Stickmen Wars

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#21

Details and polish, all the way. This game is very well done and a lot of fun.

+1 point if the game installs and uninstalls correctly
+1 point if the game doesn’t crash ever
+1 point if the game has “good” graphics that suit the game
+1 point if the game has “good” sound that suit the game
+1 point if the game’s overall style is “good”
+1 point if the game is original or brings a great new original twist
+1 point if your judge enjoyed playing the game
+1 point if you don’t whine and you demand nothing of the mods (simply saying “can you rate my game please” is fine)

8/10, featured!

I think you could easily get those other 2 points (presentation and completeness) just by continuing to work on this. I felt that the overall presentation was a little too stark, mostly I was thinking about the lack of a tutorial. The numbers above the units didn’t immediately make sense to me, nor did I understand what they corresponded to. If you just touch everything up a bit to make it easier to know what’s going on (when you first start playing), then I think that will help quite a bit. As for completeness, I feel this is missing a bit - I still feel some sort of hole in the gameplay, mainly having to do with the pace, I think. Guys were coming a little too slowly, and I didn’t really feel like I had any way to get a leg up on the computer until I finally cheated. And even though I took quite a bit of damage (as did the computer) our engineers quickly made that a non-issue because the time between waves that can actually reach the bases is pretty long.

#22

Also, as for a new unit type, I think a very expensive one that you can control would be very cool (like a superhero unit). Also, some sort of “blood harvester” would be neat - they collect blood off the ground and after they have a certain amount they perform a devastating attack. And maybe they heal from blood they pick up also.

I think either way having the ability to throw in a very expensive monster/hero unit who is head and shoulders above everyone else and just insanely powerful would be really fun. You’d really have someone to root for.

The new units you put in should not fit into the whole “rock paper scissors” thing that you have going already - they should be something totally different, like a mine layer as suggested, or a healer, or one of the guys I mentioned.

#23

Just tried it again on a windows machine and it worked fine.
Wow, this is really fantastic in concept and style, thumbs up!
Strange it failed on Ubuntu/OpenJDK tough.

#24

Thx for feature & comments! I did play with the wave timing and unit speeds quite a lot, and I settled on this speed as it gives the player a chance to actually watch the combat without constantly worrying about what the enemy will throw next: when I sped the game up I found myself just watching the AI airdrop zone in order to respond fast enough… I’m also a little worried about latency in multiplayer if the game’s too fast.

The two extra units; lots of great ideas coming in here! I like them all;

Minelayer - (whole map or just near enemies?)
Kamikaze - runs at enemy and BOOM!
Sniper - long range, high accuracy, slow reload.
Leech - heads for enemy sucking up blood. More blood==bigger boom when it gets there.
General - lurks behind frontline & boosts speed and accuracy of nearby units.
Medic - as general but heals nearby units.
Machine gunner - slow, weak, but obliterates swordsmen!
Bazooka - basically a line of sight mortar.

It’s gonna be tough choosing! My instincts are towards the last two as the most familiar, but a sniper would be really niiiice.
I’m a little short of spare time ATM but if I get a chance maybe I’ll do a version with all of the above available, then narrow it down from there.

@Mickelukas Thx for the weighting suggestions - I’ll try them out!

#25

Why add another unit? Simplicity is… worth a lot.

#26

Man, this really makes me want to make a simple game like this and just make tons of units.

#27

Excellent stuff! (And I finally managed to win without cheating!)

One tiny detail: the smoke in the background appears before the fighting starts. Maybe save it for later in the game?

There is something to that…

Simon

#28

yeah for the first play or two. But then after that it is kinda easy and boring. so if you have more units the gameplay becomes more in depth aka more fun. but becareful not ot make it TOO complex.

#29

I think this isn’t the case in multiplayer. Even with 1 unit it would be thrilling, because then suddenly the focus lies on timing, and predicting the other guy, which can be hard enough. It’s like playing checkers… 1 type of unit, lots of complexity.

#30

Pretty fun game! With more modes and less of a proto-type feel to it, it could be pretty awesome. It kind of reminds me of games I played on my calculator in high school, but much higher quality of course :smiley:

#31

A few quick tweaks: ‘S’ cheat now works, game is over when a base goes down (no more after-attacks :’() & a real classic: ‘Press ‘K’ to kill everyone’.
Archers now cost 1.5 & swordsmen have health 15, but I’ve not had a chance to test the effects yet.

#32

I Love the changes, I actually lost for the first time :slight_smile:

Won 6 out of 8 and it got a lot more fun, the swordsman can kill another couple of archers/mortars before dying but can still not stand a rifle group.

The archers are great for bombarding the base but if you only build archers you’ll end up dying due to swordsmen.

I still managed to “tankrush” twice by building 28 riflemen at once and then build 4 mortars and then build riflemen until the enemy base is destroyed, but that probably has more to do with the AI than with balancing.

#33

Oh, I’m lose. Oops. Didn’t read carefully enough - it didn’t look like a game over screen, and click to continue in the same in either case. I was assuming there was a level system and it would go back to the initial screen when I lost.

I can summon fencers now. Not sure why I couldn’t earlier. Is there a budget which you can exhaust?

#34

The buttons you’re pressing are cheats, not the actual game. If you’ll notice, Simon just said that the “S cheat not works,” he was referring to the fencer cheat.

#35

I can win by only building archers, at every drop off. :persecutioncomplex:

#36

Can also win just by building riflemen. AI should do a better job of countering with appropriate units.

#37

Fun!

Fool-proof way of winning seems to be:

  1. deploy nothing until the opponents first wave gets to your base, and let your base kill them.
  2. deploy archers (should be something like 30-40 by this time)
  3. for the rest of the game deploy soldiers to overtake your archers & act as a meat shield.

You should win in around 2 minutes.

Massed archers do seem to be almost unstoppable because the shower of arrows they create stops almost everything getting into range to attack - including their intended counter - the sword guy.
Perhaps their max range should be reduced a little, and their min range increased.

Mortars on the other hand seem decidedly ineffective - they’re extremely vulnerable yet their attack doesn’t seem to do much to turn the tide of battle.
Perhaps an increase to the blast radius of their attack would help.

#38

Yeah, mortars should have their explosion radius and rate of fire increased, and probably damage as well. Their intention I think is to kill giant swaths of riflemen, but they never really manage to do much before someone picks them off.

#39

I managed to win once (out of 20 or so tries) by only making swordsmen, I think it has more to do with the AI not countering correctly (he made mortars and archers) than balancing.

You can only build 20 archers at that time as credits are capped to 30 :slight_smile: (if you can make 30-40 please tell me how ;))

When only making archers I won 5 times out of 6 (the one time I didn’t the AI went nuts on swordsmen, went through my archers as a knife through butter

One thing that’d make the archers less all-round would be to have an optimal range for when they hit the best. If someone is really far away they hit it them 33% of the time. Once the enemy gets closer it increases to 50% but the closer someone gets after that the worse it gets, giving something like a 1% chance to hit swordsmen when they’re engaged in hand to hand combat.

#40

Oooooooh. Wow, the game takes ages just using the mouse. I gave up after half an hour because it was a total stalemate. Both of us had a couple of engineers sitting on our bases, so damage was repaired too quickly.

Mortars are actually quite good if you have some cannon fodder in front of them to draw enemy fire. I don’t think the blast radius needs to be improved; what would be nice is a) “leading” a target - that is, assuming that the swordsman running at them will move at constant speed rather than stand still while the shell is in flight; b) hold position if there are enemy units within blast range of their previous shot, assuming that the reload time is faster if they don’t move.