Messages

31

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: August 23, 2022, 01:43:31 pm »

Folks, this just goes to show how much better everything is when you DON'T pay the execs.

Seems like that. Here is a fan remaster of the original DOS Duke 3d.

Somehow looks better than what the IP owners published so far.

32

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: August 14, 2022, 10:47:35 pm »

The project is not dead... yet.

I have redesigned the mana system. Now there is single mana color, but it is capped by the number of crystals players has.
Crystals are a rare resource and a way I bind multiple systems now.
Player uses them to hire more powerful units, construct advanced buildings and just advance the game.

Currently I'm working on making the chapter 1 completable.
Basically the game is broken into loosely connected chapters.
Where the agency player represents gets hired to solve different problems.
Since I think single "demon invasion" thing would be really boring.
And I don't feel well just copying the original XCOM, without re-imagining everything.

The first chapter is about player rescuing a princess, so I needed a princess sprite and had to draw one.

This time I decided to finally create a human character base, so it will be easier to produce different human sprites.
Just draw the clothes and weapon over the existing animation. But these make for really boring copy-cat characters.
So will be used mostly for NPCs, like city civilians, which player can capture for different purposes, like sacrifices and magic experiments.
Yeah there is this reverse-XCOM mechanics, where player plunders cities. Actually inspired by Hammer of the Gods (and old DOS game).

33

Offtopic / Re: What happened to Blizzard?

« on: July 31, 2022, 07:56:52 pm »

Fans remastered Warcraft II, completely with re-modelling, voice acting and cutscenes. And it looks orders of magnitude better compared to what Blizzard did to WC3.
They haven't just converted wc2 maps to wc3 engine, but made entirely new maps in the style of wc3 campaign and rebalanced every units to fit the WC3 mechanics.

34

Offtopic / Re: Favorite music and other interesting things.

« on: July 16, 2022, 03:25:02 pm »

kick ass remaster of XCOM soundtrack

35

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: July 09, 2022, 11:52:20 pm »

Have to overhaul the magic system again. Initially it was based of reagents, with the idea being "reagent = ammunition", since the game began as a fantasy XCOM. Yet I always found ammunition management to be the most inconvenient thing in XCOM. In my case more complex spells require several reagents (think your soldier has 10 guns, each uses a combination of ammunition - insane!). Now I have also introduced the gods system, and these gods are heavily interlinking with magic system. For example, severing god's influence in the realm will affect spellcasting of that god's dependent spells. There is in fact a way to block all other players from spellcasting, while retaining that power. Of course I can enable/disable spells per player, but the most robust way to implement is by switching spellcasting from reagents to to global mana pool Master of Magic style. But I have colored mana, there are several mana pools. And these mana pools are refilled based of player relationship with gods (player controls god's temple, player gets that god's mana). Finally there is the good old alchemy - converting gold to mana, and the other way around. I like that idea more, since it develops on top of Master of Magic design. But yeah, it further deviates from XCOM. And previously I have already abandoned the idea with ammunition like arrows and cannon powder. Maybe I'm just less autistic on HRT to appreciate the ammunition concept being explicit in game design and now try to streamline everything. Because I'm also looking on making all encounters faster and maps as small as possible. But I never liked the "hunt that last alien" concept. But yeah, there are already fantasy mods for OpenXCOM, so guess people can get exactly that. I'm better of trying alternative designs.

36

Offtopic / Microsoft Buried Their DOTA/PUBG?

« on: July 05, 2022, 04:32:48 pm »

Microsoft hired the best Japanese devs to develop an action version of magic the gathering, but then just cancelled the finished project:

37

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: June 09, 2022, 12:48:59 am »

Finally finished importing all the tower parts.
These stack on top of each other, plus additional occluding sprites.
Occluders are required, because compared to the original XCOM, my engine cells dont have walls.
I.e. if one wants a wall, it has to be a separate cell, like in Magic & Mayhem, on which I based my design.
Now for art and compactness purposes I need to hide sprites beside say this tower top's rail, so I draw this rail as separate sprite with different draw order.
Calculating collision with such occluders will be additional challenge, but I don't need it for a fantasy game.

Obviously the tower will require retouch, because originally artist drawn it smaller, since back then I was unsure about the sprite size.

38

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: May 31, 2022, 07:45:38 pm »

Still alive.
Implemented something I previously thought impossible:
Large scale objects inside a cubic lattice based isometric engine.
It allows 3 levels of exposure: interior, exterior and floor only views.
Separate case is when mice cursor is on top of object roof.

I have also implemented tileset based large objects.

Guess it is the most baroque isometric engine ever.

39

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: March 05, 2022, 01:39:13 pm »

Amazing! There is now fighting at places, like Obolon, I walked a year ago in Kyiv
The Borispol airport I took flight from got bombed  :'(
A Kyiv trans girl who supplied me hormones is missing, while the friends family hides in the country.
Putin doesn't play tactics games, but Z-erg rushes like it is Starcraft. Or is it a Z-ombie Rush?!!
For Ukraine it looks like a tower defense game with huge columns of mobs going to kyiv ignoring everything.
And Zelensky armed every single Kyiv hispter. Even girls now have AK-47.
I really should have stayed and re-applied, instead of running away. Today Ukraine needs any support it can get.
So I have decided: my next game will be fully voxel, revolving around a self-defense squad in Kyiv.

