After a chaotic few months things are (sort of) back to normal so now I can crack on with Stickmen Wars 2.
I finally succumbed to the lure of hardware acceleration and used LWJGL.
Here’s an early screenshot;
I’ve also set up a Stickmen Wars 2 blog. I’ll keep you posted here on any major changes (especially player-testing - can’t wait!) but for now I’ll use the blog for the routine stuff.
As soon as I’ve got something playable I’ll let you know - hopefully it won’t be too long!
Oh, looks very nice. Can’t wait to try it.
Stickmen Wars was pretty enjoyable. Going to continue using AppEngine?
Nice render!
What will the gameplay be like? I truly liked Stickmen Wars1, which unfortunately suffered from hilarious network synchronisation issues. I especially liked the 1D gameplay for it’s simplicity yet allowing serious strategy.
Your Stickmen Wars 2 feasibility test was no doubt graphics wise a major improvement, but the controls were very hard, not to mention the camera viewpoint that was stubborn at times. It was a totally different game.
Maybe, if you haven’t made up your mind yet, it would be a nice idea to keep the 1D gameplay, as in units that have paths that they will always follow. There will be N (intersecting) paths that go from your base to the opponents base, and you get to pick the unit-type and the path they will follow. Something like that. I’d love it!
Anyway, maybe you’re already building a epic-scale free-roam RTS that totally steers clear of Stickmen Wars 1’s gameplay.
Keep us updated!
I agree with Riven. I thought Stickmen Wars 1 was a lot of fun but your feasibility test was mostly meh.
add rotation to the controls. I like to not only move my camera but rotate it.
There will be camera rotations! Probably Appengine too - the pre-built security features are sooo tempting.
I haven’t quite fixed on the gameplay yet, I like the ‘this unit, that path’ idea but it’s limiting in other ways. No rush, maybe I can do two versions, skirmish & campaign or something.
I really like the idea of something you can repeatedly come back to for a bit of micro-management, but I also like the idea of all-out war! Ooh, choices, choices…
Keep it small, keep it simple.
Once it works, build on it, and call it Stickmen Wars 3 
Agreed , Riven is right . Excellent game mate , but can anyone send me link of StickmenWars : 1?
try the forum search feature 
link
btw sw2 is looking super cool, also the sw2 blog is really nice and the regular updates interesting to read.
[quote=“kappa,post:9,topic:35902”]
Glad you like it! I’m hoping to get something playable up by the end of the month, but unfortunately I fell into the ‘flesh out the prototype’ trap so I’m having to do lots of horrible hacks and workarounds. If it all falls over then I’ll have to re-jig everything and that could take a while…
One of my many (well, 2) fans has asked for rivers of blood and I sort of agree. I don’t think I can actually make the blood run down and turn the waters red - not enough CPU - but I want to! How can I give a real sense that a bitter battle has been fought and blood has been spilled? Somehow the little fading corpses just aren’t enough…
That link is missing an “l” in html…
Oops! Fixed now, ta!
I think you can manage slowly dripping blood, couldn’t you? Every few timesteps simulate a few bits of blood, you need not do it all at once. In fact, if you did you it all in a totally linear and predictable fashion it would likely look bad.
You could also have a few different dripping animations and then just orient them in the direction of the initial slope of the hill. That might look fine.
Well, I’m already pushing the poly count pretty hard… I wonder if I could do something with multi-texturing and dynamic textures, a sort of battle overlay on the landscape with slowly expanding bloodstains. Um, it’d eat memory!
Yeah, if it’s a memory issue then that’s a different story. Putting all the corpses plus some bleed animations in the same atlas then is probably your best bet. Then choose random bleed animations so it doesn’t all look cookie cutter. Also, just having a lot of different corpses too will really help it as-is, because every corpse dies in exactly the same position it’s a bit boring.
[quote=“Eli Delventhal,post:16,topic:35902”]
That’s a good point! Not too hard to fix either -thanks!
180 day bump SMW2 has morphed into Heroes Keep.
I’m still exploring the new mechanic - any feedback welcome!
Glad you narrowed it down a bit to a small game again. I’ve been following your blog on Stickmen Wars and was wondering how you could possibly ever finish it. It would be great if you can fight the feature creep this time!
Buuuuump! Finally found some time to play with this, so I’ve cobbled together a prototype with jquery to try and get some sense of the gameplay. I’m also tired of making things that no-one can actually play!
http://www.hayles.demon.co.uk/heroeskeep/screenshots/ss1.jpg
The prototype is here and is, I know, bug-ridden. On the upside it should work in most browsers (not touchscreen cos you can’t flip cards by right-click) and it shouldn’t throw any alert boxes. Except IE<9s of course, which think the sound-player is evil and throw 1 or 2 ‘this script is slow’ alerts before finally getting going. FF or Chrome are recommended!
I’m a bit concerned that it might be a bit too involved with all the card-flipping, shuffling, point-counting and such, but I do like the way a hand can go from seeming totally useless to actually being ideal with a bit of juggling. As it is all spell cards are free (they use no manna) and there’s only one amulet so far (which you get by default) and only one unit, so it’s not as complex as it could be. So long as you can survive the first few moves and don’t forget to gather food then it’s quite easy to get to the capital if you shuffle all your spare cards to ‘block’ and keep out of the caves.
Anyway, let me know what you think of it so far - every game is different so if it crashes/is too mean then just refresh the page for an alternative start.