Balanced Energy

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

For the past couple days, I decided to re-code my high school computer science final. Its a real time strategy game about controlling the map. The rules:
-two or more teams
-each team starts out with equal number of players
-when a player dies, that player is sent to the team that killed him/her
-always a set amount of players. For instance, if there are 100 players at start, there will be 100 at the end. No one dies, they just switch teams.

Download the launcher, then click the update button in the launcher to download the game! Make sure the launcher and game files are in the same directory before running, though.
http://goo.gl/FDKQ6S
Note: See huge post made on 10/8/13 for latest changelog and other info!

Four Classes

-miners to gather resources and build
-scouts to look ahead for the enemy
-warriors for the heavy duty fighting
-engineers for designing new weapons and repairing structures/players

To Win

-capture a majority of the bases and kill all enemies
-have at least some research completed
-other things I’ll think of later!

Right now I have the basics set up, like the entity class, lighting and the camera. Lighting is affected by tiles such as stone, and will become darker faster. I have basic path finding setup and teams.

What I need to do

-all the AI
-win game situations
-terrain gen(Done)
-gui(25% done)
-(Maybe) multiplayer, it would be my first attempt(going to use Kryonet)
-saving and loading
-different types of levels(50% done)
-switch to spritesheets
-better fonts

Some screens:

Some placeholder graphics(the red and blue things are the placeholders for my entities. I want to keep the textures basic as I love that art style for games):

Very alpha main menu:

Lighting in the day:

Lighting in the dark:

Its a very alpha version of the game, but keep in mind this is the result of around 6 hours of coding. I just wanted to put it up here so I could get some feedback on my ideas! Plus, its fuel to keep coding when people talk about you :slight_smile:

If anyone wants, I’ll upload the “game” and create an instruction manual because the key mappings are crazy. But, I am realistic, and I doubt many people would download it right now!

Other Notes

-game runs very smooth even on poor setups
-using LibGDX
-plan on coding this to the end!

#2

Cool i’m working on an rts as well. Id love to see your pre alpha :slight_smile:

#3

Ooh, could you show me some screens? :slight_smile: I like looking at other games!

#4

Haha there is not much to see yet. Working hard on implementing pathfinding and networking code

#5

LoL, I really love your menu XD

[quote]-when a player dies, that player is sent to the team that killed him/her
-always a set amount of players. For instance, if there are 100 players at start, there will be 100 at the end. No one dies, they just switch teams.
[/quote]
I don’t understand this idea (I think), but I will see how it turns out, seems interesting. (Especially because I love to play some RTS against my friends)

#6

Oh that beast? Yeah I threw it together in about 30 minutes, pretty prou of myself xD not!
Basically you control a team. The team is made up of players that you control. If an enemy kills one of your players, your player that died is sent to the enemies team so that there are alwy a set amount of players. I find its very interesting because it makes you have to be very involved with the game and actually have a strategy to win or else you’ll just be crushed by teams that are way bigger than yours!

#7

Aha, that’s more clear, cool idea, but Im curious how it will turn out in ‘real gameplay’ :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyways, keep your code clean and have fun developing :stuck_out_tongue:

#8

Oh, I tested the idea out before with a prototype in Java2D, it worked awesome actually :)! But thank you!

#9

You should change your first image to gameplay, it looks like just a black screen in the ‘latest in showcase\WIP’ section.

#10

Ah, thank you very much! Images now swapped for the sake of gaining popularity :slight_smile:

#11

This sounds like an interesting idea thus far, best of luck to you!

Also: are you using an algorithm to determine the spaces around the light to get that shape? Or are you just manually setting them up like that?

#12

Ah yes, my lighting. Its very basic actually, I’ll try to explain it in the best way possible. So, I have a tile. I decrease the lightvalue of that tile by a set amount, then check up down left and right of that tile and change the lightvalue of those tiles also in the same way as the first one. There are a few checks to make sure the lightvalue doesn’t exceed the range of the RGBA scale (0 - 255), and honestly that’s about it. Hope that helped! Also, thanks for your feedback!

#13

So, I’ve been working on the game a little. Nothing too major as I’m currently in the process of moving!
-redid render system so it’s now even faster than before!
-sprite sorting so there are fewer texture binds
-rewrote tile system to make it lightweight and to start preparing to accept custom tiles specified in external files
-rewrote level class so I can make it easier to create wacky levels
-general rewrite of everything/cleaning code up/making everything more OO.

I plan on tackling file loading and saving and the GUI plus a launcher for the game next!

#14

This looks nice, keep up the work :slight_smile: will the game be bound to the “grid” or will the players move free?

#15

The players will move freely :slight_smile: (in fact, they already do!) Oh and thanks for the encouraging words!

#16

I like the idea of the game :slight_smile: so the players are npcs? do they choose their class randomly or what? (Cause they don’t get created, they are just there no?)

#17

This could be a lot of fun like there’s 4 teams (different colors) and like 128 players on a server so that each player controlls just one character :smiley: with the same die -> change team system, that would be nice too though

#18

Oh, that’s a cool idea! Right now I just assign one human player to a team which consists of a few or more little NPCs. But I might consider adding in your idea, that sounds fun!

Right now I take the total amount of players, divide them by the number of human players/AI players into teams and then divide the teams into 4 and assign a class to each NPC so that I should have an equal amount of classes on each team. I’m also planning on adding random monster that smash through the map and kill everything, it may force teams to work together for a few minutes. And it could also leave teams vulnerable, and you could backstab them while they save you!

I know I already answered your question, but I’m having fun talking about it :slight_smile: I think the game idea is awesome if you actually see it in action. Because players never die and just switch teams, you have to carefully balance your team between defending and attacking because if you lose too many players, you’re pretty much done for. I find the concept absolutely fascinating!

#19

Yeah, i like that idea :smiley: also, when miners gather resources and build houses and stuff, what are these houses for? Just for changing the stats of your warriors weapons?

#20

Oh, no they’ll build walls/bases. I’m going to let the player build wherever they want, so you can create your own structures. These blocks will behave health so after they are damaged a lot, you’ll need to repair them or they’ll break down and won’t be usable anymore. Engineers will be able to research new weapons, stuff for defense and probably some other things. But they’ll only be able to research when they are close to a specific tile type called something like research tile or lab or whatever I decide to go with!