pm »

First of all this selection box should be have some graphics not some green lines (or it is only debug thing?).

The cursor is a paceholder which will be eventually replaced with proper graphics.

Second is to show not visible tiles as black, right now edge of visibility look too "sharp" (tiles look like they hangs in space because you do not see other around).
Some thing like that is done by OXC. Probably best version would be if tile is show as black only if it is adjacent to visible tile. With this edges will look more pleasing and you will see this star background too

Yeah. Fog of war needs future improvements. But for now it is of lower priority, than implementing features. I'm curious how Magic & Mayhem and XCOM games implement FOW. I did it though bruteforce raycasting. But I doubt original XCOM used such resource intensive routine.

Anyway, the game has Facebook page. I will post future updates there:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/298041333699422/

267

Offtopic / XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: January 03, 2019, 12:37:07 am »

Hi, folks! I'm working on an XCOM inspired fantasy game. It is not a carbon copy, and the most striking difference is that I don't use RNG, leading to numerous different design decisions. For example, instead of chance to hit, to penetrate high defense armor, attacker has to spend action points. This allows for example using some at first glance useless unit, with a lot of action points, like say bird, to distract defender, while slow heavy hitter does the damage. The next difference is the shift towards spellcasting and terraforming map. For example, if player has imp worker, it can dig underground passage into a prison under castle, free inmates there and then attack the castle from underneath. The other way would be flying over moat (with flight spell or flying creatures), teleport there, pass through walls with wraiths (which also see through walls), create elevation to reach castle wall. Obviously, player can just storm the heavy guarded front gate.

The game engine also supports portals and large doors (you cant have a proper castle with puny little door). And AI uses them too.

Still the game borrows a lot of elements from Gollop's games, especially Lords of Chaos and XCOM. I.e. there is chryssalid style monsters and a raise dead spell producing undead units, which are very resistant to non-enhanced attacks. The game has a world map, invasion threat and randomly generated maps (cities, dungeons, etc...), but I also plan adding ability to play as bad guys instead.

Do you have any suggestions or wishes for such a game? For example, what do you think should happen if two units teleport into the same place or if unit tries to teleport into the fog of war ends up teleporting into a wall? For now, just strongest unit survives (i.e. the wall).

268

Programming / Re: Magic & Mayhem Engine Open Source Clone

« on: May 29, 2016, 12:36:47 pm »

The decompressor is ready and added to https://github.com/saniv/sau/blob/master/unsorted/scraps/mmdecrypt.c

*.map files were compressed too, although LZ77 algorithm isnt as good as ZIP, which made me think that they aint compressed, because ZIP was able to future compress them. Magic & Mayhem engine also supports RLE and uncompressed files in place of LZ77, which should be great, because no need to write LZ77 compressor to mess with maps and savegames.

So now we have known:
1. graphics format.
2. *.cfg/*.map/savegame compression format.
3. most of game configuration is plain text

still unknown are:
1. anim file formats.
2. map format.
3. various nuances of drawing nicelsy shaded isometric view with these sprites.

269

Programming / Re: Magic & Mayhem Engine Open Source Clone

« on: May 28, 2016, 04:55:50 pm »

Okay. I have reversed the encryption scheme. Here is the decoder:
https://github.com/saniv/sau/blob/master/unsorted/scraps/mmdecrypt.c

*.cfg are also compressed in addition to being encrypted.

*.map are encrypted too, but don't appear to be compressed.

My guess is that they did that to prevent people looking up game mechanics without paying for official strategy guide. Still, enctypting map files? 

270

Programming / Re: No way in hell

« on: January 07, 2016, 06:37:06 am »

3,4,5 in some combo. 1 & 2 not really - too much info, info a player should not have.

The weapon efficiency should be exposed somehow. I.e. what firepower would be enough to take down UFO walls or some heavy armored alien?