Efencea's site

Codename CQ

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:54:22 +0000

Our latest project, has grown from an abstract document with a codename, into a design document with direction. The game-to-be will be known as Scorn Earth.

Scorn Earth is to be the next member of our Efencea themed games--hopefully we won't overstep our bounds as with ERPGA. The game is set on Earth after a war, an apocalypse, some more war, and then a brief period of 'peace'--which ends with the advent of this game.

I previously summarized the game as, "a Civilization-esque game, but with a large focus on units, or groups of people, their use, and growth." In more detail, we will be creating a game in which tribes/fledgling cultures clash in an isometric world. Our design documents typically have both a set of keywords that define the idea behind the game and then a more detailed concept.

The short version: Post Ancient Apocalyptic Turn-Based Strategy Efencea Tribes [chess-like :D]

The long version:

Concept: Players will build an empire from a starting tribe. The game will be largely unit-centric. Units are all just individuals or groups of individuals. Giving a unit weapons will make them a military unit. Giving that same unit pickaxes would make them miners. Traits will further allow classifications to be formed. The previously mentioned miners might earn themselves the 'Of the Earth' trait, giving them a bonus to their health. Similarly, if a player has a talented merchant that merchant might earn a revenue boosting trait. There will be three elements of management, economic, military, and social. The game will be played either singleplayer or multiplayer with multiple victory conditions.

(Three Elements of Management)

Each element may be divided further as shown:

(Element Subportions)

As far as the elements go, we intend to allow multiple avenues to players as to how they want to play. If you focus on your economy, there should be some way for you to deal with your enemy's super army.

(Many Paths to Victory)

Say, you have tons of resources but have failed to build a sufficient army for an impending attack. You will be able to hire other players to help defend your territory. This will be dealt with in the form of quests.

That's all for now. Our design document has more detail than given here, but we're still fleshing out the details.

ERPGA Dies and Other Projects

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:49:48 +0000

Beware ye the wall of text.

Some may be aware that Tayoko and I are up and about once again. Some of those who do may be excited for us to make a new project. Some may just want us to go back and finish Efencea (Tower Defense). Yes, we have to distinguish it. Our latest project just flopped. We were working no Efencea Role Playing Game Arena. The Arena bit was due to the fact that we've gone through three separate design documents for ERPG, each drastically different. So, we decided we would just pull our combat system and build a game around it for a simple project--ERPG Arena. Possibly revisiting it a bit later, after we finished it, and fleshing it out into an entire game. Even the simplified version was going to be a ton of work, at least for Tayoko.

Our first step in developing was to discuss at length what we wanted in the combat system. Then, after we had spent a good long while coming up with what we felt to be a somewhat unique and enjoyable set of stats and combat gameplay, I spent a night coming up with questions that would serve to set into stone the system. The second step was answering all of those questions, which took a few days. At this time, we came up with the base-most elements we would need to prototype the system. A set of simple placeholder graphics, and a working prototype (in code; including stats, enemies, skills*, simultaneous turns, losing, winning, etc.).

Part of the prototyping was to flesh out all the animations we'd need, and how large the player sprite would need to be. Tayoko intended to digitally paint the combat graphics, rather than pixel them. It was interesting, our player sprite encompassed a 512 x 416 space, or 212,992 pixels. Seeing how Tayoko estimates that he can pixel 10 32x32 frames in an hour or 10,240 pixels per hour, that would mean a single frame for the player sprite would take him almost 21 hours to finish. Digital painting and then applying pixel touch-up would take far less time. Even still, our design called for twenty five frames for the sprite, and 25 frames for all overlays. A ton of work. I cut this down to 5 frames via use of the IconProcs library by generating some of the repetitive states (Dodging, Entrances, and Death).

Anyway, to the point, 512 x 416 was far too large. We didn't care about the size of the .rsc, we knew it would get huge from all the oversized images. Even Dream Maker began to not compile in an instant as it always had for me. I noticed there was a problem when loading up the prototype equipment took several moments. The CPU spiked to 50% momentarily and the memory usage jumped from about 15,000K to 274,776K. My jaw dropped and I was sad, haha. Needless to say, this multiplayer game would not run well multiplayer. I'm not even certain it would run well single player. I'm just confused how a 500KB resource becomes 275MB in memory. Perhaps it's a BYOND issue.

Feel free to try out the prototype: Prototype.zip

We had plans to make the equipment highly customizable, at least in an aesthetic sense. The combat in the prototype isn't finished either, It most definitely wasn't going to be BYOND input popups--you won't see them unless you try multiplayer, but they're there.

So, what now? We've been tossing new ideas around. We've had quite a few too, which is part of the problem. We can't settle on anything. The other half of the problem is that all of our ideas quickly become extremely complicated and too large to develop in any decent amount of time. I blame this in part on Tayoko, he has this overbearing urge to introduce new and exciting aspects to the gameplay--something I call the Tayoko Spin.

