Hello all, My name is Stephen and I am here representing Broken Kings (Castle Conflict). We are currently working in conjunction with a couple of other studios local to my little home town of Calgary - Big Stack Studios (Sigma, Poker Genius) and Bella Machina (featuring Sean Dunkley, whose work can be viewed at http://www.graphicrepublic.com). We are working together on a tactical/strategy game which is currently codenamed "Furious Tactical". (That is not the final name, but I like it a lot so I kind of hope it sticks ). It is a game I have designed, primarily based off of my love for many other tactical games I have played throughout the years (Shining Force, Advanced Wars, Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, Fire Emblem, etc.). I am taking some of the lessons I have learned from working on Castle Conflict and applying them to this title, including a general simplification of combat... Since this is an iPhone game, I know that many users will be playing it in short bursts, so the game has been designed to be much quicker than your typical strategy game. As such, combat is very similar to Castle Conflict - once two units enter combat, the victor will be determined. As well, we want to keep the combat fast so that the users never get removed from the battle. Sean has come up with a great style for combat that I will be implementing in the very near future - but for a preview, check out this flash animation. Oh yes, and although there are mice in that screenshot, our final theme is somewhat of a cats and dogs idea. We just didn't want to go down the typical "Fantasy Character" route - while we thought we could do interesting things with it, we felt there were more things we could do with a different skew on things. Stay tuned to this topic, I will be posting status updates as they occur. You can also watch for updates on http://www.BrokenKings.com (which takes you to our facebook page) or http://www.youtube.com/BrokenKings. I will also be cross-posting a number of the bigger posts in this topic to my blog, http://www.Thegazzardian.com
First Multiplayer Match Hello ladies and gents, Stephen here again. What is going on in this action-packed screenshot, you may be asking? The answer is nice and simple - this historic JPG file is the very first multiplayer match of Furious Tactics, a gruelling match of wits between myself and Lopi! Using Game Center, Furious Tactics will support multiplayer battles. As I type this, I must confess I am getting beat quite smartly at the moment. Somewhat disappointed in myself! Oh, and ignore that tree. It's placeholder art made by me (thus why it's not transparent) - and by made by me, I mean stolen from Castle Conflict. It will be removed before too long and replaced with a more appropriate resource. While - on to making a sexy battle screen now!
Yesterday my roommates forced me to actually celebrate my birthday instead of working so I didn't get any significant amount of work done. So today I continue work on getting something like that nice attack animation into the game. For those who are curious what it looks like to see a game in development - here's a video of me working on it . I am coding throughout but you can watch as the attack screen evolves from a fairly simple starting point to a more complete ending. Obviously one video is too short to complete something like this, so it's not quite all there: For those who know a bit of code and are interested in learning some of the techniques used in this video, I also have a companion blog post: http://unobservedmusings.blogspot.com/2010/10/making-complex-animations-with-cocos2d.html Stay tuned for more updates
Multiplayer Hey guys, I'm working on Multiplayer some more today. Last week I got connections established between players, and all the communication between two players. Today I'm expanding this so that up to 4 players can play online at the same time. As well, I will be handling error cases (a player disconnects, etc.) This leads me to asking you guys questions about your preferred user experience . Let's say that you're playing an online game, and an opponent disconnects - what do you think should happen? I'm thinking of having that opponent be replaced by an AI (especially in games with more than 2 players). Do you like this, or do you think something else should happen?
Either an AI should enter (but if this happens, the other player should choose how strong the AI is), or someone else can join from the waiting room. Both are fine for me.
Keep the mice. Go all kinds of long patrol, badgers, etc.... Like a certain kids book series. Maybe Jacques won't notice., or if so, endorse. But you could bring it close enough to be a homage.
More Units! Alright, time for me to chime in and show what we've been up to Not all the portraits are complete, but I will show you what we have so far. We're starting with a simple contingent of 7 animal units [excluding the mobile base/fortress]: Our staple units for the mice [from left to right]: Archer, Foot Soldier, Worker, Cavalry, Spearman, Standard Bearer, and Wizard [Druid]. I also want to take this opportunity to show the portrait system with other planned units. Let's introduce a feline counterpart for the footsoldier: [feline portraits provided by fellow artist and partner in crime, Cil Cheung] Please stay tuned for more info coming this week :] !
