Messages

31

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

« on: August 04, 2018, 01:34:53 PM »

Ooh, this is neat. 

As a point of critique, I think the fonts could be clearer, maybe by using fonts with anti-aliasing.

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

« on: July 06, 2018, 10:36:09 PM »

After a lot of research into the Dutch laws on cooperatives and their constitutions, Daan and I are now A Bunch of Hacks! This did mean that we couldn't spend a lot of time on actual gamedev, so it had been a while since our last release. In today's release, version 0.25.0, we've integrated Stomt into our game, so you can give feedback or upload log files directly from within the game. We've also added some dust particles and other particles to add a little bit more juice to animations.



The big new feature is weekly challenges. We wanted to give players a bit more reason to rejoin even when no one else is online, and we thought challenges would be a nice way to add some variation to the gameplay without having to worry too much about balance. We're thinking of making challenges with crazy rulesets, such as all units have double speed, or the player has unlimited money, etcetera. For now, the first challenge just uses the normal rules, but the enemy starts with a lot more units than you.



The rules are explained in a little mission briefing, which is supposed to be written by the General, the main advisor in the singleplayer campaign that we're planning to add in the future. At the end of each challenge you are awarded with stars, and you can accumulate stars by completing a new challenge each week. Getting the third star is intended to be quite difficult; I don't think Daan has beat it yet.

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Tellers' Stories / Re: The Tyrant and the Sun

« on: June 01, 2018, 12:21:50 PM »

Glad you like it!

It might also help if telling it to enumerate the "Tell me and..." statements e.g. "He asked a third question of Meadna: 'Tell me, and remember your promise, is this rogue still visiting you?' ". I hope you get a chance to try telling it sometime.

Oh that's a good one, to avoid accidentally skipping one of the middle parts. I'll edit the text a little bit.

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Tellers' Stories / The Tyrant and the Sun

« on: May 29, 2018, 10:28:03 PM »

The Tyrant and the Sun

Long ago, long before any of us were born, the Far South was ruled by a tyrant named Imras, king of the Dramites. And king Imras had as many wives as he had toes. Every time one of his wives displeased him, he killed her and raided another village, saving only one woman. When his armies reached the village of Illus, a beautiful young woman named Meadna rushed towards him and begged him to spare the lives of her people. He accepted on one condition: that she would be faithful to him. And Meadna of Illus promised that she would never tell him a lie. Satisfied, king Imras spared the lives of the villagers and together with Meadna he returned to his castle.

As they rode on horseback in the midday sun, Meadna was smiling, lost in thought, but never looking at him. So he asked of Meadna: "Tell me, and remember your promise, is there someone you love more than me?"
And Meadna answered: "Yes, someone I knew long before I met you, and someone who is coming with me to your castle."
Worried about this secret lover, king Imras locked her away in the highest tower, and had every villager locked in the dungeons.

The next morning, when king Imras and his wives sat in the garden, Meadna was still smiling, but never looking at him. So he asked a second question of Meadna: "Tell me, and remember your promise, why are you thinking of someone else, when everyone you knew is locked away in the dark?"
And Meadna answered: "But he has never been inside your dungeons. You lock me in my room, but it is completely open to him. Every night, I lay awake and I know he will visit me again."
Mortified of some nightly intruder, king Imras had his masons close off all the windows of her bedroom.

But the next day, as king Imras enjoyed a dinner at sunset, Meadna sat next to him, smiling, but never looking at him. So he asked a third question of Meadna: "Tell me, and remember your promise, is this rogue still visiting you?"
And Meadna answered: "Yes, his fingertips touch my skin every day. And even after he has left I can feel his warmth where he kissed my neck."
Furious with this daring seduction, king Imras had her cloaked in black garments that revealed only her eyes.