Some of our recent ideas are below:

Code Name: CQ
Tayoko wrote up a beautiful abstract design document detailing the rise and growth of societies. It focused on the harmony needed between government (military), Economy (resources), and Society (influence).

"The primary goal of an empire is to expand power. The fundament of power in an empire could be broken down into three elements. These elements of power include economic wealth and control of resources, government dominance and enforcement of rule and regulation, and the structure of society and its functions. Each relies on the rest; all co-existing in harmony."

This would more than likely turn into a Civilization-esque game, but with a large focus on units, or groups of people, their use, and growth.

Code Name: Action Avatar Town Defense
I had a moment of inspiration that begat this project. Here is my synopsis:

"Players are gods who give their blessing to a fledgling village on the outskirts of the territory of man. However, a god must not exert themselves in the realm of man, lest they expend their immortality, and thereby must choose an avatar to carry out the majority of their benison. Upon the exaltation of their chosen avatar, a god may bestow hallowed gifts, be they raw power or manifested holy objects. Even still, evil is afoot and has no love for man and their gods..."

Players would start the game viewing a tiny village, or possibly the construction of a town hall. The town would have a random assortment of AI villagers that ran around carrying out mundane tasks, fetching food, running errands, building, cooking, cleaning, and everything else that is involved in running a town. The players, being gods, are the protectors of the town, and choose an avatar. The avatar would be any villager the player wanted. So, I might choose a miner bless his pick-axe with all my available godly power and then play as him in the defense of the town with his uber blessed pickaxe. Random events would determine the fate of the village and the game would run until the village was destroyed. One game the village might have a slime problem, slimes keep pouring out of the sewer and must be fought back to whence they came. Another might see the town grow to a decent size only to be wrecked by a ferocious dragon. I had ideas as to the random construction of shops by NPCs with the required talents, caravans of goods coming and going from the town, among other things.

Code Name: DNA Man-Pets
This was a fun idea. We take the typical pet game, and flip it around such that you play a monster (an alien) that has a pet human. The concept was that aliens were secretly in control of the Roman colosseum and ran their human bloodsport. Players would be an alien that trained up a human via the use of genetic (magical realism in play here) alteration. The genetic alterations would explain the various myths of the time. Medusa would be a woman merged with snake DNA, for example.

Code Name: Blue Mage Taken Roguelike
We've wanted to do a roguelike for awhile now. This would be an Efencea themed game that involved one of our concepts, the Taken. You, the Taken, would seek out Efencea inside dungeons whilst learning the abilities of your enemies. This was the result of last night's discussion, so it doesn't have nearly as much detail as any of the others. We were toying with the notion of not including death or saving and some other things, which is where I called too much Tayoko Spin and quit discussing ideas for the night.

Phew, I got a little lazy on some of the idea descriptions, feel free to ask questions.

If you read all of that, excellent, you can easily consider yourself a fan! Thanks for your support, comments, and time.

This took a long time to write up!

Efencea progress

Mon, 18 May 2009 21:37:04 +0000

Finals are over now and I can get back to work on various projects. Efencea is among said projects and as such I will be spending time on updating it.

I just wanted to report on the progress since the planning post.

There is quite a bit of work remaining. However, I'm coming to a close on what I can do without the aid of the rest of the team.

What I can still work on:
The two glaring objectives are the Tutorial and the Pause function. However, I can very well work on anything that Tayoko hasn't made art for yet as well--he's got a lot left to work on.

What has been completed:
Both the cost and the ammunition system are there and really just need me to attempt an initial balance. AI has gotten some improvements as well. Then there were all those little smudges that I polished up.

I'll give a more in-depth overview of the development when this version is finished. Hopefully I can get Tayoko to quit burning out his talent on paid jobs to come back to work on Efencea. On that note, I hope I can run into Guyst_x sometime too, since we need more of his skills as well.

Just a little update.

(I haven't really been on recently, that's my excuse as to why the team hasn't been communicating as much as it should.)

Efencea: V1.3 plans.

Mon, 04 May 2009 02:33:07 +0000

After working hard on that last release, I took a little break. Upon my 'return' to working on Efencea I formulated what needs to go into the next version. Here is what I've come up with, in a short and sweet list.

