Jp's Site - GIAD 2009 entry

GIAD 2009 entry in Off Topic

ID:81935

Sep 13 2009, 5:29 pm

Here's my entry for the Game In A Day contest, 2009: Gears of War.

It's a turn-based tactics game - you have a bunch of robots, your foe (Either an AI or another human player) has a bunch of robots, and you would both rather like it if the other's robots all vanished.

I'm actually reasonably happy with the quality of the result, given the timeframe. The graphics are utterly awful, as you might expect from me, and the UI is a little clunky - but the gameplay is, I think, actually pretty good, and the AI manages to be semi-competent, in that it's actually trying to hurt you and not doing random stuff (Actually, my first cut at AI for it just had the AI moving 'bots randomly and then firing at any enemies in range...)

I might actually continue the game in the future - probably with some rewriting of code and better graphics, but the same game, at least.

#1 Sep 13 2009, 6:24 pm
DarkCampainger	Aha, beat the AI and only lost 2 Mercury's (Darn'd Lightnings!) Great game! The controls were a bit confusing at first for me, but they were surprisingly easy to learn. Also, it seems like you can't select another unit when they're covered by another's firing area overlay (not sure why you would want to shoot your own units anyways..)

#2 Sep 13 2009, 6:44 pm

DarkCampainger wrote:

Aha, beat the AI and only lost 2 Mercury's (Darn'd Lightnings!)

Great game! The controls were a bit confusing at first for me, but they were surprisingly easy to learn.

Thank you. :)

The weapon-select stage is the confusing part, I think. I'm not sure if there's any sane way to get rid of it and handle attacking well.

Movement would benefit from being instant, too, I suspect, because otherwise it's quite easy to overshoot with the faster 'bots - Mercuries and Katanas in particular.

Also, it seems like you can't select another unit when they're covered by another's firing area overlay (not sure why you would want to shoot your own units anyways..)

I'm pretty sure a movement area overlay blocks it, too - I think the click is going to the image, which is attached to the turf underneath, and thereby blocking clicking on your own unit. There's probably some way to fix it by using screen objects and setting mouse-opacity to 0 or something, but I'm not sure it's a terrible problem - you can always deselect the currently selected unit by pressing 'Escape', after all.

I can think of one situation in which firing upon your own unit might be desirable. Say you've blocked up a bottleneck completely with units, and would like to get another 'bot through so it can destroy something before the other player gets their turn - perhaps you've moved a bunch of Mercury 'bots through the bottleneck to shoot at a Chelobot, that is now on <10 armour, and you want to get your nearby Katana to hit it with its sword. If you can get something - a Lightning that's further back, for example - to destroy one of the blocking scout 'bots, your Katana can come through and kill the dreadnaught before it can shoot at you. But that's a very contrived situation.

I'm aware of one glitch, by the way - Say you select a bot, move it forward two spaces, and then deselect it. Then, move a bot onto the space the first bot started on. Then, select the first bot again, and reset movement - you'll end up with two bots on the same space. Probably deselection should set the point to reset to to wherever it was when you deselected...

#3 Sep 13 2009, 7:11 pm
D4RK3 54B3R	Looks like we have a winner. :P I'm pretty upset with my game at the moment. I submitted a version with untested AI (I had a quick fix for some stuff) and there are some huge bugs with it. :/

#4 Sep 13 2009, 8:35 pm

D4RK3 54B3R wrote:

Looks like we have a winner. :P

I certainly hope so. :P.

I'm pretty upset with my game at the moment.
I submitted a version with untested AI (I had a quick fix for some stuff) and there are some huge bugs with it. :/

I grabbed yours off the interwebs, and it looks pretty cool (Certainly significantly prettier than my chicken scratchings), but I can't seem to start a match against the AI - am I missing something, or when you say "AI" do you mean "unit AI" rather than a computer-controlled player?