On the day after that, as king Imras showed off his skills with a bow, Meadna watched with a smile on her face, but never looking at him. So he asked a fourth question of Meadna: "Tell me, and remember your promise, what magic does this trickster use to evade my guards?"
Meadna answered: "He never hides when he arrives, and until he leaves everyone in the castle knows where he is. But his splendor is so great that few dare look at him."
With that king Imras faced Meadna and laughed: "You are afraid to look at him? Be afraid of me! I am the king of the Dramites. Who does he think he is?"
And Meadna answered: "His reach is much larger than your kingdom."
Fuming, king Imras nocked an arrow on his bow and bellowed: "No matter where he is, my arrow can hit him from where I stand. Tell me! Where do I find this fiend?"
Meadna answered "He is with us right now."
Seething with rage, king Imras strung his bow and roared: "Tell me! Tell me his name and I will strike him down!"
And Meadna of Illus answered: "His name is Sun."

King Imras looked up at the sun above and loosed his arrow. And the arrow went up and up, ever higher, but it did not reach the sun and instead was sent back to earth.
Thus died Imras, king of the Dramites.


Not sure if this story belongs here, as I haven't actually told it to anyone, but I figured it fits the style and I would love to tell stories like this if I ever muster up the courage. I wrote a different story with the same ending back in highschool, where the king's daughter kills herself out of loneliness and he attacks the Sun as revenge. It didn't make much sense, and I was inspired to rewrite it when I came up with the idea of 'he touches her skin every day, but she is afraid to look at him'. I have a couple of stories like this based on a pantheon I came up with; I'd like to revisit them but for this one I decided to keep the sun god abstract.

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

« on: May 25, 2018, 03:44:46 PM »

Yeah, we're blending a lot of time periods together; the trenches and zeppelins are reminiscent of WW1, the tanks are more WW2 and we also have nuclear bombs planned. There was no deliberate message behind it when we started it, but it does feel appropriate that the game applies just as much to the world in 1918 as to the world in 2018.

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

« on: May 22, 2018, 11:52:18 AM »

Yesterday we released version 0.23.0 with some big gameplay changes, including a new unit: the Militia. The Militia replaces the Rifleman as the starting unit and has basically the same stats, except it only has 1 hitpoint.

   

The Rifleman is now built at the Barracks and remains the only unit that can capture enemy tiles, so we changed the win condition to include occupying all enemy City tiles simultaneously. This was mostly done because mass producing Rifleman units seemed to be the strongest strategy and once a player captured one City from an opponent, they had a massive advantage; not only does the opponent lose the income and production of that City, but the capturing player gains extra income and production as well. The hope is that Militia units occupying your City tiles are easier to get rid of due to their lower hitpoints and the fact that once the Militia is gone, you immediately regain control of your City tile.

We also made it possible to produce units in tiles that you are defending with a friendly unit by having the produced unit spawn next to the defender and move to an adjacent tile. After we reworked the AIs to be able to handle these gameplay changes, the RampantRhino AI seemed to be lot better at defending because it no longer avoided placing its units on its own tiles.
The last big gameplay change is that Tank units can no longer attack and must rely on their Shell ability to wreak havoc. This was mostly done because it was harded to defend against them using only Militia, but it also fits the fantasy of cumbersome but unyielding tanks that must take their time to aim.

Lastly we reworked the UI and added a newspaper as a little announcement every time global warming crosses another threshold and new disastrous weather effects are unlocked.



We're running a little round robin tournament over on our Discord server which is going well; round 2 is starting this week with the new gameplay changes, so I'm curious to see how these gameplay changes alter everyones' strategies.

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

« on: May 01, 2018, 11:16:07 PM »

Oooh, neat! I especially like Ronceveaux, except that the squares at the bottom just barely don't line up.

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Announcements! The Town Crier! / Re: ANNIVERSARY COMPETITION: RESULTS AND FULL ENTRIES

« on: April 30, 2018, 11:11:22 PM »

Great work all! Nice to read all of the submissions.

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

« on: April 30, 2018, 09:32:44 PM »

Whilst I've only really done founding of things in the UK, I've now helped found three or four societies/associations of different sorts and you're welcome to consult me on things like constitution-writing

Well we feel reasonably confidant that we can come up with solid constitutions, but the notary charges more for a homewritten constitution than they do for changing a boilerplate one. So we have to scrap the stuff we wrote and figure out which parts of it are worth getting charged for. Same thing with the tax authority, every time we think we've figured out how the Dutch tax law works we realize we also have to figure out how they think the tax law works.

