Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

It's been a while since I posted here because I'm moving most publicity for this game over to a facebook page. You can see it here . Right now I'm working on buildings, I've done a mock up of some to show the damage progression from pristine to bullet marked to fully destroyed. There are some buildings at the back which are going to be used for a different map type, the "destroyed city" map. I hope to have several different map types, including winter and fall, desert and this one. It will represent later parts of the game where the defenders have fallen back to positions in their cities and are fighting desperate urban warfare. 

I greatly reduced the rate of fire of the rockets and made them smaller. A single 60mm rocket now takes up the same space as a machine gun. A single vehicle should mount a large number of rockets to take advantage of their power. I also added a delay after a weapon is successfully fired. This means the rockets will fire in a staggered volley instead of all at once. I tried both styles and this looks better and creates less logic spikes. I think it needs more smoke and I'll be adding some rocket trails too. I'm still unsure of where to put the rockets in the tech ladder. In real life the Russians developed their rockets before the German invasion. They were first deployed in 1941. These early rockets were quite small though larger ones were developed later. The Germans designed and tested their first rockets as early as 1940 but they were not deployed until 1941. Larger rockets were introduced later. The rockets weren't mounted on vehicles until 1943, by whi...

I've started work adding trees back in to the game. They look nice already with the mipmaps turned off. I think I've got the color match with the ground for summer trees. The trees have a "shadow only" object which helps reduce rasterizer usage and match the shadow with the lamp. I'm not 100% happy with the trees right now, but I hope they will get better as I make more of them and refine the textures a little. I really don't want to waste any more time just fiddling with them. In a few days I'll take another look and see if I can see where the problem is. I think maybe the ground color is too uniformly light. It needs some more dark areas and contrasting sections. I decided to go with the hollow health bars, I like the effect. More than the black bars. I've also finished adding recoil and other physical effects to the vehicles. Even the guns move, with the main gun swiveling to track the enemies. It also tilts for range if it is a suppo...

It's been a while since i posted any updates. It's not tat I haven't been busy, only that the work hadn't reached a point where it was worth showing. It's been a lot of small incremental changes, building a modular menu system with widgets and buttons, porting over some of my old code for displaying vehicle models etc... This is just a dummy menu at the moment. From here I can set the active profile, manage vehicles for testing and jump right in to an in game testing environment. Each chunk of screen space like this is a widget. It can have a number of buttons. The buttons react to being moused over and clicked. They send a message to the widget to decide how to deal with that interaction. The widget then executes some code and might reset the menu page or load a different one. Clicking manage vehicles loads this menu: I've moved some of the structural elements of vehicles away from components mounted in the vehicle and in to a system of options w...

I'm going back to my real time tactics project, Vinland 1936. While working on the other project I overcame the problems which were stopping me from saving/loading the game and also cleaned up the base code a lot. After a few weeks I'm getting near the the state I was in before. Infantry are back to their previous state, and vehicles are running OK. This time I'm going to push ahead with mocking up the combat system though before I work any more on the vehicle builder or graphical aspects of the game.

I'm revisiting the vehicle editor currently, partly because of some issues what have cropped up with how vehicles are saved and loaded. If I'm going to go back and dig in to it that deeply, it's better to rewrite it.. and update the visual elements at the same time. Here's a preview of some of the elements of the UI, I've simplified and cleaned them up a little. I think it looks better already. On the writing front I blocked out the chapters for the story, I'm pretty happy with it. This is the first time I've approached writing like this, with writing a chapter summary for each chapter and then going back and expanding the scenes to fill in the chapter. It makes much more sense than just starting writing from page one and going with the flow. That's why all my previous stories failed probably. :)

S7alker117 asked me today on Deviant art: What's the story behind this project, if I may ask? To try to lay it out as briefly as possible: It's an alternative history "... if Alfred the Great had been defeated and England had become The Daneland". From this base, using Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Slaves, Viking settlers were able to colonize North America . However, the little ice age which brought viking occupation to an end in our own history left this fledgling civilization isolated from Europe for around 300 years. During that time Christianity developed differently, partly merging with the pagan beliefs of the viking settlers and partly being subverted by the Vinlanders as means of controlling their slaves and lower classes. There are some other departures from our own history; The Eastern Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne were (re)united by the political marriage of Charlemagne of the F...

I got the artillery converted over to act like a hybrid unit. I really like how they turned out, though it did expose some messiness in my code. After cleaning up some junk I feel like the project is pretty well organized so far. Here's an animation of the light artillery: And the heavy artillery: With artillery you can set your crews to defensive stance to protect them from enemy fire, but it makes their rate of fire and movement rate slower. I'm considering allowing artillery to be sandbagged (fortified) and camouflage nets to be deployed when in sentry mode, as a special skill for high level units.

I did a stress test with infantry yesterday: The important bits to look at are "Logic" which is the performance of my python scripts and "Rasterizer" which is how long the scene takes to render. At this point with around 375 infantry men in the scene Rasterizer is proving a much bigger drain on resources than Logic. In fact Logic costs are really very low indeed. They'd have to double again before you'd get a loss of frame rate from 60fps. That's great news! Some other things I worked on this week: Adding the code for units to use binoculars. This allows you to see further but with a limited field of view. Good for scouts or officers. Began working on artillery units. For now they work almost exactly like vehicles, the infantry modes are just static meshes. I hope to make them a kind of hybrid unit with mesh guns and sprite crews. But for now they work like this. The have to be deployed before use, and stowed for transport. This ...

