ID:53724
 
Keywords: efencea, news
Work on Efencea is coming along, despite being slowed by my return to college. The primary focus of my work has been the addition of AI and the development of concepts/new features. We've decided to split single player up into several different game modes. These will include a campaign mode, skirmish mode, and survival mode.

Campaign mode will be what you expect from most strategy games; A simple storyline with lots of maps/battles mixed in. The campaign mode will allow us to give a little bit of storyline to our aliens and robots and will hopefully give bored people something to do. Consideration has been put towards building a new 'rankings' table to display players who have completed the campaigns and on what difficulty. The campaigns, their stories, maps, everything but simplistic AI, are unstarted at this point. This mode may be left out in the -next- update.

Skirmish mode is exactly what the game is now, just with an AI opponent. I'm unsure as to whether I'm going to have single player skirmishes count towards rankings yet, however. Besides that this mode is mostly set up.

Survival mode spawned from an interesting infinite loop accident I had. The AI would send a wave every second which resulted in some -very- short games.

(It was fun watching a never-ending hoard swamp the map)

Anyway, survival won't be as difficult as 1 wave/second like the AI in the incident I had. It'll be a slower scale towards impossible difficulty. I may keep a list of top times rankings up on the website for this mode. As far as development is concerned, This mode is largely unfinished as well but shouldn't take long to set up. Setting up rankings for it would be the most time intensive portion of the work.

Another new feature is the introduction of special powers. These will be neat attacks to help you out. From raining meteors to setting off large explosives to unit based enhancements. Faction powers are a relatively new concept for Efencea and we're still expanding on the idea. If you have a really neat idea feel free to comment.

AI is coming along. Relatively slower than what has come before it, though. I have a habit of testing the AI each time I make changes, even if they're simple ones. I managed to save myself some time by making an AI datum that acts like a /client and just giving it a /mob/player variable--the alternative, gutting the current system to add support for mobless/clientless players, didn't appeal to me. The AI currently makes somewhat smart decisions as to what towers to place and where to place them. Lots of work.

I believe that's all. Oh, Tayoko painted a beautiful title screen depicting a fight between two bosses.
(It's set as my desktop background, but I may be a little biased)


On a side note. Did the player stats link go away? I liked it quite a bit.


Line and Character Count of Source Files
Total Lines 4397
Total Characters 123443
Ranked Players 69
Games Played (v.825) 430
#1 Player Ganing
(I think Ganing is a bit addicted)
Woot, very exciting. This is probably one of the biggest updates since the release of the game.

Ganing is beyond addicted, I've gotten way too many pages from him recently. And these times they weren't his way of getting some porn, either.
Just a question to put out there but is there going to be a version in the future where it is Player Vs AI? Efencea going Single Player?
Troy1121 wrote:
Just a question to put out there but is there going to be a version in the future where it is Player Vs AI? Efencea going Single Player?

Either you're really dim or you didn't read the post.
Vermolius wrote:
Troy1121 wrote:
Just a question to put out there but is there going to be a version in the future where it is Player Vs AI? Efencea going Single Player?

Either you're really dim or you didn't read the post.

My bad. As soon as I saw the post I got to hype with questions not reading "Campaign Mode". Please disregard my post.

Jeff8500 wrote:
Ganing is beyond addicted, I've gotten way too many pages from him recently. And these times they weren't his way of getting some porn, either.

LOL