Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

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...

Another video diary can be viewed here : This shows at least part of the screen layout. I'll be working on the inventory and UI next. You'll be able to drag and drop things right from the UI to the viewport.

For anyone who's interested in the newest version of the game you can see the current video diary here : I'm very happy with the atmosphere of the game so far. I feel like it's something I can work with. I've got a lot of ideas for the game, but for now I'm just going to keep slogging away trying to get a working gameplay demo. The schedule so far is: 1. Item generation. 2. Basic player stats. 3. Inventory management. 4. Moving items between the screen and the inventory. 5. Using items to attack and trigger events. I'm going to be working a lot with messages this time around. That should clear up many of the hurdles I was facing in past versions of t he game. One problem I had before is that I had to complete both player mechanics, and enemy mechanics simultaneously. A player attacked a monster causing damage directly, the monster had to process that damage and so on. With messages, I can just send a message and forget about it. It doesn...

Well another Blender game making contest is finished and as usual it's left me to re-evaluate what games I want to make. I had great fun making a story based adventure game, and I'd like to set up a collaboration to make another one, with some other artists. The game would be developed over a set window, like two months and then released immediately, maybe try for steam greenlight. It would be nice to try and do something in a set time span instead of the almost endless development cycles I have with my other games. Anyway, if you want to play the games from BGMC 23, including mine you can download them here . 15 games to try out for free, that's something you don't see every day. :) I'll leave with an animation of one of the scenes I designed for the game, a proper matte painting, the first I've ever tried:

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:

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 spent some time today looking at the possibility of adding A* path-finding to my game. I've used it in the past and I actually got it running pretty fast, even though it's written in python. So I was optimistic about replacing my less than stellar dumb path-finding with A*. However I ran in to some problems. First is the fact that I'm working with quite a fine graph, each infantry man takes up one tile, and tanks and the like take up several (a big tank takes up something like a 12x12 chunk of tiles. When you're working with a graph which might be several hundred tiles square, you get slow performance. When I've used it before I worked with either a pretty course grid, or with navigation nodes. [a* with grid] [a* with nodes] Both these situations give you quite a limited grid and so, good performance. Working outdoors with such a fine and almost unlimited grid makes the algorithm work too hard, especially when you have a lot of agents. Looks...

The infantry are coming! You can see a quick video here . Infantry are moving around as expected, it's easy to select them and get them to go where you want. As of yesterday there were still problems with them getting too near to tanks, and not knowing to get out of the way when a vehicle wants to come through. I think I got that covered today though. Here's a first version, you can see something is up right away though if you look carefully. That's right, I forgot the camera is rotated 45 degrees for an isometric style view so the infantry are facing the wrong way when moving. After adding a 45 degree offset to the code for sprite display I got them to face the right way. I also tweaked the code to stop them from walking through each other. Now they won't occupy the same square as a fellow squad member. They also adjust their avoidance radius based on their state. If they are standing still they will move out of the way sooner. But while walking they ar...

What have I been up to this month? Well you can see it in a couple of development blog videos, here , here and here . Vinland 1936 is a game I've been working on (on and off) for about 3 years. It is somewhat based on the old Nirval interactive game, Blitzkrieg; I hope you've played it since it is one of the best games ever!!! (IMHO) Blitzkrieg was a real time tactics game. You didn't build a base, or spawn units. It wasn't about rushing the enemy. You got a small number of troops and vehicles that could be replenished or repaired if you had access to a supply base and the right supply trucks, but couldn't be replaced if lost. Once your vehicles were destroyed and your infantry killed you were finished. You couldn't just churn out some more from your factory and have another go at rushing the enemy guns. This made you invest a lot in each of your units. They really mattered. It was also procedurally generated. Each mission (except for the historic...

Although the roguelike project was going well I had a few issues with some parts of the code, and the sheer size of the project was something I could see stretching away in front of me for years with no guarantee that people would actually want to play it when it's finished. It's time to try something a little less ambitious. I'm going full rogueLITE! Using a lot of the code from the roguelike project, I started making a more limited game. There will be a single character, combat will be more arcade like, there will still be a chance to upgrade and develop your character's stats, but they represent only a single class and have fixed equipment. Introducing the Lady Grenadier. I've got a fun character, an interesting setting and an exciting story lined up. It still utilizes my low poly style, but things are going to be a little more cartoony. Game play involves mostly chucking bombs at the enemy. Bombs away! But there's also a lot of platformin...

An in depth video this week focusing on tilesets and doors. I'm happy with how they are working right now so I'm going to move on to items and inventory. You can see the video here if it doesn't display.

You can get a look at how the tileset looks in this short video Blog: TILESETS  I'm working on lighting and tile visibility. I'm also about to start work on doors.

This week's updates are pretty boring for any readers, just some improvements in project structure and handling of animations. Here's a video. But this week I started work on integrating the Shadow World. [He knows what I'm talking about!] The Shadow World is an idea which I hope will add an extra dimension to the game, literally, as it exists on top of the regular world and can be entered at any point. For an instant idea of what I mean, think of the moment in Lord of the Rings when Frodo puts on the ring. Suddenly the world of daylight is gone, replaced by a world of twilight, similar, yet different. [Gen and his shadow] I had the idea because I've been reading Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea stories.The characters are able to cross over to the land of the dead, a place where the dead go after life. It's not Hell, but it's certainly not Heaven either. More like the afterlife depicted in some pagan mythology. There are no Gods or Devils rewardi...

As promised I've spent most of my time this week on coding basic gameplay. [text above each agent displays debug info] I started out having separate state machines for AI decision making and actions/animation. Sometimes AI control calls for very rapid switches of states which would also disrupt the animations. Causing them to stutter or jump. But by setting up Animations to only switch after a short delay I eliminated the problem you get with having AI and actions in the same state. If a call to switch animation occurs, but rapidly switches back (like stopping for an instant when walking) the switch is ignored. So I refactored them in to a single finite state system with inheritance helping to structure things like animation and path finding. [Blocked in!] AI is pretty basic. They just try to get towards you avoiding squares they've already visited. But it works surprisingly well. It's easy to get blocked in by the enemy, but you can use the nature...

Hello again! It's been quite a while since I posted here. I've been working on other projects, and spending a lot more time with my family, but the core reason is that I just lost interest in the project as it stood. But wait! I haven't given up. I just needed some time and some ideas to remake my vision in to something that: A: I can finish. and B: Is actually fun. So read on for the next chapter in the development hell of: TREASURES OF THE DEEP DWELLERS !   This time last year I took a break from this project since it was wearing me down. I realized I was making a game for me, with stuff that I liked. But which I would probably never play.   What I really wanted to do was capture some of the excitement and joy of playing an RPG / Roguelike for the first time... And package that as something that modern players would actually find enjoyable. So it's clearly time to start over.    Where do I go from here then?...

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t...

Click the clock to watch Video devblog number 6... Next up I'm going to do a basic hand to hand combat setup to test my combat and stat system. I want a system which allows combat between groups of quite a range of abilities. A group of weak players should be able to take on a single strong enemy. And likewise a large group of weak enemies should be a danger to even a strong player party. I also want there to be an incentive for using different kinds of weapons for different situations. What's the point in getting lots of loot if half of it is worthless? Hopefully some robust testing of the system should see whether it's a good system, and more importantly if it is fun or not.

You can see the latest updates here: Click the image for the Development Diary video. Physical representation of agents has been added along with animations. Lots of bugs fixed with AI and generally improved speed and reliability of pathfinding.