Messages

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics - Now on Kickstarter!

« on: November 03, 2018, 08:41:17 PM »

Thank you so much Jubal! Also for featuring us in the newsletter on Thursday. I saw them come by earlier just didn't have the time then to thank you. The first 48 hours have been really hectic.

The illustration was a bit of a last minute commission, but we're really happy with it. Really captures the spirit of Epicinium, I think. Also makes me even more determined to do a water-based expansion after, if we ever get there.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: November 01, 2018, 04:05:10 PM »

Good news everyone! Epicinium is now live on Kickstarter!



Things we have discovered so far:

• WYSIWYG editors are awful.
• Gifs getting reencoded is awful.
• Stressing because the page won't launch because you still have changes open in a different tab is awful.
• People are really great!

So now it's sit back and relax, right?

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: October 24, 2018, 07:05:46 PM »

Oh for sure, perception probably plays a huge role. You'd need a huge audience to do that kind of A/B testing, though.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: October 19, 2018, 11:24:51 PM »

We just announced our Kickstarter date: November 1st! Here's a little gif of us preparing the kickstarter video last week (I'm the one in the checkered shirt):



This leaves us with only two weeks of frantic editing, gifmaking and navigating awful wysiwyg textfields, but we haved managed to squeeze in one more game update: beta version 0.30.0. We implemented a lot more visual cues to help convey information and in general just make the game stand out more. For instance we updated the lighting system; the lighting now also changes with explosions or gunfire, and we highlight the active unit during the Action phase. Another thing we did was dim the building lights when a tile is occupied, with a little flicker effect to further emphasis the sudden change.

 

We've also added visual markers to the damaging weather effects such as Frostbite or Firestorm, because it was sometimes hard to see which tiles were affected and which were not. At the same time, we saw a lot of players struggling with the large volume and unpredictable placement of Firestorm, opting to keep their units safely inside for the entire Summer. In combination with Frostbite during the Winter, this caused some games to stall out for longer than intended. We drastically reduced the number tiles that receive Firestorm, but made them always hit "flammable" tiles (Grass, Forest, Soil, Crops and Trenches) if possible. This has multiple benefits: it makes the placement more predictable so players can anticipate where it will be, even in the fog of war; it drives gunners out of trenches but does not deter units from crossing deserts; and it remains an effective tool to lower the number of grass tiles (and hence the score).



I think there are more issues with the pacing of the game, but they are harder too tackle without extensive prototyping, so that will have to wait until after the kickstarter.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: October 12, 2018, 12:17:00 PM »

Well I believe that there might also be one or two coops for boardgames, and maybe one subsidiary of a major Dutch gamedev company that probably only exists for fiscal reasons.

I'd love to talk with you about that, but yeah, maybe in 2019?

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: October 12, 2018, 10:41:39 AM »

It's coming along well, but our deadline is getting closer and we still have some things to finish. Lot of half-baked goods waiting for other things to get done first.

We shot footage for the crowdfunding video yesterday. This is the second session, because we weren't happy with the script we used last time (which was a couple months ago?). We also shot a lot of B-roll last time though, so that's good. We're currently getting help with writing our marketing texts from a member of the only other Dutch gamedev coop, and came down from the Far North to help shoot as well. So now: onto editing!

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: October 07, 2018, 09:10:50 AM »

Yeah, I saw. Thank you for writing them, Jubal! There is always a bunch of cool stuff featured in it.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: September 25, 2018, 12:45:28 PM »

As our crowdfunding is approaching, we decided to bring the open beta to a close, in exchange for a closed beta centered around our Discord server. Starting with version 0.29.0, a beta access key is required to join the server. People that played in the open beta automatically gain a key if they enter the Discord, and we give away keys to active community members as well. A couple of people with very low account ids came back to join the Discord, and we got some legit key requests from press as well, so that's nice.

Keys can be entered in the main menu. We spent probably too much time improving the text input fields by adding copy and paste functionality, as well as the ability to select text with the mouse or with the shift key. UX is hard work, who knew?

