WW1 - No Man's Land Devlog 8

Once again, it's been awhile since my last update. Really gotta get more consistent with these, but work has continued on this project. Last time, all I had was the basic troop movements. There was no UI, no game over state, no cards, etc. All of that has changed now: the underlying systems for the cards has been added, the game can now end, and the barebones version of the UI has been added! I got a couple of cool vids of this stuff in action, so lets hop right in! 

The cards

The game features 8 different cards (and more may be added) that each add other methods for you to strategically defeat your opponent. There are 4 cards in the lethal category, meaning they directly harm troops, and 4 cards in the tactical category, meaning they indirectly harm the enemy team. Here are several of these cards in action:

Grenade Card

This is a card that allows you to pick 1 of your troops to throw out a grenade! Note the the explosion used in the video is temp art and is not mine. Also, still working on a death animation for explosions, for now, just using one of the standard death sequences:

Artillery Card

With this card, players will be able to set a target anywhere on the battlefield, and send a shell flying toward it to create a devastating explosion. As with the grenade card, the explosion effect is temp art. Future plans include having a little camera popup that shows the canon actually firing the shell, and then shaking the entire scene to add greater energy to the shell's impact!

Chlorine Gas Card

A card that allows you to shoot a shell loaded with chlorine gas, which creates a dead zone that slowly travels toward the enemy! Any troops caught in it are lost. Note that the green square is just temp art as well.

Reinforcements Card

Allows you to spawn in 2 more friendly troops in case the battle is not going your way!

Special troop action

When troops are moving, and they cross paths with an enemy troop, they will perform a melee attack on that enemy, allowing you to essentially get a free kill via strategic movements (you may even be able to get a streak)! Of course, only the side view animations are in place, still need to do melee sequences for facing down and up:

The new UI

You may have also noticed that I worked a bit more on the UI setup: we now have the actual confirmation button (a telegraph button) in place, and a dice counter for tracking the number rolled. A little light has also been added, where red indicates that you still have moves to make, and green indicates you can confirm all troop movements. Still need to add in special UI effects, and the 2 decks for lethal cards and tactical cards will need to be flipped hehe.

Also, got started on NETWORKING the game, yay!

To cap things off, I also made some major progress on my networking solution. This part has been one of the most time consuming parts (aside from doing the animations), since I had to do a fair bit of research and whatnot.  In the end, I decided to go with Mirror as the underlying networking package, as opposed to Photon (which I have usually used up to now).

As of now, I got the underlying system for public and private rooms in place (with a little bit of bugs to work out still). The next big step is to get the game itself networked, and once that is done, playtesting should be possible! Here is a vid of the room systems in action:

The server itself doesn't look like much, but I did take some time to add in a menu that allows me to sort of poke through the data the server is creating, such as the rooms, the players in those rooms, account info, etc:

New Debug tools

Nothing too big here, but also took some time to touch up some of my debug tools. Firstly, I added the ability to see the battlefield grid data, where each color represents the type of grid (is it a trench grid, a barrier, etc):

Secondly, I added in the ability to quickly use any card, at any time, rather than having to waste time going through the random draw card system on the 2 decks:

Both of these new additions have made debugging things a bit more smooth, so super glad I took the time to make these!

Final notes

So I think my next focus will be on getting the game scene networked, and making the room system fully stable. I also will be making a major push to do another round of art creation and enhancements, particularly for creating the missing frames on the british troops, the UI, and the German troops. I also want to redesign the tileset itself, particularly the dirt patterns, since those seem to be getting too busy and boring...

I will also be aiming to polish up the UI effects and making things a bit more clear for when it comes to troop selection and card usage, as I feel that can be a bit confusing right now.

Once all that is done, I will turn my attention to implementing some AI for single player mode, though I think that won't appear until a devlog after the next one. Anyways, exciting things on the way hopefully! Super eager to do another art round, I think the game is sort of faltering on that side a bit, and I want to correct that! 

Thanks for checking this out! Until next time!