Dungeons of Oberon's Court So I've decided to add mini-dungeons to the game maps.. Allowing you to enter the different ruins and keeps on the main map.. These dungeons can unlock extra resources, or enemies. #Additionally some dungeons will allow the user to perform various rituals, such as chaining unformed shadows to your army, ascending existing units, or permanently buffing units.. Also you will meet some elder shadows that inhabit this underworld, such as cleaners, mechanics, or glutons.. #Cleaners being insane elder shadows that devour any other shadow they come across, #the mechanics are hive mind, shadows that control the walking lands, and the glutons are shadows that have feasted to much and expanded to amorphous blobs Anyhoe, here's some samples of a few dungeon themes
Woah, this game looks incredible! This is the first time I've seen it Any update on when this will release?
@JCho: The artwork is great indeed, I really like his style Only 2-3 months to release? Quite ambitious. I don't know how close you are to having a submittable version. But I'd plan a month - better two - for betatesting and reacting to the feedback you get: bugfixes, changes, and retesting all of that takes time. Do you absolutely want the minidungeons in at release? If not, I'd release first, and add them with a later update. Added bonus that you can already announce it in the Appstore description.
i'm fairly close, i've chosen to have the minidungeons also host a number of rituals, that where originallyrequired in a menu screen. (unit management and such).. I've given myself a tight deadline.. but thats whats needed. If there are any delays I can live with that.. but the dungeons are easier to make than you think, and they'll save me some time in the end.. (hate making menus, been putting it off). And now that I have a working teleport system I could probably make map2map teleporters instead of a map screen.. but yeh, well ambition heh.....
I think that's awesome, so that way it feels more natural. I'm all for it! And yeah I would be glad to beta test. Not many of the RTS games on iOS have really captured me so I hope this'll be different.
Muppet Puppet, make sure to do some serious testing on every device so you can locate big bugs before we all do
hehe, my luck is as a applied game developer, I have acces to a large selection of devices, and might even convince our regular QA partner to put in some hours.. So I expect that device compatibility will be quite good, only thing i'm worried about is keeping a good framerate on a wide array of devices.. But the advantage is that I have not yet had to disable any visual fx for say the ipad2 and such..
Well, I'd guess the Muppet was busy with Sinterklaas over the last few days, no time to do unimportant stuff like coding, when Sint and the Piets come to town
Development HI guys, besides Sinterklaas (offcourse),, I've been hard at work. I've tried to also take a few days of to not work on Oberon's court to get some distance and evaluate some gameplay choices (which was very fruitfull).. What's happened in development then: 1. reliquaries are no longer just random statues that pop up from the ground. I had a tracking minigame in mind, but with a bit of perspective that just felt like a cop-out,and a bad idea. So you will now find fields of graves that will provide the blood reliquary (and resource, and you'll find essence pools that provide the essence resource. This way you'll be able to scout for resources and claim them more easily creating a better gameplay path through a map. 2. As I mentioned in a previous post, i've been trying to put all the metagame stuff (managing your persistent army/collection) in mini-dungeons. This means you'll find the following (amongst others) items in the mini dungeons. These will come in the shape of rituals to perform or elder shadows to meet. -chaining a new shadow from its crypt (adding units to your army collection) - upgrading units, (ritual) - destroying units (you have a unit cap both in active units, and units in your collection) these are the mechanic elder shadows, searching for a way out of the underworld, and you can offer them one of your units as test subject. (there's a bit of an over-arching quest feel to this, to reap the real reward) -finding steel reliquaries -finding bone reliquaries (only blood/health and essence/stamina resources can be found on the main map now) -receiving special abilities from custom encounters (based on the unit you send into the dungeon) -random enemy encounters - a few story driven encounters -traps The mini-dungeons are the largest remaining bit of actual coding and modelling/animating to be done. 3. I've also been working on removing the map-screen, you now have portals in the gameworld that will transport you to a new map, creating a bit of a roguelike feel to a campaign. This is now working and finished, but required a lot of refactoring. 4. refactoring the load system, this was required for the seamless teleportation between maps. Now the entire game system is loaded on startup and never unloaded. In practice this means the initial load time will be a bit longer, but the loading time between maps is a few seconds tops. This as i'm keeping all the assets and pools in memory and then rebuilding a new map on the fly, but not destroying units and other pools.. This has cost me the most time so far, as it also meant creating a good level description system, such as what flavor/theme is a map, does it have a cutscene/intro, what enemies and what level enemies does it contain, what dungeons are accessible etc etc. ] 5.Portrait mode. I've been trying to get a good portrait mode working, so you can play it easily from your iphone, and are not required to flip your phone on the go. This required some experimentation with the swipe sensitivity and Field of view for instance. 6. beyond that I've been working on creating more variation in the level environment, so more mountains, plains and distinct set pieces. 7. I've got a label!, as I'm self publishing I felt I needed a label, for this and future projects. Introducing Boof Games And finally Oberon's Court has been nominated in the Slide DB GOTY awards under the catagory best upcoming RTS. If you'd like to help out please vote, its very appreciated if you do.. Just follow the link and click on the vote button, no registration required. http://www.slidedb.com/events/2013-app-of-the-year-awards/top50 (select upcoming and then real time strategy) or directly on the gamepage: http://www.slidedb.com/games/oberons-court So that's an update. Hope you liked it, and make sure to post and ask questions.