40

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 18, 2022, 11:32:51 pm »

In XCOM player gets funding of the world governments.
I decided to overhaul it a bit, and instead make the player fund the oppressor.

As of now it is a % of the player's income and it will grow with time up to taking most of all player's money.
But it can be reduced by completing the king's quest (inspired by King's Bounty  )
But I consider also adding a flat tax for the low income scenarios.
In case player does crafting or a lot of freelance questing, hiding the money from the crown.
And it would also launch other systems, like forcing player to take debt to pay the tribute.

Now I was thinking about a more refined extortion hierarchy, and when player becomes the king there will suddenly be a need to pay tribute to the gods.
Or I can start the player as a serf, or a free person without any land. But for the v1.0 it will be that simple, because scope creep is already enormous for a single person indie game, which I need to finish before I either gain asylum in NL or will have to suicide to avoid deportation. In case I will have to kill myself, I will release everything into the public domain before taking the pills. But the project is so huge and already too so many years, I doubt anyone would be able to continue it or rewrite from 0.

41

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: February 15, 2022, 07:28:50 pm »

Cheers! Breaking with my bf really affected my sanity, but Im still alive
Most of the changes went to the Symta - the Lisp programming language dialect behind the game.
But I'm working on the game itself now, which required refactoring the entire codebase, due to the language changes.
I've completely settled with the background story, blending all the elements I had in mind, so that they will drive the gameplay nicely.
The demon invasion is still there but it gets proper development now.
Think about XCOM organization existing as a contractor for some time, before the actual alien invasion, but then gets redirected to fight it.
And the stuff XCOM does during that time affects how the alien invasion will proceed.
Obviously my game has mercenary organization, instead of XCOM, but otherwise it is the same.
Yeah I'm using the extra-planar demons instead of aliens, because fantasy and stuff, but Might & Magic had space demon aliens too in a fantasy setting.
Almost connected all the points to make the game completable from start to finish.
Even after that it will require a ton of polish. The ideas.txt list is like 100kb, while the todo.txt is 50kb.
And TODO has the stuff I really need in game for it to play right.

Currently working on the basic intro movie. I thought about adding a simple storyboard for now, but syncing it with music and voice acting will be huge pain. I can put it together as a standalone movie, but it will require some decoding library, which will need some syncing too. The final goal is to do that movie in my voxel editor for the moderately cheesy effect.

42

Offtopic / Re: XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game

« on: October 27, 2021, 12:57:20 pm »

My voxel editor, VoxPie, finally sees the first public release
https://nancygold.itch.io/voxpie

I have also learned a bit about video editing by creating a trailer for it.
And now I better understand the requirements for making the animation easier.

43

Offtopic / Re: This game rocks

« on: October 16, 2021, 04:07:17 pm »

It's written in YAML, a markup language (fite me, it is) and so is easy to understand with no prior experience. All you have to recognize is that as with anything else in programming, the game is an absolute stickler for syntax. So to get your feet wet, it is best to copy other mods and make tweaks to them.

YAML doesn't look easy to me - it has rather advanced Python-style syntax, compared to JSON. And scripting in general is a bit harder than raw programming, since it implies good intrinsic knowledge of the system being scripted. Almost always the documentation for scripting languages is lacking, and you can't just look at the source code, as you do with C/C++. So successful scripting indeed relies on copy-pasting the working code and experimenting with it. You can also do only as much as the devs have exposed, unless the underlying system has complete introspection (i.e. runs on top of C# runtime, JVM or some Lisp system), because it is notoriously hard to expose parts of the C and, especially, C++ software to scripting - there are special complicated tools for that.

44

Open Feedback / Please change my nickname to NancyGold

« on: October 02, 2021, 03:49:08 pm »

Hi! I've finally found enough courage to start transitioning, so my old name is obsolete now.

I don't want to flood the forum with dead accounts, so asking if it is possible to rename me to "Nancy" or "NancyGold" (if Nancy is already taken)?

BTW, I'm surprised other girls play XCOM too, because I have seen a few girls here.

Dank u wel!

45

Offtopic / Re: This game rocks

« on: September 18, 2021, 07:41:06 pm »

how 8bit graphic can be same as 1bit? Not mention different dimensions. Graphic is only inspired by XCom graphic.

Yeah it is inspired. But the sprites do look "traced" or just downscaled and cleaned up.

This games? Only looking on this two videos I see lot of similarities in game play, or at least parts when player character move on map.
It very possible that Sega version is simply trim down version of original game.

Yup. The SNES version is completely different, and is closer to earlier game The Immortal. Again, the original is a bit too complex game, both to port and to find audience among the little SNES kids, who are not hardcore D&D nerds. You see even the person demonstrating the original DOS version of the game couldn't grasp what is required to do. And it only gets more obscure.