Ideas

[veu]

So the theme is Reversed and we're trying to make a strategy game. I guess there are a couple of ways to interpret that like reversed gameplay mechanics, reversed roles, or reversed presentation.

I'm gravitating towards taking an existing game and giving the player a different role while letting an AI take the part of the usual player but it's not like that hasn't been done before (e.g. tower defense vs. tower offense).

Any ideas?

[veu]

Okay, here's a decent idea for a strategy game that involves a reverse game mechanic, is simple enough to get done in time but has enough room to make it fun if the first version sucks.

There's a castle (pictured) that you have to storm with some guards. Your people start at the bottom trying to reach the top. You have two types of units: climbers and fighters. Fighters have to follow the yellow path while climbers are horrible fighters but can take shortcuts by climbing the walls. Your only two interactions are to revert the roles of the units turning fighters into climbers and vice versa and to rewind time to figure out the right timing for the reversions. There's a couple of things you have to keep in mind like climbers changing to fighters while climbing will fall down.

There's a ton of open questions but it's getting late so I'll leave that for tomorrow.

[veu]

I've pushed a new branch called castle. It currently only contains event handling but I'll add an isometric engine prototype shortly

[veu]

Leaving this here to maybe improve graphics at the end. http://www.transparenttextures.com/

[veu]

Status update because I don't have anything to push yet: the isometric view is complicating things a lot more than I thought. With the original setup I wouldn't have needed a truly 3D map because walls and paths would have just been different backgrounds for 2D tiles. Now I have to model each cube with 3 sides and do pathfinding in 3D.

I still hope to have a basic prototype to show later today though It'll likely be just a single unit, a fixed level, and path finding.

[veu]

I pushed the first version that renders something. No idea what's up with blocks on the far edges looking different. :/

[PeterSenkel]

cool stuff. looks nice. i will review the code later on if i have time.

no new ideas from my talks with people but i like your thoughts even tough i can imagine that the swapping roles thing may behave weird in the gameplay.

[veu]

You can now edit the map a bit. Keep in mind that in the blocks aren't supposed to have empty spaces behind them and it will look weird if they do. Example:

Next up: ramps and then hopefully pathfinding and a dummy unit to test it.

[veu]

I'm scrapping diagonal movement for now to keep the pathfinding simple.

[veu]

Pathfinding is integrated and you can switch between play mode (just movement for now) and edit mode.

I really want to post public screenshots but I want to fix that graphics glitch first. -.-

[veu]

Closing in favor of individual issues.