Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Well, adding wall detection for the missile attacks wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. In fact I still haven’t finished it. I’m having the missile collide with the edge of the system tile so that I can use the callback function to check for any walls in the way. If there are none then I just restart the missile’s movement towards the planet. Sounds simple, but I’m doing something wrong, because the missile refuses to budge towards the planet after colliding with the tile!! Arrgghh! I finally caved in after two hours straight trying to figure it out and posted on the GG forums. We’ll see what happens. *sigh*

So tomorrow’s a busy day for me. I have to wake up around 4:45am (yes, AM) in order to drive up to Staten Island for the SpikeTV commercial shoot at 6:30. I wasn’t picked to be one of the stunt guys but they did offer me some extra work so what the heck? So I’m doing that until like 10 or so and then heading back to NJ to go to the IGDA chapter meeting and give my presentation on GDC. Afterwards I might go out with some of the chapter members to talk shop and then I’m hitting the road once again to travel to north-eastern PA to hang with some friends for the rest of the weekend. Play RISK, GameCube, shoot pellet guns – all that fun stuff

Be back on Monday – you all behave while I’m gone!

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Last night I spent about 6 hours working on getting the special actions implemented. I was heading into some new territory with TGB (Torque Game Builder, previously known as T2D) code-wise so it was slow going in some spots, but I pushed through. By the end of the nite I had two actions implemented, and these were the biggest of the 5 in terms of making them happen. The other three are relatively easy.

Here’s the gallery. Enjoy! Tonight I’m going to be staying home and working on some more actions (among lots of other stuff on my plate right now!)

This Red planet has been targeted for destruction! Dum dum dummmm!

And she’s away! Awwooooga! Awooooga! Incoming!

KABLOOIE!

Now the Red planet has lost a ring but the Blue planet the attack was launched from also lost a ring as payment for carrying out the special action

We’re about to place a defense wall. Upon clicking on the system you move the mouse around the system to position the arrow. Another click annnnd…

Presto! A wall is erected. Now we’re going to test its defense capabilities by exploding the Red planet beneath it

Behold, the Blue planet remains unaffected. Red’s hostile takeover is thwarted.

Now lets test the walls up against a supernova

As you can see, only a few planets survived the onslaught of a tidal shockwave. Flipping back to the earlier image, only the adjacent systems (up, left, down, right) with walls pointed at the star survived, and for systems on a diagonal if they did not have two walls erected in the corner towards the star the shockwave got through and wiped them out.

Whoops, I forgot to code in that walls also thwart missile attacks as well. I’ll take care of that real quick. Walls also block players from expanding onto their own planets. I debated for a while whether to allow planets of the same type to pass through walls and decided to leave it as it is – walls block any and all planets – to make players think twice about just throwing up a wall.

More updates coming later today!

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Today I woke up at 8am (somehow) and went up to NYC to audition for a stunt job. They were looking for stuntmen to do a commercial for a SpikeTV documentary. The management firm I’m associated with called me up yesterday and set me up with the audition. It went pretty well, I had to pretend I was a hardcore gamer (not hard) and be playing a portable device (like a PSP) and so there was some acting involved with the facial expressions. Then they had me act all happy and jumping around like I just won. Next I had to pretend to hug an old lady standing behind me and then react to a slap in the face with a handbag. Then they had me to a frantic sprint as if I were running from the cops she had just called – across a 7 foot room mind you 😛 Yea I couldn’t stop before sorta running up against the walls a bit, next to the sign posted saying “Stay away from the walls” yea okay whatever 😛 Finally I had to pretend to hurdle over a park bench and catch my foot and fall flat on my face. The only problem is that they had no mats, so I had to do my best faceplant on a tile floor. Oh yea that was fun Scraped up my left arm just a bit – seriously just a bit, no sarcasm intended – but gave them a good show, they looked extremely pleased. We’ll see if I get a phone call tomorrow – the shoot day is either Fri or Sat.

So on the way to and from the city I got to sit on the train with my laptop and get some work done. I implemented a new way of indicating to the player whether they can place a planet or carry out an action over a certain system. Instead of having the cursor change to a crossed-out red circle, the system gets highlighted along the edges a green or red color to indicate okay and not okay. This made things a lot easier code-wise too.

After that I worked on how players go about using special actions. The steps are

1. The player right-clicks on a system – if the planet there has 1 ring or more the highlight turns orange and the system stays highlighted to designate it as selected. The range overlay also appears
2. The player then selects an available special action – not all will be available if there is less that 2 or 3 rings around the planet
3. When the cursor is back over the map it will be a crosshair and the player then selects the target for the action, red and green highlights will let them know what planets they can and cannot use the action on

In order to cancel a special action the user just right-clicks anywhere on the map and they can place a planet again.

