The Tactical Advantage

Hey guys! This build has some of the most dramatic changes to the game play that we have made so far. The focus has really been on evolving the core game play that occurs with each event. It includes a new tactical mode in which you can pause the game and give commands to your crew. Also, we have added classes to the crew which make them unique for playing different roles during battle. You can play the latest build here...

Build v.10

Just for the sake of bragging, I will show off a beautiful sunset picture that I took while on vacation in Hawaii this week. The early mornings were still free for me to get some indie dev work done.

This was the backdrop for my past 2 weeks of game dev'ing

I am really excited about being able to take tactical command of your crew during a battle. This adds a much more cerebral element to the game in which you can plan out what each crew member should do next in order to survive an encounter. As a result, the interface is now something pretty similar to the game "Dragon Age" where you can give commands to your party as well as take direct control of one of them. While playing the game, press SPACE to pause it. While paused, you can click where you want your crew members to move or attack. Then, press SPACE again to un-pause and they will follow those orders.You can use TAB to switch between which crew member you are controlling at any given time.

Giving tactical orders to your crew

I am trying to decide if I like the blend of tactical and action or if it would be better to remove the direct control aspect and only have tactical control. It could be that the blend will just end up being confusing for players and not actually add any fun. I would be really interested to hear peoples thoughts on this in the comments after they have tried the build. Though, as I mentioned above, the blend did work pretty well in "Dragon Age", so I know it is possible to make it work.

The other main change that is in this build is the addition of classes for each of your crew. Every class has bonuses which change how the class is used best. The bonuses include things such as increased health or faster attack speed with bows. Also, each class has a special ability such as a healing spell or the ability to stun enemies. Ultimately, creating a good complimentary class composition for your crew will be critical to success in the game. Also, finding the right items to compliment each class member will be critical to reaching the full potential of that class.

Browsing through your crew

Along with the class abilities, some items now have actions which are used in a similar way. For instance, there is a spell scroll which can be used to heal crew members just like how the monk can for his ability. Right now there are only a couple items that take advantage of this, but I intend to have unique actions tied to most of the items in the long run.

On a separate note, we have a team update which is that we have found a music composer to join the team. Our composer Riley is going to whipping up some awesome pirate tunes so people can look forward to hearing those in the future! He may also by involved in helping with sound effects and doing some of the coding for the game (depending on how much time he has).

Lastly, I hope everyone enjoys trying out the new build and remember to leave me your feedback on what you think about the tactical game play. The next build is going to include an art drop from Kurt to liven things up and we will be announcing the name of the game very soon. The list of significant changes in the build is below.

---- v0.10 ----

- Add tactical crew control (press space to pause)

- Fixed several bugs around how the crew work

- Player can now control any crew member equally

- Crew now have special abilities which can be used

- Actions can be queued up while in tactical mode

- Items can now have an action attached to them

- Improve item tooltips to be easier to read

- Added a window for browsing your crew

- Lots of UI improvements

- Added game balance framework to help with tweaking the balance in the future

- Add a handful of new items but most of them aren't fully complete yet

- Did an initial balance pass. Much more to come though

- Added Heal area action

- Added Stealth action

- Added Stun area action

- Added Mutli-shot action

- Added Rogue class

- Added Barbarian class

- Added Monk class

- Added Archer class

A Sweet New Style

Hey again everyone! This weeks build is all about style. Kurt has been cranking away in order to pump out a bunch of new sprites and animations for the characters in the game. So far, we have humans (with different hair styles), twerps, fishmen, giant robots, sea golems and gas skeletons. They all looks really sweet so check out the latest build below and give it a play.

Build v0.9

I will keep this post pretty short because most of the new stuff you should really see by playing yourself. Nonetheless, below are some screen shots of some of the new characters. However, you really have see them in action to really appreciate the awesome animations.

Trying to survive a robot attack

How did sea golem's get on my boat!?

Twerps spawning from a portal

Another new feature that is introduced in this build is the ability to go on an excursion onto an island. In the future we plan to do a lot of different events that will take place on islands, but for now there is just one simple one to test the feature. Most of the work this release went into building a framework that can randomly generate islands on the fly. So, pretty much every island that you go to in the game will be a little bit different. The system is pretty interesting as it uses an alteration on a classic midpoint displacement algorithm in order to generate the terrain. In the future as we fill out the island content much more, so I am sure that I will have more to say about it then!

