Conqueror - New Game Idea

[--Fusiox--]

Hello!

Currently I'm trying to make to make a turn-based/real-time strategy game called "Conqueror" (forgive me if the name is already used). Here is what I am trying to currently get done.

-Include a "strategy" screen where you move your full armies around a map with separated regions. Regions should have bonuses such as a structure-building function or what have you. When you meet an enemy army in the same region as one or more of your armies the game goes into "tactical" mode.
-Include a turn-based "tactical" screen where you move battalions of fantasy units (swordsmen, archers, mages, trebuchets, giants, etc...) around a playing grid. Once one of your battalions is beside an enemy battalion and either you or they choose to attack the game goes into "battle" mode.
-Include a "battle" screen where you control a captain of a battalion and direct your units to wage war and line up in formations whilst fighting yourself as the captain, all in real-time.

If any of you are interested in helping me with graphics, code, design and balance, etc. feel free to post a reply on the forum or pm me. I would like to begin really kicking off this game without screaming at my screen tearing out my hair because the code does not work. (In short help would be greatly appreciated)

Best of luck,
Fusiox

[bluemagica]

What are the views of the 3 modes? top-down, side-view, isometric,....??
What part will you be contributing to exactly? coding? graphics? sound?
Whats your working environment, flash version? and whats your experience?
Also the most important thing, what's in it for the future team-members?

[--Fusiox--]

1: The view for "strategy" mode will be top-down, like a map. The view for "tactical" mode will be top-down as well, like a grid or array. The view for "battle" mode will be side-scrolling, but not like super-mario platform jumping kind of thing - the game will goes left to right or vice-versa (left if you attack, right if you are attacked), with the up/down arrow keys moving the player character up or down ON THE GROUND, not in the air. I feel that I should only have spacebar do an attacking animation or mouse to aim a bow or siege weapon, but if I add heroes with special attacks or something like that, I will implement those as I can.

2: I will be currently working mostly on coding and design - the graphics will be stick people with weapons for now.

3: Flash CS4 is my working environment currently, although I may switch to Java once I am experienced enough with the language. As a programmer, I have not too much experience, but have gone past the point where I can make basic games like Pong and Memory Cards with power-ups and special effects in less than a day without many errors (more like one or two hours without more that 10 errors).

4. I currently don't really need a "team" to get the game off the ground, just help - however if you want to be part of a team I can so far guarantee that I will give full credit to the members in the finished game, as well as suggesting them to other developers for their skills. For payment, I really don't know how I could pay with cash, but I may not even get money. We'll see. This game will be complicated and will probably take a little while.

Fusiox

[bluemagica]

What is your flash version? Cause I need to know whether you will be coding in as2 or as3!

From what I understand so far, this isn't much complicated at all, assuming you plan to keep this single player! And depending on your dedication, the entire thing can be done within a month!

[--Fusiox--]

Whilst AS3 is a failure in some ways (easy things done in AS2 take forever to do in AS3, like assigning variable names (private static const dirx:uint = 40; in AS3, dirx = 40; in AS2)), AS3 is still more powerful, so I will use AS3, even though I am slightly more comfortable in AS2... but only slightly.

This is why I take it as complicated:
-In the "strategy" screen, there will be resources created by buildings that generate resources, maybe farms, so long as you have conquered the territory (won a battle on it, used a power to gain it, moved an army there when it was unoccupied or unguarded). There will be other buildings as well: a barracks that creates units which you assign to one of four different armies, a blacksmith which can make resources, and a wall which generates a wall in the player's side of the "tactical" map if the region is battled over, for starters. Finally, I plan to add bonuses for territories conquered by the player, such as a 20% resource bonus if you capture a fertile farmland region, a -10% upgrade discount if you capture a mining region, a -15% unit discount if you capture a city region. I will probably add more as development progresses.

-In the "tactical" screen, I need to create an onMouseUp function which will select the battalions of the armies which will be marked by a large version of the unit type, preferably only one tile should be able to be used a time. Maybe I should use a boolean which becomes true when the unit is clicked allowing it to be used, and becomes false when the unit is reclicked or its actions are depleted for the turn. There should be a "move" value making it move only one or two tiles per turn before it is cannot move anymore, an "attack" function making the unit attack adjacent enemies and go into the "battle" screen, and an "undo" function, returning the unit to its previous location and resetting its move values. Upgrades should affect the look of the units in the "tactical" screen.

-In the "battle" screen, you only control the captain, which takes out the whole "select a player" function. Upgrades should affect the look of the units in the "tactical" screen and the "battle" screen. There needs to be the whole attacking thing, maybe using spacebar or mouse as I mentioned earlier. As well, I would like to implement "formations": defensive formation making your units form a wall and attack only when enemy units are close, battle formation making your units attack only when the units are a medium distance away and doing actions like shielding when applicable, and an aggressive formation where your units charge only regardless if they're being attacked to get to the enemy as quickly as possible so they can attack.
The captain will just be a clone of the units in his battalion with a flag or star above his head marking him for the player, and maybe having cooler-looking armor; he will have more health and attack power than his soldiers, and can do whatever he wants to even if his soldiers are charging or defending. If he dies the battle will go on as normal until one battalion is defeated, although the player can only watch. Once the battle is over and the game returns to the "tactical" screen the defeated battalion is destroyed and the victorious battalion stays, returned to full strength, omitting the whole battalion health thing.

There is so much more, but I will post that here later or on a blog or something. Yes, I know some HTML and XML, but of course I need a server to make my blog, or maybe use wetpaint or something like that.

