Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

You can see the latest progress on the project in the most recent video diary here. A lot of work has been going on trying to get the AI to work well, without causing too much drain on computational resources. Trying to get AI states to be more flexible so that an artillery weapon might use normal attacks if the enemy gets too close, instead of trying to do long ranged attacks on a target the other side of the map. And so on. I also finally got around to adding an effect to the air support actions so they have an actual aircraft fly in and drop bombs or reveal the map. It's a bi-plane because the current version of the game is set in 1936, with early war technology. The current plan is to get this one finished with a basic set of game-play options and then produce expansions or sequels with all the other great stuff I want to do; custom vehicles, procedurally generated missions and so on. The tactical side of the game is maturing right now, with the introduction of four di...

Ok, so it's not exactly skynet, but I have got my first AI state working, kind of. The first state is "HOLD" in which case the agent stays in place where they are and shoots at any unit that comes in range. When I started writing this module, I found that the existing method of triggering actions wasn't good enough to allow the AI to choose the best weapon or target. It worked by simply sending a command to the unit to trigger the currently selected action. If the action is valid, it triggered, if not it didn't. That's fine for play controlled units, as that's all they need to do. But AI needs to know in advance if the action is valid. The player can get that info from UI feedback, but that wasn't available to the AI player. There were three problems: 1. The UI feedback duplicated code in the action trigger function. These  two sets of code could get out of phase so that UI feedback was wrong. 2. The action trigger didn't give enough ...

After some testing, I decided to rework the radio contact rules described in the previous post. I've been playing a lot of RPG and Strategy games lately and one thing I don't really enjoy is the micromanaging aspect of buffing and de-buffing. Rather than force the player to make hard decisions on where to allocate their buffs, it just ends up with them having to devote too many resources to support. You end up having at least one team member out of four doing nothing but support. It also wastes a lot of time clicking and selecting and so on. So, I want support actions to offer a significant bonus when active, but most should be passive. They should have specific utility too, not a general buff which you simply apply to your best unit. If your tanks are getting swarmed with infantry, then rapid fire will help you clear them out. If there's an enemy who is well dug in behind cover, you can use steady aim or mark target to get a bead on them. In the end I just made s...