Wandering around a random island (test graphics)

As always, thanks for following along and beware of the many bugs you are sure to find in the build! Below is a list of the major changes in the build if you are interested. Also, don't forget to leave your thoughts in the comments.

---- v0.9 Ship Notes ----

- New more realistic water sprites

- Add new human sprites

- Make humans NPC's able to equip and use various types of weapons

- Add Twerp enemy type which is small and fast

- Add framework for random island generation

- Add new Twerp Portals event

- Add Steam Robot enemy type

- Add Gas Skeleton enemy type

- Add island event (test graphics only)

- Major perf improvements to the sprite manager system

- Add Fishman enemy type

- Add Sea Golem enemy type

- Make enemies able to have multiple attack types

- New Portals event type

- New events for new types of enemies

1 Million Downloads

This post is just to take a moment to celebrate that I recently crossed the 1 million downloads line for all of my games. It is a pretty exciting milestone as and indie developer, and I am really thankful to all of the people who have taken the time to download and enjoy my games. It is a huge joy to read all of the reviews and comments and see that people like them for the same reasons that I do! So, the journey took about 3 years and the following graph tells the tail...

Windows Phone downloads (~982k)

Most of my success has been on windows phone where I still receive about 300 downloads a day even though I haven't updated my most popular game Legends of Decent for well over a year. You can see a few large peaks in the daily downloads which represent times when my game was featured on the front of the windows phone app store. Otherwise, it has been a stead crawl most of the way.

Windows 8 downloads (~19k)

I ported the game to windows 8 shortly after the OS was launched, but haven't been able to find the same success there. However, the 19k downloads were still part of getting me over the 1 million line, so I guess it was worth the effort. I have often wondered how the game would have done on android or iOS, but I think that I did benefit from the visibility that I got from being in a less crowded marketplace.

Nonetheless, by far my proudest achievement has been how well reviewed Legends of Descent has been ever since launch. I still get a new 5 star review every few days, which is really incredible.

Reviews for Legends of Descent in the US

Anyways, it has been a fantastic journey and I hope that my next game will be as well received as this one was and can put me on the road to the next million (or 10)!

Artificial Stupidity

That's right, it's time for a new build. The main focus in this build has been to improve the AI of the NPC characters in the game. Also, you can now hire crew members which will fight on your behalf in events. Check it out at the following link and the full change list is at the bottom of the post.

Build v0.8

So, why do I title the post "Artificial Stupidity". Well, the reason is that there isn't really much intelligence involved. The enemies aren't very smart, but rather simply follow a predefined behavior in a way that makes them appear to be smart. One of the most important pieces of appearing to be intelligent is to be able to find your way from one place to anther. In the world of AI, this is called path-finding. There are TONS of algorithms which can be used for path-finding and each one has its own merits and drawbacks. The one used most commonly in game development is called A* (and it is the one I am using as well). I won't go into the details about it, but if you are interested in algorithms then you should read about it. Either way, the end result is that the enemies no longer simply walk into a wall because you are on the other side of it. Now, they will walk around the wall in order to hunt you down and kill you. Cool.

A* path-finding grid in action

The other major feature that I put into the game with this build is the ability to have a crew on your ship which fights on your behalf. Right now, this is the most simple implementation that I could make, and the only difference between crew members is how much health they have. However, there is a ton of potential to expand this system to make each crew member bring something unique to the game. In the future, I intend to add different characteristics which each crew member might have which would make them valuable. For instance, different ones have the ability to use different kinds of weapons. Also, some might heal you and other crew members. Other still might have the ability to coax enemies to attack them and they can take a very high amount of damage. Putting together a crew which has complimentary abilities will be critical to winning the game.

Hiring some crew for my ship.

In this current iteration, your crew is completely controlled by AI (and a simple one at that). They will look for the nearest enemy and go try and kill them for you. However, I plan to make a lot of changes in this regard in future builds. The first thing I want to add is the ability to assign different AI personalities. For instance, you could assign some crew to be aggressive (like they are now) but others to be defensive and to stay on your own ship and defend it instead of attacking. However, I want to go beyond this and try out adding the option to pause the game and then assign specific actions to your crew. So, if you want to micro manage your crew during a particularly difficult encounter then you can do that by pausing every time you need to and then assigning what actions you need your crew to take. This will add a new tactical element to the game which is currently missing which I think could be super fun.

New slaver ship event in which I have gotten the slavers to surrender.