[V1.3]

Tutorial
Pause
Unit Pixel Offsets
[BALANCE]
- Cost System
- Ammo System
- Lv3 Units
- New Maps
- Rebalance
[AI]
- Consider opponents towers
- Possibly path sides.
As aliens, in attack mode, the initial attack funds were 0 until you clicked the attack button. (Foomer)
The first time you clicked on the tower selection sections the default stats were all "99". (Foomer)
Add a Reboot Button/Command in single player and for hosts. (Foomer)
Remove "The SFX Volume: ## and Music Volume: ## messages" (Foomer)
Remove "Gah! I have nowhere to place a tower!" (Foomer)
Bombard Exploit - http://www.byond.com/members/Efencea/forum?id=8#8 (Foomer)
When the bombard towers left craters, they were on a higher layer than the unit shadows, so that the shadows go underneath the craters. (Foomer)
Lower relative volume on shrill robot deaths. (ACWraith)
Full length music that loops well. (Android Data)
Anchor all the GUI elements. (Ganing)

What you see there is what you get in the next release. Hopefully, enough recruits will prove helpful in coming up with a nice balance, especially so, what with new units and new gameplay mechanisms in place.

As of now none of this is implemented. A bunch of them are minor things that shouldn't take too long, including tower costs and ammunition, and most of the later items above. That and some items, Lv3 units, and full length music are for sound and art respectively.

Questions and comments are welcome as usual. If you've reported something and I missed it be sure to comment and let me know!

Efencea: Who wants to be a balance tester.

Sun, 03 May 2009 23:03:59 +0000

Since Efencea employs XML files for it's balancing, as of the latest couple releases. It is now within the power of those capable of editing XML to modify quite a few unit and tower stats.

I'm going to be designing a few new maps and would like some people to help with the next balance. If you've played the latest release you may have noticed that there is only one map available. This is due to the balance being modeled for Straight Forward. The issue I have is that I'm on dial-up and can't properly test the game with others. As such, I had to rely on the AI, which isn't finished, to help me determine unit stats.

That's where you come in. Those willing to help would get a copy of the game with new maps available and would need to play/host and tweak the XML until a balance across the new maps has been found. Of the balance testers only one would need to be able to host, since, I'd like it if a small group of people would volunteer and work together to get a reasonable balance worked out.

So, if you're interested in being among the first people to get to toy around on new maps, you know how to modify XML, and would like to help out with Efencea, leave a comment, I'll be in touch from there.

Promote Efencea and earn cash!

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:13:12 +0000

So apparently, BYOND has a referral feature allowing players to earn money if someone decides to stay after playing a game.

Efencea would be a great game to use as bait, since it's cool-looking, single/multi-player, and pretty darn fun.

For more information, visit the Efencea's referral page.
---
Tip:

Stick that thing in your blogs, websites, profiles, pages, HUBs, E-mails, wherever a possible player might see it. [:

You can also winch out the image the link uses and replace it with whatever you see fit. we have a Media Section with loads of pretty pictures.

Efencea V1.2 Released.

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:04:00 +0000

The long-awaited Efencea overhaul update is up and ready for download.

Click to Visit

Now go And Eat Up single player. :)
Any Suggestions, Bug reports, or Questions belong in the the Efencea Forum.

Thanks. Feedback always apprecitaed.

Unveiling the Efencea Blog

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 23:54:00 +0000

Welcome to the new home of all things pertaining to Efencea. Here you will find all Efencea news, project details, media files, position opportunities, and our new forum.

Likely, the first thing you'll notice is that we have a navigation bar to the left of the blog content. The Efencea blog is going to be used slightly differently than most BYOND blogs in that we will be keeping blogs that act similar to web pages. Using tags in a specific manner we have allowed visiters to peruse the blogs, that we'll keep updated.

Many thanks to T3h B4tman for his wondrous CSS job. Credit to Tayoko for the layout images.

Don't forget to join the site and favorite Efencea! ^_^

Efencea RPG

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:57:24 +0000

We wanted to start bringing in solid design tactics to BYOND RPG games. So we began to feed our curiosity about game design philosophy by reading game design articles and watching developer presentations. We learned about some of the "problems" role playing games face. The team began to take apart and examine each one of these issues and come up with our own solutions for them.

The game will be an online single-player role playing game. Players will play through their games while changing and molding the world around them for themselves and others. The idea of the game is to give the player choices, and present problems, or puzzles, to challenge those choices and develop the game. All these choices and problem solving equate to the player's 'story' then having multiple roles collide to form the RPG world. The game world would become the design and expression of the player base, as developers, our goal is simply to give the players the tools to create it.

Every aspect of the game will have some sort of change to them; Wi wont settle for Menu navigation and brainless clicking. This involves both mental and physical challenges throughout the game. For example, the combat system is a mixture of two types of challenges; it is another one of our "color theory" based game designs. Well post more on that when we draw closer to designing it.

The work required to complete this game is extensive, and we probably wont begin on the game until we are confident that our team's production strength can handle it.

Efencea Gameplay Media

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:45:13 +0000

Animation by Tayoko

Video by Guyst-X