As well, the units need to actually be usable when they are assigned to an army. Units in the "tactical" screen should not be able to occupy a space where another enemy or allied unit is occupying. Really, it shouldn't be too hard, but I think it will take longer than I expect it to.

Then there's AI. It shouldn't be too hard, I just use the same functions the player can and make the computer use them as well. Along with extra functions like formations and such.

I will be really dedicated, working on it every second day for one or more hours. But my dedication may be greater than my actual skill

I will make this single-player for now. I will only make it multiplayer when I am done the whole thing, and if I feel it deserves my work.

I will soon come up with a single "skirmish" alpha game, allowing a player to play a single battle with an enemy using an even amount of unit battalions. I will implement the "strategy" screen later, along with all its quirks.

Sorry for such a wackload of info,
Fusiox

[bluemagica]

errm, const dirx isn't a variable, it's a constant, and considering your As3-vs-As2 example, as3 just gives more control, otherwise you could have just written:-
As3- var dirx = 40;
As2- dirx = 40;

Now onwards to the game, since there is no actual pathfinding in the battle view, unit formations can be done with a simple predefined placement array! So that isn't a big deal!
About resources, those can simply be kept track in a global array....again, that is really easy!


So far, that game isn't complex at all, so I hope we will be able to see some good progress on this soon!
But keep in mind, making the game too complex for the user will affect the playerbase....people mainly play flash games for quick fun, most don't have enough patience to load a game that takes more than 2min to load, and/or go through the tutorials to learn the gameplay!

[--Fusiox--]

errm, const dirx isn't a variable, it's a constant, and considering your As3-vs-As2 example, as3 just gives more control, otherwise you could have just written:-
As3- var dirx = 40;
As2- dirx = 40;

LOL, I was just going a bit overboard... See what I told you about me being more comfortable in AS2?...

Since the units do move as per orders in the battle screen, unlike some strategy games where you just watch the units duke it out on a preset movie and they always do a fixed amount of damage, this means that some battles can be won simply by good unit control instead of building your army on steroids (equipping them with as many upgrades as possible). There will be a wildcard key (I chose shift because it is close to the arrow keys and WASD at the same time) that will be usable if the game detects that something is "interactive", this will most likely be a boolean. This way you and your men can climb up a wall if you are near one on the opposite edge, raise and lower drawbridges, fire siege machines like catapults and ballistas, set siege ladders, use battering rams, blah blah blah, instead of hardcoding every single action your units can perform.

As well, do you know how to change the way your graphic is facing so that the unit is facing in the direction it is running? I never really learned to do so since my other game was top-down (I never finished it, got bored).

Finally, if you want something to fire rapidly without resetting or want to, say, make the arrow stay where it lands while you fire other arrows, you use an addchild instead of "hiding" the projectile offscreen, am I right? It's been a while since I last used Flash, trying to learn Java and C++ and all.

Thanks a lot,
Fusiox

(P.S. The wildcard command is there so that the game is more deep without too many things to learn. The tutorial will be as quick as possible, basically going through a quick 4-battalion battle or something that can be done in 3 minutes or less while dynamically loaded text tells them what to do as they play.)

[bluemagica]

umm, simple scaleX will work when working in sideview, or use the .rotation property in top-down to face where you are going!

As for resetting and stuff, nothing will get removed or "reset" unless you tell it to! If you consider the displaylist a queue, addChild simply pushes objects in it, and unless you manually pop them, they will stay there and eat memory and/or cpu! It's best to not trust adobes garbage collection system, and clear things out manually!

[--Fusiox--]

I just realized, I'm blowing this game's complexity out of proportion.

For your scaleX thing, I also want to make it smaller the farther up it is, and larger the farther down it is. You know, proportion. Maybe I should just do a simple "size--" variable loop or whatever seems to work. If you have a good idea, let me know.

I forgot almost completely about ._rotation! Thank you, I remember now from my previous game! I'll just do something like:

"if (isUnit == true) and (*.dir == "northeast"){
  unit._rotation += 90;
} // end rotate

isUnit being a boolean telling the computer whether or not the clip is a unit and "northeast" being a case switch (or whatever it's called, maybe I'll just use a bunch of "} else if" statements for now) telling the computer what to do if the unit becomes "northeast". Yes it is horribly written, but I had to do this off the top of my head in a half minute. Like I said, you probably have better solutions, let me know if you can reveal them.

Finally, maybe I should add a timer function for deleting unused projectiles. If there is a barrage or something I want it to look realistic and have the arrows stay for a while, half a minute perhaps? Then they just delete themselves and disappear. The user would probably get bored watching the arrows disappear anyways.

Fusiox

[bluemagica]

umm, I don't think *.dir will work here.... also from the looks of it, you aren't actually thinking with the OOP approach of as3. And I am also kindof starting to get lost in your idea flow now....maybe some concept sketches, or doodles of the gameplay will help me get a better idea!

there is no such thing like size--, you have to use a a combination of scaleX and scaleY.....for example, assume the distance from "near" to "far" is 100, then while travelling:-
for each(var un in unitArr)
{
un.scaleX /= (farX - un.x)/1000;
un.scaleY /= (farY - un.y)/1000;
}


*don't try using the above, it's only to give an idea!


As for the arrow/projectile thingy, look into bitmapData and copyPixel before thinking of keeping multiple objects on screen! Basically learn about particle systems! And normally you won't use timer, rather, a number of object limit (say 500 arrows at a time, when 501th arrow is fired, the 1st arrow will be removed), and out-of-view removal!

[ImprisonedPride]

The user would probably get bored watching the arrows disappear anyways.

Fusiox

Take a look. I've rarely gotten tired of seeing thousands of arrows flying. Might use that as some inspiration too.