Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

The second play test of the Alpha build went well, lasting about 30 minutes of real play before an unexpected crash. There were a number of small issues and things that need to be re-balanced, but overall, the game was great fun. When comparing to the real-time version of the game from 6 months ago, there is a marked improvement is fun, and real moments of excitement, at least for this play tester. The mission chosen was one with multiple small groups of enemies scattered around the map. The player had limited artillery and air support, one unit of each. Both sides had a combat support unit for de-buffing opposing troops, and the enemy also had a general support unit for buffing friendly troops. A short time limit meant that the player had to split their troops to tackle several objectives at once. This made the mission quite interesting as several small combat arenas were active simultaneously. The small map size (32x32) wasn't a problem, it never felt that cramped, and at t...

Infantry are being added back in to the game. The sprites look great, even though they are really small. They seem to suit the turn based gameplay better than the real time version of the game. There will be some more previews over the next week as more functionality is added. Particles and decals are being added back in to the game as well, much of the code and graphics are reused from the earlier version of the project, which helps to save time.

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 ...

In any RPG or turn strategy game you'll find special roles for special characters. There's the tank , whose job is to absorb damage, and the DPS whose role is to do a lot of damage per second. You might find other roles like glass-cannon , but the one you can't do without is a healer . Of course a healer isn't only supposed to heal, they also have the ability to put buffs or de-buffs on other characters. At this point you can split in to a further specialized role, the support character. They might not be able to heal at all, but they can buff or de-buff and perhaps summon allies. Once I made the decision to switch Vinland: 1936 over to a turn based strategy game, I had to think about how roles were going to work out. Tanks are obvious, and DPS is more complex. But today I want to talk support. In the above picture you can see that a lot of the selected unit's abilities and actions are grayed out. It can't currently use them because they are restricted....

It's been a while since I posted here. I worked hard on Vinland; 1936 and got a playable demo up and running. But there were quite a few problems with it. I could have continued with the project as it was and finished adding all the art resources, but the game seemed so flawed that it just wasn't worth the effort. So once again I'm starting out from scratch. This time I'm going to be taking on board some gameplay elements that I've picked up from some other games I've played recently. I'm also going to avoid adding any art until the gameplay is all finished. For now I'm using some stand in assets that I created this afternoon; With luck I should be able to get the game to a playable state quite quickly. This time I'm going to get testers to try it out before spending any time on art assets.

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 finished working on the code for adding foliage and having some extra time I decided to experiment with the code for rockets. The original idea I had was that rockets would be large vehicle components that can be fired very quickly, regardless of how much manpower is used for reloading. They would use up a lot of ammo, so they would run dry after a short but devastating barrage. The problem here is that it's easy to take advantage of this by adding a lot of ammo, which is much smaller than in bulk than the rockets. There's also the problem of firing large caliber rockets. In real life rockets of up to 30cm were used, but I think that will be too powerful for the scale of combat in this game. lol. Somehow that one trooper survived the mother of all explosions... A 30cm rocket could contain nearly 30KG of explosive. That would be a very large explosion. I've tried to balance the game by using a simple equation to make bigger guns more powerful, but h...

Right now I'm working on the game's effects. Explosions, physical reactions, sounds etc... It's not easy to add really great effects without putting a drain on the Blender Game engine, so things will be as good as I can make them, but not at the expense of frame rate. Here's an enemy tank being bombarded by rockets. Hits by enemy weapons cause a vehicle to shake and rock. Later there will be more effects, such as rocket trails and a big explosion when the vehicle is destroyed. Here some infantry are getting hit by small arms fire. You can see the red section of their status bar increasing. This shows they are heavily shocked. When that happens their rate of fire and accuracy is decreased and they also can't move quickly. Finally here are some PBIs getting hit by automatic 40mm cannon fire. Machine guns and auto-cannons are very effective against enemy troops out in the open. The large caliber model also does splash damage, increasing the damage ...

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...

I've been working a lot on the game recently and I've nearly rebuilt it to the level it was before. Past that maybe, since now I have the beginning of a working combat system and the ability to save and load the game. Infantry can now occupy a building. It's quite an abstract representation, since they stay at the door and turn invisible. But they can then fire from one of the windows and take damage from shots at the windows too. I think I've set it up well so that when building damage and destruction is working then the system should continue to work. For combat I tried some new ideas, but they didn't work out that well. It seems that it's important that viewing range should be further than shooting range. Now shooting range is pegged at 18 units of distance, while viewing range can extend out past that. In the above image one unit has an officer, so has further viewing range. The other can only see as far as they can shoot, a dangerous situation si...

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 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.

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...

Starting work now on the UI for the game. I need to get on with this as it's going to handle controls for things like changing infantry formations, giving orders to your units, targeting and combat etc... Here's an early version of the UI command buttons: The commands will also be accessible by hotkey. For example the first 4 are A, S, D, F: 1. Attack, 2. Sentry, 3. Defend and 4. Flank. These will set the overall state of the selected units. Attack will make the unit move to the selected destination or enemy, trying to shoot whenever possible. Sentry will go in to observation mode and for infantry they will go prone. Tanks will open their hatches to get a better look around. They won't attack unless first attacked, and will get a better visual range in this mode. You can use the ambush mode as well (second row, number 6), in which case they won't get the visual bonus, but will be harder to spot. Defenders will try to turn automatically to face the nearest...

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.

Added a second infantry type in to the game for testing. Now there are riflemen and sub-machine-gunners. I found a way to reduce the time it takes to do the animations, which is nice. It was really pretty quick to animate this one.

I got over the lack of a North direction in the animations by giving each infantry man a default "north" facing when they are created. This will be either North West or North East randomly. That way there's a little more variation in their appearance. Making a good 4 frame walk animation is not that easy, it tends to look a bit like they are moonwalking. Still, being able to fit all the animations for one infantry man variant on a single sheet makes up for it. I changed the default animation (and prone default, trench default etc...) to be a fidget animation. This has a lot more movement (checking the gun, looking around etc...) and only plays 10% of the time, when the infantry man is idle. This should stop the infantry looking so static when they are just standing around waiting for orders. I gave the troopers a blue uniform, somewhat similar to those worn by Austria-Hungary armies during WWI. I think this gives more of the pan-European look I wanted. It...