ID:43217
 


The long, and hopefully awaited, new release of Fortay is now here. I have added several new features including an interface which I gained inspiration from Battle for Wesnoth.

First of all, I will start out with what I consider is one of the most important update I created which affects the entire game. Balancing every unit, I invited a fellow BYOND member, Keeth, to play my game; after the game was over he told me how unbalanced the units really were. At first I denied this as I believed the units were well thought out and balanced. But as I looked back at previous matches I realized he was speaking the truth. Mainly with the Archers, they could basically hit and run the whole time without getting injured. So I went through several combinations of how each unit should be until I came up with the current balance which should work near perfectly.

When I found out that the Build Your Own Board Game contest was going to be extended I decided that it was a must to add in new factions, units, some maps, and a new interface. I have added in a cleric and a mage which belong to the Taligons faction. I also created a new faction named Vamion which are vampire like aliens, though they do not exactly go with the medieval fantasy theme of the game. As programming for hours straight some times gets a bit dull I went to my artistic “mapping” skills. I created three new maps which are named The Village, Moss, and Grass Lands.

Now for the element that took me a complete day to implement, the interface. I had numerous ideas on what I want the interface to look like ranging from something similar to X-COM through Battle for Wesnoth. At the end of the day I decided since my game was medieval fantasy based that an interface somewhat like Battle for Wesnoth would fit the best. I am fairly pleased with the results but I believe it could have look a lot better. But since this feature took so long to add in I believe I probably will be sticking with it for a while.

I have added in some battling features also. The cleric/medic can heal colleagues, but a “burst” effect occurs which can also heal opposing teams. Also for example, if my cleric heal points were 10 and the member I am trying to heal was 5 tiles away, that member of the team will only get healed for 5 points. The formula basically is Heal Points – Distance.

Now onto some bug fixes. There was a serious bug which occurred when a player attacked and killed of an enemy. That player’s whole team would no longer be able to attack for that round nor walk. After some lengthy searching I finally found the problem and fixed it. There was the, “Infamous Can Not Move” bug which I originally had no clue why it happened. It rarely happened so I sought out to ignore it. I soon realize that if your unit was in a location and if a new user logged in at that same spot it would consider that user a unit instead. There were also several runtime errors that I received while playing the game which no longer exit.

During the development period of version 1.2 I recreated the help guide as I felt it did not meet the standards of teaching a new comer. Yesterday, yet again I started from scratch and created a new guide which this time goes into better detail on how to start and play games. I have also created a window that is properly named the Unit Central. Here a player can view every unit’s stat and faction within the game, the purpose of this is so anew player can plan out their team without having to do it by joining a game. These two features can be viewed by click the options tab within the game.

A request several players have been asking me for a while is to be able to tell the difference between each team, something similar to how most online turn based strategy games do it. So I finally gave in and added a non filled colored oval in which a unit stands in. I have also added in a timer in which each round you have 100 seconds to commit your actions.

The last feature I added in was the music and sound effects. Many thanks goes out to Battle for Wesnoth as I used various sound effects for my game. I also added in a battling song which I personally believe fits in perfectly with the game. The song is named Moments In Love and was created by Art of Noise.

Now as I came closer to the deadline of this contest I realized there will be many features that I will not be able to implement. These are a couple of them that can possible be in version 1.3. Bigger maps, I want maps that players can roam on, the current map is 21x21, and I possibly do not mind getting as big as 41x41. I have also liked the idea of cooperative battles in which two players can team up, with different factions, to play against two other players. Someone once asked me if I was going to add in a campaign mode, the answer to that is perhaps. But that would be a separate game, also before I do this I would first like to come up with a breathtaking story line that the game will focus on.

Have any questions or suggestions; feel free to email them to [email protected]. Please include either the game’s name or BYOND within the title.