 

We also worked on improving the pathing, so that unit figures walk around buildings instead of through them. There are still a few quirks, though, and sometimes a newly spawned unit just bugs out and starts dancing up and down the tile before moving to its spawn position. Huh.

All in all, the switch to closed beta seems to have been a good step, as we're having a lot more activity between players than before. I'm having one of those "if only I had known this a year ago" moments, but yeah. Probably not the last one I'll get before this whole thing is over.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: [Dev Log] Tourney: The medieval tournament sim

« on: September 25, 2018, 12:18:23 PM »

Happiness

The visitors all have a happiness value now that goes up or down depending on various things - such as if they want to eat but cant, enjoyed a fight etc.

Whilst doing this I realised an issue: The visitors just wander to and fro & when they need anything they go right to any venue that can provide for that need. So if a new outlet is placed - they'll one by one go to it, and end up looking like a horde of zombies.

So what difference did it make where the player put anything?

I think the answer - like in all other simulation games... is to use paths to direct where people generally go.
It would have been nice to not use them just because it would have set tourney apart a little bit. More like real "crowd in field" situations, where people would just wander about. Still I think it is something people will "get" and provides a neat solutioon

What if there is a limit to the distance where peasants detect new venues? So if everyone is thirsty and you place a new beer vendor, nearby peasants will swarm towards it, but peasants further removed will keep wandering until they stumble across it. Perhaps in combination with paths; if they are more likely to follow paths then you can direct them towards your vendors that way. Don't know how much computing power it would take to track all that, though, since each peasant would have its own memory of what the map looks like.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: September 16, 2018, 02:53:40 PM »

Thanks!

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: September 13, 2018, 10:03:28 AM »

Thanks, will do!

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Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds / Re: In which Jubal decides to find out how hard writing comics is

« on: September 01, 2018, 10:16:28 PM »

I'm already a big fan of Otarid, Learned Above All. Not in the least because his magic seems to be teal-colored.

Hm, I'll have a think about that - I've tried messing with other fonts but none of them seemed to improve it really. Does the font still look unclear to you if you look at the image in full-size? (Click on it in a web browser to enlarge).

Ah yes, that helps a bunch.

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Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds / Re: Pixel Dungeon Adventure - A Web Comic

« on: September 01, 2018, 10:07:47 PM »

Oh, I love this!

edit: And that was only page 1!

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: Epicinium - strategy wargame with environmental mechanics

« on: September 01, 2018, 09:18:53 PM »

Is it september already?

The two of us are running dangerously low on funds, so we've had to divide our time between developing, setting up a crowdfunding campaign and panicking. We did release version 0.28.2 yesterday, so that's something.



Other than implementing a self-patching patcher, I've been spending a lot of time on improving the UI in various ways. I made some monochrome icons for each type of unit, building and order, and these icons are now used consistently between the order panels (shown above) and the order guides and order list (shown below). We also added some hitstop to attack impacts, both to give them more oomph and to make the attack animations more readable. We hope that the more prominent hitmarkers help players to follow along with the way that damage is distributed.

   

We noticed that players are having a hard time finding each other in our in-game lobby system, so therefore we've been focussing a lot of our attention on improving our Discord server, and making it the center of our playerbase. One thing we've done is integrating Discord Rich Presence, which means the game shows up next to Discord users' names while they are playing, even showcasing the map, game mode and match duration. It also allows users to post invite links in the chat.



Starting next week we also want to have automated mini-tournaments every week: Discord users can join the tournament at any time, play a game against another participant on any map and the winner is awarded tournament points. The winner gets three stars (the same that you get for completing challenges), and the other participants do as well based on their total score that week. We're hoping that the free-form nature of those tournaments will stimulate more of our players to play games against each other.

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Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Re: [Dev Log] Tourney: The medieval tournament sim

« on: August 04, 2018, 01:41:26 PM »

I do think the screenshot on the left looks more vibrant and also more readable.