Lastly, I will leave you with a small taste of what is to come in the next build. Kurt has been hard at work coming up with the actual sprites that we will be using for the characters in the game. Below is a tiny sample of some what he has come up with so far and you should be able to see them live in the game soon! As always, let me know what you think of the build and share you ideas in the comments.

New enemies from Kurt that we will be adding in soon.

v0.8 Change List

- Add path-finding to AI

- Make ranged enemies do line of sight checks

- Allow enemies to grapple across ships

- Add hirable crew members which fight for you

- Add ability to hire crew in certain trade events

- New marooned man event

- New slave ship event

Ship Battles for Fun and Profit

After going through a phase of creative block, I am finally making significant progress again. The latest build includes the baseline tech that I will use to save games and takes a first stab at what a pirate ship battle will be like. Check it out here...

Build v0.7

I have spent a ton of time over the last month trying to conceive of what a ship battle would look and play like in this game. Of course, it is not an option to cut ship battles when making a pirate game, they simply must exist, and must be fun. However, there are a lot of technical things to consider since the game takes place up close to the action and I can't easily zoom the camera out because the game is 2D and things would get distorted if the camera wasn't pixel perfect.



New pirate ship attack event

One idea that I considered was to have the ship battles be like a separate mini game. This way I would use completely different graphics for them and then after they had played out you could zoom down into the action again. However, I didn't really like separating the ship battles out from the rest of the game very much. Also, it would need to be coded completely separately and need its own art assets and whatnot, which would be expensive. So, I decided not to pursue that route.

Grappling between ships during a battle

Ultimately, I have settled with the idea of having the ships be stationary during the battle. Then, characters will grapple back and forth between the ships as they battle for victory. However, I will still allow the player to have some control over the actions of their ship (in future builds). I am thinking of adding the ability to attach upgrades to your ship such as cannons which you could then use to sink the opposing ship. I will have to experiment with a bunch of different ideas for how your ship will play a part in the encounter in order to find out what is most fun.

So, in the comments let me know what you would like to see in the ship battles and maybe I will add it in :-).

A Bit More Tech

When building a new game (on a new engine you haven't used) there is a lot of time spent just putting together the underlying tech necessary for the type of game you are making. That is what the past few weeks have been spent on for me. Unfortunately, this doesn't result in all that much new content which is fun to play. However, it does help flesh out the vision for what I think the game will be in its final form some day. So, try it out here...

Build v0.6

There are two main new changes introduced in this build. The first one is a new merchant system that allows you to buy and sell items in certain event locations. Along with this I added a few new events which result in you being able to make trades. In the future, trading items will be a vital way of decking out your gear, your crew and your ship.

Trading items at a merchant port

The other piece of tech is a new travel map that your see when you want to sail. This shows you a map of where you are and the various locations that you can chose to sail to. The addition of this gives you a much better feeling that you are actually travelling somewhere between events which is really nice. The art used for the map right now is just something I grabbed off the internet, so we will be filling it in with something better in the future.

Choosing a destination to sail to

Anyways, hope this gives you some more of an idea of where we are headed with the game. I am hoping to get most of the tech out of the way soon so that we can start filling in the game with more fun to play content.

Let's Get Piratey

In this build we are trying out a new theme which is basically your classic pirate theme. The tiles that are used for the ship are from the actual artist Kurt, so they should resemble the style that the finished project will look like You can check it out here...

Build v0.5

Don't be critical with this build because it is pretty raw. I wanted to play around with some of the concepts we are thinking of, so I have prototyped a bunch of stuff. However, I don't want to make everyone wait until it is all over before you try it. So, I have posted this build up for you despite its obvious rough edges. So, enjoy all of the numerous bugs that I am sure it contains.




Fighting the undead on your ship

The main thing to notice in the build beside the pirate theme is the event system. This is where you can sail to different locations and a different event will trigger at each one. Right now, when you sail it just randomly spawns an event. In the future, there will be some sort of map that you can pick the location you want to sail to. This gameplay style is borrowing a lot from "FTL" which fans of that game will notice right away.




Example of event text

I am pretty excited about the event driven gameplay because it allows us to do a lot of different stuff. Most of the places that you visit will have some choices that you can make. What you chose will determine how the event plays out. For instance, if you come across a merchant ship you could choose to attack it or to trade with it. Whichever you chose will make a large difference in how you are able to progress.

Shout out in the comments with what cool events you think should be added into the game! And of course, any other feedback is always welcome.