We don't want to ignore the importance of menus in this game. This video speaks about our belief that they should be fun and how we intend to implement it. What do you guys thinks? How important are menus? Are their any games with menus you really remember?
HD Graphics Fail Today I got Retina-Display supported. Unfortunately, we don't have the HD versions of all the graphics yet - so while it works, the graphics that aren't HD-ised kind of got screwed up. Check it out: If you compare that to how it used to look, though, the Retina-enabled graphics look much sharper: Hopefully soon we'll have all the HD Graphics in and you guys can start seeing sexy HD screenshots!
Since this game is early in development I'll chime in with my 2 cents I've played a few strategy games but none of the older ones but so far I've really liked upgrading units like Battle for Wesnoth where units change appearance and some even have distinct upgrade paths. I think it's a great incentive to keep your units alive. I know this game is made for short matches bit hopefully something similarly can be accomplished at least for the campaign mode or something. Overall this looks great and I look forward to seeing how this game evolves. You can count on an instant buy from me.
Hey Balu`, thanks for the great suggestion! For now, I'm just trying to get things to recognise when a player disconnects properly - I'm not getting the notification from GameCenter I thought I would, which means I am probably doing something wrong. So I'm tracking that down, as well as working on other areas of the game that need work, like the menus Having someone join from the waiting room is an interesting idea but it seems somewhat difficult - possibly frustrating for other players - wouldn't you hate it if you joined a game only to find out that the last player left because his opponent had 100 units and he was out of cash? It's definitely worth thinking about, but for starters I think we'll stick with ai - unless anyone here has some suggestions on how they think this option could work? As far as growing units, we are looking, more long term, to have quirkier and more interesting units, so those could definitely work. Perhaps something along the lines of the slime from Castle Conflict's latest update - it gets stronger each time it eats a resource? ultimo, Sean gets the credit for the great looking mice art . Thanks for the great feedback guys! Anyways - it's Friday night, and I've just implemented a heartbeat system for monitoring problems in multiplayer. It is a bit too strongly based on some previous versions I've written that are based on two player games, so it might not work perfectly with multiple players. Testing + updating to work in multiple player matches will happen over the weekend or probably Monday! But tonight, my fiancee wants to watch Paranormal Activity 2. Hopefully it's as scary as the first!
This looks great! Thanks for your interesting posts about the game's development. Tactical strategy games are one of my favorite genres, and Shining Force is probably my all-time favorite as well as Fire Emblem. I must say, however, I'm not a fan of the title "Furious Tactical." Too generic, and you have such nice characters with the mouse warriors. The title should convey that flavor. I don't expect you to use these, but just some ideas for a title: Mouse Tactics Rodent's Tale Of Mice and Mouse (Steinbeck pun!)
Ingame units and the purchase interface. Thanks for the feedback so far folks Although some of the screenshots already show ingame units, there has been some slight changes to the appearance of the units so that their team colours are easy to distinguish on the field. Due to the multiplayer addition, we've now added yellow and green as colour options on top of blue and red. Here's the yellow army for size: Also, purchasing already works ingame, but I need to create a menu to complement it. Here's what we have so far: I would imagine any finger scroling on the upper portion of the screen moves the units selection around. Also, tapping on a unit directly will zoom it to the centre of the selector. I would like to end on an inquisitive note: This is a minor issue, but it would be fun to hear what people think. Initially the cat units did not have whiskers. What do you think works for you, whiskers or no?
Yes to whiskers. It's more cat-looking. Also, about the title... Of Mice and Cats! (Again, the Steinbeck pun - I'm a bit of a literature geek, sorry) Also, PLEASE don't go nuts with the DLC. Make it a game where you pay a price and get a full game upfront. DLC is fine for legit additional content, but I hate when you have a game that really is prodding you to pay more money to fully enjoy it after you already bought it. Just my 2 cents.
