[Dev Log] Tourney: The medieval tournament sim

[Jubal]

Lovely! I really like how the look of it is shaping up

[beebug_nic]

Loving the updates, I try and keep up with as much as I can on twitter, but it seems I've missed a lot of very hard work. I'm really loving how this is coming together and the UI improvements look awesome!

[Jubal]

UI is the great unsung part of gamedev really - it takes so much of the time and is so so vital, but it also feels frustratingly small when you show it to people somehow compared to "here's a new unit!" or "here's a new quest!"

[Tusky]

Lovely! I really like how the look of it is shaping up

Loving the updates, I try and keep up with as much as I can on twitter, but it seems I've missed a lot of very hard work.  I'm really loving how this is coming together and the UI improvements look awesome!

Thanks both!

UI is the great unsung part of gamedev really - it takes so much of the time and is so so vital, but it also feels frustratingly small when you show it to people somehow compared to "here's a new unit!" or "here's a new quest!"

Yeah I know 100% what you guys mean. Each one of those graphics  took something like 12 to 15 hours to make (and that is discounting previous incarnations). You're right, nobody really cares that much about UI  - well except maybe other devs or UI artists!

That's why I'll normally try to put something else in an update as well so there might be at least something of interest to the lay-reader. Because I think that to some extent it's tough to post something that will be of interest to anyone at all, since it concerns something that does not exist yet.
For example the last game I had received very little interest as I was making it. Certainly whatever I made a post somewhere it seemed to broadly fall on deaf ears, UI based or otherwise. I was obviously far more excited about it than anyone else 

As such It's very encouraging to hear your feedback. I really appreciate it!

[Tusky]

It's been a bit of a slow couple of months for me, since I'm currently doing some training courses in Cyprus till the end of June. Hopefully next month once I've finished with the courses I will be able to spend a bit more time on the game.

I have been chipping away, though, and progress has been made. I completed the items I wanted to from the last post: Add a way to start the tournament phase, and add objectives to complete during the tournament phase. There is a basic objective system in place, so you can now play through level 1 and win or lose!



I made some menus for knights and visitors now so you can click them and see some basic info about them. I need to spend a lot of time creating all the various icons that are needed before the menus are fully finished.

I've made a fun system for scheduling a joust, where you can mess around with the order of who knights are fighting against, before it starts. It means the player can give their house knights a more favourable path to the final if they want to.

The game phase now represents a day, and the lighting will slowly adjust accordingly.



Next

I am going to create a summary window for a joust event, so that you can see what factored in to the result. There are 4 main contributing factors: potions, mood, skill, and tactics (equipment is also sort of another one - but that mostly concerns damage output / mitigation). Once this is information available to the player then I can add in gameplay for the four methods so the player can influence them.

[Jubal]

I really like the day/knight cycles

And the tents look really pretty too!

[beebug_nic]

That day/night cycle is awesome :-) It might be feature creep, but it would be lovely to see cooking fires and things like that when it goes dark :-)

[Jubal]

Agree with the beeb

[Manic Arts]

Just binged your posts and holy armadillo does this pulls at  my nostalgia strings!
It really does feel like roller coaster tyccoon in medieval times!

I think it's the attention to details that does the trick... the way the pig gets roasted in your gif just sold me.

Need more updates!

[Tusky]

Thank you so much eveyone! Well, without further ado, back by popular demand* here is an update!

I have been working on the "gameplay" part of the jousting. This is what the joust window looks like now



So you can see all of the pairings in that knockout tournament. You can also see the scoring that lead to the last result. (po = potions, mo = mood, sk = skill, ta = tactics).
Conran Wallace pretty much wiped the floor with Fierabras there. You can also see how certain knights are clearly the "ones to beat" because they tend to have better armour on.

So what's next is to allow player control over those scores. You can elect to use certain tinctures or potions to increase that score. You can make your knight happy, or irritate the enemy to affect the mood score. You can train your knight to increase their skill. Finally you can play the minigame to get a good tactics score.
You could not bother and just leave your knights to it, of course, but then you might not get the ranking you want.

Things continue to be quite slow for dev on the game. I am currently slighly marooned on one of the Yasawa islands in Fiji till October. However I'm managing to get an hour or two a day done. It's slow progress, but it's progress

* Manic arts requested one

[Manic Arts]

Yeah the important is to keep going. The most difficult thing when creating a game is ALWAYS to finish it!
Most people will jump ship to another project when the honey moon period stops.

[Jubal]

Yeah the important is to keep going. The most difficult thing when creating a game is ALWAYS to finish it!

This. Also to not end up with impossible levels of feature creep... *looks at own project in minor dismay*

[Tusky]

Hey folks!

Very chuffed to have managed to knuckle down and complete some good stuff lately. Here's a digest!

Surgeon Tent

New buildable structure! The surgeon tent is there for knights that have finished their joust and have got injured. They'll make their way here and get fixed up. It's medieval medicine, so obviously it's lacking some of the modern day medical amenities we're used to. Something I hope some of the blood stains capture.



Knight about

The knight menu has been worked on a fair bit and polished. One of the new things is that every knight has a little bio for them to add some flavour. Some of their bios are little pop culture references; some of them are just little funny factoids. Some of the "about" information will contain clues to things that will particularly ruffle the feathers of that knight, maybe when you will be facing them and need a bit of an edge.



All people menus

I've added a status bar for the player to see what the little guys are all doing. It's not surprising & essential for this type of game. You click on the person, you want to know what they are up to, right?



The other element to this menu that is new is the bit I've called "happiness flags". Much like a moodlet you might see in games such as a very popular life sim by EA games. Things that are going on that are affecting the person's mood. It's made me very much have to dust of my pixel art tools to make all the different icons...

AOB

Lots of other fixes and tweaks have been going on. Lots of attention to the jousting to make it lively and fun and somewhat realistic. A knight is now allowed to surrender before jousting. That means instead of having low health - but just charging in anyway to die, they can instead surrender. When they do that both knights will trot to the end without lowering their lances.
I also ensured that all knights can sustain some damage. Before it was only the loser that did. Now a draw can mean both knights are damaged. A defeated knight can also impart a parting shot to the victor. It makes the acquisition of some health remedies to use mid-event important, since they won't be able to duck out to the surgeon...

Next up.

It's been far too long since I made a new person model. There is one very iconic person that will be required in tourney: the jester. They will be a member of staff you can hire, and they can be used to cheer up the crowd, and also maybe to irritate a knight before you face them in an event.

The jester will need lots of animations and coding, but will make a start on that soon with sketches and 3d modelling.

[Jubal]

How will the surgeon tent work? It would be fun to find some way to slip some actual medieval medicine references in...

[Tusky]

How will the surgeon tent work? It would be fun to find some way to slip some actual medieval medicine references in...

What kind of references?

At the moment all the outlets are vending machines, but my goal is to put a vendor bod by them. I think the most fun behaviour for the surgeon would probably be to wield a saw at their knight patient in a somewhat random and bloody manner.

I do want to avoid sacrificing realism over what i think will be most fun, though (and what is achievable with my current dev capacity)