I promised a review before. I did not start with it, oops. So let me catch up! What Came Before I was a bit surprised to find that the game was developed by Massive Damage, Inc.. They are the makers of Halcyon 6 - which gained some small hype 2017/2018. I bought the game and found it to be Okish. I played it a few hours and it seemed to lack focus. There were only a few updates, I’m not sure they “fixed” that. It could be a “me” problem. This however, is not a review of Halcyon. ...
Remnants of the Vanquished
Now, let me reveal the name of the Unnamed Game. This time, we will focus on some more technical aspects of the game. As a disclaimer: I use Bevy, which more or less enforces the use of an Entity Component System (ECS). ECS is kind of a hype (micro-services anyone?), of course it can be used for everything - but does it fit everything? Still, I am not yet turning my back on Bevy just yet, so I’ll have to make do. ...
Shogun Showdown Core Mechanics
As promised, in this post, we will take a look at the game Shogun Showdown. It is still in early access, but has very good review scores and a sizeable amount too. Its Steam page tells it’s “inspired by great games like Into the Breach, Darkest Dungeon, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Slay the Spire and so much more”. That is similar to the inspirations behind my own game. As my in-development game shares some of these traits, this game certainly is one I need to take a closer look. ...
The Yet to be Named Game - Continued
In the last post, I showed some of the goals I want to achieve with my game. Including some early screen shots. I decided to replace the AI generated ships with some procedural generated ships - lets have a look: While not exactly beautiful, and not even in the style I want the game to be - it’s a better placeholder. It should not agitate people as much, as AI generated art would. ...
The Yet to be Named Game
Previously we took a birds eye view on the topic of the game development process. Or, to be more precise, the model in my mind. I plan on refining and correcting it as I go and learn. Current State of My Game I can actually show a screenshot of my prototype: ![Image](prototype-screenshot.png", alt=“Not much to see yet) It contains a background I made and some ships an AI model created (for the prototype only, I will create or commission the real art). To the left are the player ships, to the right the enemy ships (I did not even bother to make the “look” toward the player ships). ...
Game Development: A Personal Journey
Today, let’s take a peek at game development in general. Similar to what I already did a while ago. A few months ago I picked it up again and to flesh out the design more and do some prototyping. It was nice and all, but I made the classical mistake of having a scope that would take years to implement. Depending on what you want to achieve, that could be okay - or not. In my case, I want to learn the whole process: ...
Comments - Take 3 - On Zola
A while ago I added comments for my Jekyll base blog. Since then, I switched to zola. Its basically a Rust based “clone” of the static site generator (SSG) Hugo. Compared to Jekyll, it is a lot faster, and I found it to be a lot simpler. However, Zola has its own set of challenges. For instance, changing themes is nearly impossible and theme extension can get messy. That is the story for a future post. At some point I might consider creating my own SSG. Building a small one should be easy enough (and due to GitHub’s Actions it could be used immediately). ...
4X Game Loop
I think I don’t really need to explain what a 4X game is, maybe not even what the 4X stand for. But, I’ll do it anyway - the gameplay loop of a typical 4X game is: ![Image](4x_game.dot.png", alt=“The 4 Xs”, caption=“A loop of loops - that is 4X) eXplore eXpand eXploit eXterminate Much of the fun of this simple formula comes from the fact that none of those factors stands on its own. You usually cannot expand without exploring first. Sometimes to expand by exterminating an enemy at a location first. What is there to exploit, if you did not expand before? And how will you exterminate, if you lack the resources you ought to have exploited first. ...
MOO resp. ROTPR inspired 4X game
So Sonko started a new project. Following suit, I jumped back in time to already have a game project on-going for quite some time now. A bad habit of mine is to reach some milestone and then “pause” (drop) the project. But now I’ll return to it, and as a small incentive to keep on it, I’ll start this blog. As with Sonko, this means my StarCraft AI related projects are on hold (don’t worry, the basil ladder will keep running). ...
A son was born
This was meant to be a tech related blog, mostly for Broodwar AI related stuff and private projects. Since private projects are included, I guess one could call my son a private project. Screaming into the light, he was born in late February. His name is Benjamin, which I am certain means horse-dung in some weird language. I do not care, go away! And due to Corona, we have been left alone for most of the time since then. ...