Shadow Covenant

Last hours have been most productive… I added 4 types of enemies (soldier, archer, dragon and wizard), each with their own special strenghts and weaknesses, and different types of attacks (melee, ranged, aoe)…

It was easy adding them in my data-driven system, which is totally awesome, at least that’s well design… 🙂

There are still balancing issues, although not many… still not a game, missing the power gems (to restore mana, health and “wall strenght”), game over and win conditions, m…ore levels, title screen and instructions… Instructions are particularly scary, since the game is quite complicated already from a mechanics standpoint… and I didn’t even add more spells and RPG-like attributes like critical strikes and attack speed.
Some graphics need lots of work aswell, and it would be nice if the characters would face whoever they’re attacking, but that will take much longer than I have, specially considering my drawing skills… 🙂

Tomorrow I own’t have much time to work on the game, since I have family visiting… going to try geting most of the work done in the morning and at night, specially late night (after 11pm or so until 3am, which is the compo’s finishing time in my timezone). Want to have a complete game with sound, music, title screen, instructions, game over and several levels… the rest of the stuff I’ve been pondering about (more spells, RPG-like damage system, etc), will be left for Monday (so it can participate on the Jam aswell).

Anyway, nice for about 10 hours of work… all data-driven and such… 🙂

Finished lots of stuff… The GUI was pretty easy, and it doesn’t look half bad (I’ve done worse in the past, eheheh):

Still need to add some information on what’s the blue bar and the other bar that will be shown later (showing the progress of the super spell that’s being cast). Also left space for other spells, if I have time to make them work (game logic system already supports it, just a matter of implementing each spell).

Also done the possession logic:

The possessed soldier (the blueish one) has just killed another soldier (hence the grave), by dealing 25 points of damage… Different unit types deal different damage to the others… this way I can have archer units dealing more damage to dragon units than soldier units.

Currently, the fight system is done through a “I hit you, you hit me” thing, although I might want to add some randomness to it (just because it’s cooler), and even critical hits (because they’re even cooler!).

The game also implements an agro table so that the enemies attack whoever is dealing them more damage (which will make them prioritize, hopefully).

Not sure on what to do next… probably I should finish the game, with just some more units types (trivial to add) and game over/next level/success conditions, so I can try to balance it. That would leave me with whatever time I can gather on Sunday for polish and the Monday for all the spells and abilities I’d like to add to this game (although it could only be used in the jam then)…

Anyway, haven’t had this much fun doing a game for a 48-hour compo for some time now… 🙂

The army already breaks down the walls… You can see walls in different states of disrepair…

Now it’s time to get some actual gameplay going, add the cursor, mana bar and possession interface…

Got some more game logic in the game: the army now advances…

The army can only spawn in grass-tiles on the left side, and it advances choosing randomly a direction (up, down, right), prioritizing up and down (to avoid having too many “straglers”).

Took me longer than normal, since I did an XML system to be able to customize any unit… so adding new units, is just editing the XML file (data-driven code ftw!).

The sprite is traced from Oryx’s sprite pack from the TIG Assemblee competition (really like that pack)… I zoomed it in Photoshop than placed all pixels by hand in a new image, adding the small feet animation aswell… Think this is allowed and it looks much better than something that I started without a reference… Going to do that for the rest of the graphics, since it looks nice…

Now to get some wall-destroying logic going… The army will only attack the wall if he can’t move forward anymore (the army never retreats!).

Just finished my lunch:

Good chicken takeway… 🙂

Anyway, got the tilemap working, which is read from a text file…

The blue thing on the right is the castle… need to change the colors, looked better when I was drawing it… Maybe swap the rock for trees for “impassable” and use grey for the castle walls…

Anyway, now to get the army moving…

Had breakfast (bread and liquid crack AKA Nestea Orange):

and inspiration hit me… I actually got a decent idea!

The idea is a mix of Bejeweled, Puzzle Quest, Possession Mechanics and Tetris…

An invading army is attacking your castle and you have to possess the right type of enemy to deal more damage to the surrounding units… It’s kind of complicated to explain without visual aids (hopefully, or else I won’t be able to do decent instructions and nobody will understand my game).

I think this is pretty simple to implement, so I won’t use my engine and go back to my old LD#17 framework to do the game… if I’m lucky I’ll be able to make the compo instead of the jam, let’s see…

Going to use placeholder graphics until I have a firm grasp on what I’ll need to actually draw…

Really excited by this one…