You could add a decay factor on wealth generation methods like industry, so they decrease their output over time as resources run out?

Yeah, that would probably be the best solution, and for income from farming this already applies. Cities and towns however grow during the match so they only become more valuable, and if you upgrade Industry it also generates more income. One thing we are considering is having cities and towns lose power at night if their surroundings become too ugly, and similarly have industry lose power if the surrounding cities cannot sustain them. But it might feel a bit punishing if you suddenly lose power in the middle of the game without spending it.

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

« on: April 29, 2018, 12:02:50 PM »

Ooh this looks neat. I like the use of color pairs rather than just straight colorizations for each of the 13 houses, so they don't look too similar. Do you have 13 flags / logos ready that you can show us?

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

« on: April 29, 2018, 11:56:41 AM »

We released version 0.21.0 this week, where we tried to improve the order list UI and make it more intuitive and manageable. Orders now float from the center of the screen towards the order list:



You can now drag around orders within your order list, and we've also added a little gizmo that shows  which player has initiative each round.

     

No gameplay changes because we mostly want to focus on growing our playerbase, which isn't going as fast as we would like. On top of that we're also trying to found a cooperative, which comes with its own set of fiscal topics we need to delve into and crazy notary costs.

We were working on a gameplay change, but it ended up not making the cut; we noticed that a lot of FFA matches tended to drag out a lot because at some point all players have highly upgraded industry or barracks tiles and just keep sending wave after wave of tanks and gunners without achieving anything. We think this is because money stops being a factor after a while, so it is harder to gain an advantage over your opponent; capturing or destroying a Town does nothing since they have enough money, and killing their units is not effective if they can afford to rebuild them. So we came up with Morale as a second resource next to money, that was collected by exploring the map. We had hoped that in the late game, when all players have a seemingly unlimited amount of money, it would force players to explore unexplored areas of the map and thereby creating a new focal point. In practice though our current maps are laid out in such a way that you explore almost all of them as you are attacking your opponent, so you just end up generating an endless supply of Morale in the early game and it would only factor in as a "clock" that ultimately limits the amount of units you can make. So we scrapped it for now, and just made the FFA maps smaller, which seems to help a little. Maybe we should just rebalance unit costs a little bit so you are decentivized to hoard up a ton of money.

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

« on: April 01, 2018, 11:15:55 AM »

Climate change would be a more accurate term, I suppose, but global warming just has a nice ring to it.

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Announcements! The Town Crier! / Re: EXILIAN ANNIVERSARY COMPETITION: EXILE

« on: March 31, 2018, 12:54:48 AM »

Argh, forgot to finish my submission in time.

Sent it in anyway. It's still March 30th in, uhm, Tokyo, right?

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

« on: March 23, 2018, 10:03:24 AM »

Frostbite is one of the effects of global warming, so it only appears in longer games or games involving industry.

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

« on: March 22, 2018, 09:53:01 PM »

We've just released version 0.18.0 which adds password-protected accounts, some gameplay changes and a new RampantRhino AI that can upgrade barracks and build sappers.

Writing an account system took a decent chunk of time, but it should reduce the amount of people that had to create a new account every time they switched PCs. Now that the user database is online we can better intergrate it other web systems; next week we will be working on adding a leaderboard. We also have a website now, which links back to our itch.io page, shows how many people are online in the Discord and allows people to subscribe to our mailing list.



Gameplay wise, we made Industry and Barracks require a manual upgrade to increase their size. This should be more intuitive than requiring you to build more Cities nearby, and it allowed us to make Cities cheaper while keeping the cost of upgraded Industry and Barrack very high. We also reworked Frostbite to more interactive. Instead of lowering hitpoints, it now directly deals damage to ground units standing in open fields.



This forces players to have them seek shelter in nearby forests, cities or trenches. Or not, if you decide you have better things to spend your orders on.