Finally I coded in all the special actions’ usage rules, so that when you select a system and select a special action the crosshair appears and the systems are highlighted green or red accordingly. The final step is to have the action carried out at the click of the mouse button. That will come tomorrow.

So here are those screens I promised yesterday, and then some!

(yesterday)The new completed game panel with special action buttons and timers

(yesterday)The timers when activated

(yesterday)Some disabled buttons

The system is green, which means you can carry out the action here, whether it’s placing a planet or applying a special action

Uh oh – red system means no-no

Here’s a system that’s been selected. With only one ring its range doesn’t extend very far

There we go – add another ring and we can reach one of our enemy’s planets. Note we also have another special action option

Here’s the full range of a planet – 3 rings is maximum range and gives you all 5 special actions to choose from

So wait a minute… I fell asleep last nite at ~5… I woke up at 8…. and I’m going to bed at… 4? Wow. Something’s wrong with me And I love it!!

Nite!

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

A few weeks ago I was thinking about other turn-based games and Worms popped into my head. I always loved shooting missiles and watching the enemy worms go flying into the air. Then I asked myself, why can’t we shoot missiles in GC? That opened my mind up to a whole new side of the gameplay – ranged attacks. Right now you have one central focus in the game, to take over other players planets. That’s the main focus, but how about some spice? If you can’t take over anyone during a turn why not launch a missile at them instead? Over time the idea evolved into what I now call Special Actions. These actions can be carried out in lieu of placing a planet on the board and cost the player rings from the planet selected to carry out the action. The more rings a planet has, the farther the range of the action from that planet. There are 5 special actions:

• Missile Attack – (1 ring) Launches a missile at a planet in range and blows a ring off. If the planet has no rings than you can’t attack it.
• Defense Wall – (1 ring) Puts up a wall to one side of the system that blocks a single missile attack/nova/takeover. The wall remains up until it is used to repel something or the planet in the system explodes. Only one wall can be erected per turn but a system can be completely walled in.
• Planetary Shield – (2 rings) Places a shield around a planet that prevents the player from using it for a turn, but also protects it from all actions/events for that turn.
• Star Buster – (3 rings) Forces any Solar Body in range to go supernova regardless of its current life stage
• Reinforcement – (1-3 rings) The selected planet can distribute its rings to any other planets in range, but cannot add a ring to a planet that would cause it to overload and explode.

Another benefit to these actions is that it gives players a reason to occupy the center of the map. Currently the best strategy is to stick to any sides and corners because it’s easier to overload and explode planets, thus taking over other players, but you can’t get a planet with three rings unless it’s on the inside of the map and not the edges.

So last night I drew up the new ingame panel where these special action buttons will reside, which also gave me a good place to put the game and turn timers. Only thing left to do now is code in the functionality, hopefully I’ll get some up and running by the end of the week. I have some screens but for some reason FireFTP seems to want to keep crashing on me when I try and upload them so screw it for now. Post them later hopefully.

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Well I finally logged some more hours today working on GC. I spent a little time on it Thurs too but didn’t really accomplish much. I never get any work done on Friday nights (come on, it’s Friday night!) and Sat I was skiing all day for the first time this entire season. My Dad got me a 3-use discount card to Mt. Creek, where we always go. I doubt I’ll be able to use it again Hopefully it will carry over to next year, or hopefully I’ll find another free weekend before the mountain closes.

So since I took a few steps backwards, I’m still playing catch-up. But I managed to get Imperialism back to snuff, as well as Blitzkreig mode, and pretty much all the bugs I fixed as well. All in all I think the re-additions so far came out better than the originals. I still have to re-implement the special system density selection, the missing map detection/handling, and exposing the image map creation through the DB. I also want to add an in-game DB editor. I was originally going to have it function via console commands but with T2D’s GUI editor on hand I might as well make it more user-friendly than that.

Still have a month left until GDC so I’m not worried about getting the AI implemented in time. Hopefully tomorrow or Tues I can finish up what I outlined above so I can start March off fresh. ‘Course Mon and Tues are not among my most productive sooo… we’ll see.

But that’s all for now… I think it’s about time I started catching up on my SG-1/Atlantis/Battlestar episodes. I’m already more than half a season behind!! Ack!

Oh yea, and I also backed-up my code to the BES server, which I will do after every coding session. Not making that mistake ever again, but better safe than sorry…