My vote's in. Now as I haven't combed this whole thread, I'm a little lost. Is this game linear? So do you move through with your units gathering resources and killing enemies? Or is it more traditional with just an open map and you have to destroy the enemy presence? Because as far as I've seen there's not base system. If this is already cleared up you can just direct me to a page, thanks
Well.. to answer your question. The maps are non-linear, much like the old warcraft 3 stages without base-building. So the maps themselves contain many pathways or open spaces where you must find and control resources spots. Resources here will replenish over time, but must be controlled by a squad to harvest. Each map will contain ruins or keeps which a single unit can enter. these mini-dungeon's unlock either new units, or new abilities, but are often protected (they're dungeons).. Each map will also contain several gates to other maps. So you can move backwards and forwards through the larger game world of the campaign,for instance if you need a particular unit not found in the current map, or need to grow stronger to defeat a map, you can travel back. There is a roguelike element and a permadeath to your campaign if you lose all resources and units. That's basically the gist of it, that and lots of combat. The storyline and map goals are still under development, so i'm not spilling to much on that.
Whoa, you have been busy All that stuff sounds great, really looking forward to it. Of course you got my vote on SlideDB. And I like your new logo, even with being a cat person, not a dog one Two questions: Everything in memory now? Does that work out well on older devices with even less RAM? No more travel map: Makes sense. But, for one, lazy folks like me like our travel shortcuts Trekking back and forth the long way doesn't sound like too much fun. Will there still be an overview map that shows which area is where? It's always a huge immersion breaker for me when I have to manually draw my own maps. Same goes for live onscreen maps of each area: do those exist? I don't see a minimap on your screenshots. The traveling back and forth between areas sounds interesting, very curious how that will play. Absolutely love your idea with the mini dungeons. Sounds like a complete extra game in itself. You should already start a gameplay beta, nevermind that the story isn't complete yet.
Well putting everything in memory is perhaps the wrong term. What i'm doing is using object pools. So there's a pool for nearly everything I would normally create at runtime. Cuz creating stuff at runtime on mobile devices is a bit of a no-go area, the memory speed and lack of proper fast cache (like on a pc) makes for instance a direct creation of a unit give a significant hickup during gameplay. So you use pools, sort of ready- made stacks of objects you can just activate and use, and then dump back in the pool. That way you'r actually managing your memory pretty tightly if done well, you know exactly what you are pooling and how much mem is allocated. and offcourse not having textures really downsizes the memorysize tremendously. the largest mem allocations are for audio and animations.. A regular map will be a 32x32 tilemap with each tile being bout 150k tops. so that's a very manageble affair.. And yup as soon as I've finished all the dungeons I'll make a 3 map mini campaign as a first beta..
Interesting stuff, thanks a lot for that. Seems I have to really dig into how these things work on iOS some time soon. Why not flip that around? Unless you absolutely need all the dungeons for a beta, I'd quickly patch together 3 maps and there you go. Doesn't even have to have any story. One or two super-simple goals per map should be enough. If you can top it off with 1-3 dungeons, even better; but not mandatory. Disclaimer: Yes, I got bitten by the "Agile over Waterfall development" bug, too Your call in the end, do whatever you feel good with. You're doing an awesome job so far. I am just trying to talk you into it so I can get my hands on it earlier
ooh dear, those darn waterfalls,, I'm still more in favor of programming mother(bleep)er (Do you speak it?).. Check out http://programming-motherf...er.com (need to fill in the blanks) Basically I need the dungeon's in my current setups.. just a few more weekends and it will be there.
