(unnamed) Rogue Battle Chess (Android ONLY)

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

Built for Android 2.1 - so should work on most phones

Download current alpha:

Background info / about links:

What is it?

  • Spare time game I’m writing at weekends, typically 2-4 hours at a time
  • Every day I work on it, even if just for a few hours, I’ll make a new build and upload it
  • I’m actively prototyping the core game-design - it’s interesting to see how many builds it will take before it becomes a “real” game, and how much I change my mind before I even get that far :slight_smile:

Also … for the programmers …

  • It’s using the public domain Entity System at http://entity-systems.wikidot.com/rdbms-beta with a few tweaks and improvements - anything I add I commit back onto the trunk, or I’ll fork and add a new page to the wiki.

NB: the Entity Systems Wiki is intended to document the simplest possible ES’s upwards - the ES used in this game is appallingly low performance, but amazingly even on phones it’s good enough to do simple games. There are much better ES implementations out there, the wiki implementations are designed for other people to learn from, not really to be used in live games. I’m using this game as a testbed to add small increments to the wiki, so that other java coders can understand how an ES might - sensibly - evolve from a simple version upwards.

i.e. … no, I really don’t recommend you do this. Unless you want to understand how ES’s work, in which case, go for it. And then, once you grok it … grab someone else’s bigger, richer ES and use that - don’t re-invent the wheel!

#2

Why the entity system? I had no idea what was going on, but it ran. Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

#3

That’s what I thought :wink: But it did run, at least (30fps) (Galaxy 2 S, 2.3.4)

Cas :slight_smile:

#4

What you see at the moment is approx 10-15 hours of design + art + development + refactoring + iteration.

Without the ES, that would have taken me 20-30 hours.

It’s all about making sure I can get a game running very very early - and that I can change the design rapidly.

At the moment, it’s not much of a game: you move around, you kill enemies, and pick up green/red potions to recharge your health.

When all the enemies are dead, there’s nothing to do but hit the back-button and start again.

Or … if you die before the enemies are all killed, it’ll dump you back to the level-select.

#5

Thanks guys - really helpful!

PS: no need to post FPS and model - if you have internet access, each time you finish a level, it’ll send a small ping to Flurry with the average FPS.

#6

Helpful to know if it runs at all though eh? :slight_smile:

Hm so if that took you 10-20 hours using ES but you think it’d take you 30-40 hours with ordinary paradigm-free programming… well, something’s up there. Using my long-trained eye for designs of this nature it looks like about 10-20 hours or so to get what you’ve got there working using my usual ways… so what gives?

Cas :slight_smile:

#7

Indeed :).

Yes. It’s a personal problem :). It only really comes up on solo projects, but it’s crippling.

I’m extremely fast at fixing broken code, and very good at finding clever, short, fast solutions to difficult problems.
I’m good at design, but I typically have to try something three different ways, throw them away quickly, and then settle on a fourth way that’s great.

If it takes more than “minutes” to re-write my game, then I lose the thread of the design I was doing, and it takes me hours to get back on track. I can’t do design if every design decision takes hours or days to try-out; I need to be trying multiple things in a single day.

With an ES, no design-change takes more than “minutes” to implement and test in the game. Scripting languages used to help me a little - but a lot of the design changes I make require small changes to low-level systems - e.g. the renderer.

(for instance: changing the visual style. Makes a huge difference to the feel of the game, but it always ends up needing at least one change to your rendering)