Happy New Year! It's hard to believe I started the germ of an idea that became my current project over 2 and a half years ago! Over the last few weeks I've done a lot of work to get the UI up and running and to get infantry movement modes functioning. You can watch my latest video Diary here . And here's a GIF of the infantry movement modes and UI status bar in action:

Something I didn't point out yesterday was that the status icons only display when the specific status is valid. You won't see them most of the time. I decided to go with more transparent health bars in the end, the previous version looked nice and crisp, but it was too obvious, it preoccupied the eye, taking it away from what's really happening on screen. The new version is a little less obtrusive, there will be different color schemes available depending on your faction, or your personal preference. The rectangle with an "X" in it is the state icon. I've chosen 4 icons to show which state / stance (aggressive, sentry, defending, flanking) the unit is set to. I'll have to change the control buttons to match these new icons though otherwise it could be confusing.

Today I implemented health bars, which seems like an easy thing to do, but in a game like this health bars need to display quite a lot of information without becoming overwhelming. I'm not quite happy with them yet, but I'm getting there: There are 5 elements to look at here: The first is the health bar, a simple green bar with a black background. I'm not sure I like the shad of green though. Also there may be multiple health bars for vehicles to show engine damage, crew casualties etc... or I may leave that up to the info-icons. The second bar is the red one, this is the shock bar. As a unit comes under fire they will suffer shock. If the shock bar is too high the unit will become pinned. Enemy units might run away too. The bar will drop down naturally depending on the experience of the troops. Some other actions can clear the bar too. The third element is the group number. Using control and number keys you can set selection groups, and then select units by pre...

Today I did some work on the mini-map. It's working great. Later I'll be using some textures to make it look better, but for now it's just in the testing phase. You can already see that it shows the location of friendly units and their viewing range. Line of sight is currently dealt with as a radius only. I've thought of using obstacles to block sight but I think it's one of the things that was really unpopular with the original blitzkrieg. When an enemy was shooting at you but you couldn't see it to shoot back or even guess where it was. Very realistic, but also highly annoying. I think there's going to have to be a compromise. If something is far beyond your line of sight, you can't see it (though it might see you). If something is blocked by a building, you might see it, but can't shoot it. You need to get a direct line of sight. I'm also thinking of making out of range or blocked units invisible but represented by a question ma...

UI design, and 2d artwork in general is one of my weaknesses. I'm trying to improve my work in this area and one thing I've been told is that it looks better to have cleaner textures, not so much grunge as I've been adding. Also thinner borders with more room for the icons. Here's a mock-up of the buttons I've been working on: The top ones are deactivated or not clicked, the bottom ones are when something is selected or clicked. I think they look pretty good, even when small on screen. Let's compare them to some other games: One game UI I like the look of is "Order of battle". The icons look clean, the faded paper texture is nice. It's similar to the UI adopted for the Blitzkrieg spin off, Stalingrad: I like this three tone effect. it doesn't detract too much from the main game action and it's pretty easy to tell one icon from another even if it's not easy to tell what they mean. The blitzkrieg 3 UI goes back to...

I'm going to leave trees and move on with some other stuff for a while. I think the trees look pretty good and performance is much better than when i was using individual tree sprites. I'm still conflicted about how to handle alpha in the game. Here's a shot of the trees with clip alpha: Clip alpha is basically either/or alpha. Either it's 100% transparent or it's not. It's very fast to render, but it gives pretty horrible edges. Another option is to use alpha sort. This is similar to the alpha blend I use for the infantry sprites (grayscale alpha) but it works to sort the individual polys of the mesh to make sure they get rendered in the right order. Performance is slightly slower than with clip alpha. But the end result looks much, much nicer. Again this may be something I make a part of the graphics settings, as it would be possible to load different trees from file, some with alpha sort and others with alpha clip and lower resolution.

My video diary is up on youtube so you can see the results of my experiments with infantry working in game. Here's a shot of the finished designs for the European faction's early war "Summer" infantry: I may do some work on the scout because I'm not 100% keen on the design, and the Machine gunner needs a lighter jacket, but for the others I'm pretty happy with their appearance. Adding the other factions infantry should be easy from this point. I want to add some more infantry types though, such as commandos, paratroopers, gun crews, snipers, radio operators, bazooka troops and so-on. Some of them will be specific to each faction, like ski-troops for the Vinlanders.

I started to worry yesterday that the size of the textures involved with adding a lot of infantry types would start to put a drain on lower end graphics cards, so I had a think about how to deal with that. One thing I did right away was to rationalize the number of animations. A lot of the ones I chose were not really that essential, so by being a bit ruthless I was able to cut it down to 8. By halving the number of animations I was then able to fit two infantry man animations on a single sheet. I further tested using 32x32 pixel sprites instead of the current 64x64 pixel sprites: It's difficult to see the difference at the normal level of zoom. You have to zoom in quite a lot of notice: Now you can see the big difference. I think the 64 tiles are much nicer than the 32 tiles. I don't think it would be worth cutting them down that much in quality. But since I will be loading the sprites from an external file, I'll think about including a set of low rez sprit...