Hey guys. So life's going on. I'm currently doing this as a break from going through a 113 page California driving manual because I've been putting off driving for a good while now and I'm finally getting up on it. But its dull and dreary as hell so I think I'd rather use the remaining couple hours I have before work to throw out a blog post instead. Just been trying to work through some personal issues and life in general, I've got college classes coming up again where I'm going to be re-doing some things I attempted a few months back and that didn't go too well. Mostly just struggling with reconciling my state of mind (meaning earlier this year and now, but moreso earlier) I guess thats the best way to put it. Its one of those problems that are hard to completely wrap your mind around. Some people who know me say its bad habits, disposition or something like that. Intuitively I think its not quite that, but while I certainly think theres more to it I can't always place exactly what it is, and then maybe I just think that because somehow it makes me seem like a better person? I'm not even sure. But hey who doesn't go through problems in their life? I'm honestly not feeling all that negative about the whole situation, it just causes bad moments sometimes. Right now I'm trying to get myself designing at a regular rate so this will be easier to keep up during the busy times to come.

http://wbttlofm.smackjeeves.com/comics/1547376/page1/

Here's this comic that I discovered just a couple weeks ago, I gotta say its one of the most creative webcomics I've ever come across. It has to do with dreams foremost, although what that means can really be broken down. Lets say the story itself is an exploration of a fantastical dreamscape. Not in the shallow sense either, there are a lot of interesting themes and underlying ideas that get touched on. Oh and the surrealist art, lets not forget that. This artist has a good sense for that and even though the characters themselves have a pretty simple art style the presentation comes together really well. I'm actually really interested in trying out this style for myself, I did a surreal kind of painting in an art class in spring and I'm interested in doing some more of that. A game with this art style and a focus on surrealism would be cool too. Perhaps a kind of rpg but with dialogue and puzzles instead of combat. Or maybe combat can play a prominent role as well, but using a more… abstract combat system than usual. Make combat into a bit of a puzzle in itself, that sort of thing.

Well onto the ideas I actually am working on at the moment. First off the grand project right now takes the form of a motely collection of sprites and a couple half-finished little game experiments. But at least conceptually I have a pretty good idea as for how the structure should be built up, what kind of mechanics I should add and all that. Today I drew a few elevation tiles to test out the look (you'd be surprised how much dynamic adding some hills to an environmental scene could give). I'm liking the effect so far but I find that having a darker shade of grass for the slant but the same shade up top gives a weird, almost hollow effect. I think I'll make the flat grass darker to compensate. I''ve also thrown in the sprites for a player-character (medieval-style) armor progression and variations on that, and I'm liking how they've come out.

I've just noticed the resolution here is rather small, the in-game would be more than double that. Also I'm going to draw (isometrically) diagonal elevation tiles to keep it from looking too blocky later on. I don't intend for this specifically to be the big project that I someday want to make but I'm at least aiming to make some kind of rpg out of this, and it'll grow however much it grows.

But for now I have something smaller on my plate, as I mentioned before I was interested in a combined turn-based and real-time approach to combat and I wanted to put that to the test with a little war game. Or to put it a bit more formally, the objective of making this game is to explore what kind of depth can (and what can't) be offered by a game with a combat focused on that system, and different ways it can be applied. Here's what I'm considering, but first a picture to break up all this text:

The idea of combining the two approaches is to give the player more control and tactical agency over the gameplay that one has with turn-based, but keeping the more dynamic and natural flow of real-time. Now there's a kind of spectrum of effects here to how much favoring one system does vs another. One end would real-time with pause like baldur's gate or some other similar games (is Diablo rtwp? Never played it). Now to be honest, this system is kind of unappealing to me and in the games I've tried that use it (only Baldur's Gate and Arcanum) I found a bit awkward. But maybe those were simply clumsy implementations? Because the pacing just felt really strange to me. Things happen fast and timing abilities is critical, as someone who plays rts a lot I'm used to timing being a challenge so instinctively want to respond in RT mode like in an rts (or I guess more like a MOBA) so I ended up dying a lot just because I was hesitant to take advantage of the pause feature that the game was expecting me to use. And non-ability attacks just had your character swing away with the same animations for little percentages of hp over and over. But then perhaps those aren't inherent issues with the system itself but just flaws in the overall game design of those specific games (perhaps I was just too offput by the lack of hills in the environmental design xD).

So I'm leaning towards not real time with pause, which means that instead the action progresses at arbitrarily long increments in between which the player decides their next course of action. But again there are different lengths that this could be taken to. The more realtime-leaning way would be to treat "turns" as more of a timer. As in things progress in a real time fashion and every 'x' seconds the scene freezes and you can give orders to your units. That means everything is based in real-time with cooldowns on attack and abilities all running on counters independent of the turn sequence. This seems like a more simple/straightforward option, but there the correlation between cause and effect might get a bit chopped up amidst the flow of the game (bullets stopping in mid-air). The other way is to give each action a specific amount of 'action-points' that limit what can be done in a single turn. I find this appealing because I think it gives the player a more direct form of agency and makes the player-ai less of a middle-man between player orders and the outcome of those. But of course then I have to base the division of action points per turn on the real amount of time each turn takes (if a unit has 3 moves per turn I have to make it so that the time it takes for it to make a move is approx. 1/3 of a turn). And this will undoubtly result in some units being unsynchronized from others and needing more time to catch up, unless the speeds of everything are really spot-on (and then, things just get stuck sometimes). But this effect can definitely be minimized to the point where its not too bad, and hey this means I can do longer turns if I want to minimize the amount of tedious micromanage (at the risk of minimizing fun micromanagement as well of course).

Currently I've programmed units to group together in a formation to a certain grid point (not moving as a formation but keeping them from being bunched together awkwardly at the destination) which is what you see in the screenshot. Bare, I know, but its a start. As far as pathfinding goes I'm not using anything too sophisticated, just simple mp_potential_step with optimized settings and a bit of speed modulation based of how far the destination is. I definitely want to improve my pathfinding code (I've tried my own version of A* with the isometric grid-based style thats in the first screenshot, it doesn't work too well yet) but in this instance I think the built in functions suffice, I don't see too much to gain from using a more complicated pathfinder for this specifically. That being said, the units do get a bit weird when moving in a group, and especially when having a problem getting to their destination point because of being blocked by other units. But I seemed to have minimized this to a tolerable level, since I'm not expecting units to traverse across too long of distances anyway for this particular game.

Next I'm going to need some more interface stuff, right now I have a system to check that a single 64*64 gridpoint doesn't go over its capacity but it still doesn't account for units being ordered to a point and then being redirected to a different point (having their spots in the formation marked as unoccupied so other units can take their place, etc.). On that note, I still don't have the units "refreshing" meaning completing their order and being able to take a new one worked in yet either. From there attacks need to be implemented, but its a simple matter of counters and stats. More interesting is going to be the ai behaviors, both of individual units as they combat others (I want a bit more to combat than just standing in place hitting/shooting the other guy) and the strategic ai faced by the player (man I know that won't come easy).

Well thats enough for the war game, I'll be posting more of progress as it occurs. Next blog will probably be about my Broodwar map, I just about have what I want to say thought out, but I want to put out the question: how much/what do you guys want to know? Do you want me to get into the details of the game, with lots of pictures to show off the factions of the game and how they play, and lets say basically a run down of things one might want to know if they were about to go play the map themselves? Or should I spare the details and talk more about the mechanics, gameplay and design itself? If you care, leave a comment to let me know :).