Planet Invasion
Luka Tsulaia, Stanislav Belogrivov
The goal is to develop single-player turn based tactical card game. The game is about conquering a planet played out as aliens with limited resources. This implies limited resource management also. Graphical style is supposed to be pixel-art.
We are doing work using Trello. You can find the page if you click here. Source Code can be found on github page of project.
Milestone 1 (28.09)
- Brainstorming all possible features and requirements which can be developed during the project timeframe
- Starting to develop game loop based on result of brainstorm
- Start shaping out the game story/graphical style/setting/
We have brainstormed the features we want to see in the game. This included Short list of desired features:
- World has a state and three lists (resources, tech and variable dictionary)
- Different resource types for both player and AI
- Having Countries on planet
- Action Slots/Action Points
- Actions have requirements (tech, resources and variables)
- Some Actions take more than one turn
- Some Actions might have "augmentations"
- Having background actions list for the game state (for example country gets its annual revenue every turn)
- Game cycle can have several steps (defense step/attack step...)
Milestone 2 (19.10)
- Filtering out extra features/actions
- Player interaction mockup
- Creating first set of Actions for player and AI
- Designing tech tree
We still did not filter out all the possible features, but selected the ones that are a priority. On the software side, we are progressing and majority of the main game-loop is ready. We started creating first set of actions for player and thinking about implementing those for AI as well. Designing Tech Tree is moved to next milestone. The first interaction mockup for player will be the "hangar". It will have low-poly with pixel textures. However, we settled on 3D world with 2D objects in it, similar to Fallout Shelter. In other words, 2.5D game.
A list of the "ready" objects for the game can be found on our Trello page.
Bonus!
Potential merchandise
Milestone 3 (2.11)
Prioritized Game Features for this iteration:
- Game world consists of planet and alien ship. Planet has different regions.
- Ship will have one or more "rooms"/screens with information.
- Main screen will have action selection option.
- Player can select actions every turn (for now - attack, defend, explore tech, and gather resources)
- AI also can select actions every turn (for now - attack, defend, explore tech, and gather resources)
- Finish tech tree design (Stanislav + Luka) (done)
- Focus on delivering a scene (hangar) with some action mockup (Visual Side - Stanislav, UI - Luka) (Stanislav - done, Luka - ??)
- Asset Integration (Stanislav) (done)
- Feature List prioritized (Luka) (done?)
On this iteration, we finished mostly everything that was planned. More objects were generated and the hangar initial version was written: Trello Link.
We have discussed and designed first part of the tech tree. It is not complete and definitely not final. However, it describes all elements that are needed for the initial state of the game.
List of Tech so far:
- Atmosphere 1
- Communications 1, 2, 3
- Languages
- Geography 1, 2
- Examine Population?.. (name to be changed)
- Human Studies
- Psychology
- Flora 1, 2
- Fauna 1, 2
- Several Tiers of Weapon and Energy Tech, based on different prerequisites
We encountered some difficulties with the coding part which, combined with other subjects, made it impossible to finish the action mockup in full scale.
Milestone 4 (16.11)
FINISH:
- Produce a scene that will have 3d objects from previous Milestones. (Stanislav + Luka)
- Produce a mockup dummy gameplay. (Luka)
INTRODUCE:
- Start working on practical implementation of tech tree. (Luka)
- Generate better materials for meshes. (Stanislav)
- Make some animations for characters. (Stanislav)
POTENTIALLY:
- More 3D assets for the scenes to make them look nicer. I.E. Alien ships, more objects that are interior and such.
Milestone sum up
So far, we managed to deliver 3(!) alien animations, which can be found by following this link. We put a bunch of objects on the game scene so that we could see how the game would look. Additionally, we put a couple of light sources to see how the shading and such work.
Below you can see the three animations mentioned above: blinking, breathing and walking.
We also finished doing a demo scene, which looks like this. Finally, Stanislav went for developing super stupid and simple AI for the Aliens (WIP) to make them wander around the hangar, to add more "life" to the scene. So far... added a magic button and some looping animations.
Stanislav also did some minor updates to the material properties. Still needs improvements.
Milestone 5 (30.11)
- Added the functionality to further add the story Luka)
- Overall changes in codebase
- Further materials polishing (Stanislav)
- Introduce randomizers to alien animations and make them "wander" around (Stanislav)
Did a bunch of experiments with materials for the hangar (shown on the milestone demo), settled on this version. As of now, material uses texture (reworked from scratch!), a normal map and a height map. Aliens "move" somewhat, but do not want to die despawn... Working on it...Also made a this version for tablet, as there was a necessity to change the layout. The before/after examples of both can be found below:
Core functionality:
- Added three countries for the testing
- Game now can be seeded with initial parameters (starting resources etc.)
- Added save/load of the state of game (still not tested fully)
- Overall small changes and bug fixes
UI
- Changed "Card View" into "Tablet"
- Moving from legacy text to text mesh pro
- Target country selection screen
- Event Log screen
- Now, we will be having news screen and event log separately
Gameplay
- Started Writing story elements, descriptions for actions and tech
Milestone 6 (14.12)
- Get AIs to move and despawn sanely (Stas)
- Rework textures (Stas)
- Fix naming issues in files (Stas)
- Achieve playable demo from gameplay point of view (Luka)
- Add some essential story/descriptions (Luka)
- Clean UI (Luka)
- Hangar (Optional, Stas)
In total, we achieved everything we wanted to do for this milestone. The AIs move almost like fancy sires (it is a video! Though... quite bad one :( ). The HQ textures have been improved, as seen here. This was achieved using custom-made normal maps with definition 64 times greater than their respective original textures. The naming issues were fixed more or less and a bunch of redundant files was purged.
Furthermore, there is a hangar prop which we added to sort out UI.
This room is almost identical to the HQ, with one exception - it has a hole in it, which is framed by a "gate", followed by the "airlock". The idea behind that is as follows - as this is a hangar, vehicles would need to fly in and out of the "mothership".
You can also see a small Ert there on the background of a star sky, which we made from scratch. Space generation was done using 3 stages of noise application and subsequent painting - apply noise, shade it out, increase the size of the texture. This way, we got proper "square" stars of different sizes.
This is how the whole hangar scene looks like from the side:
Last moment addition to the hangar props - the alien ship. Inspired by Mass Effect dropships, we totally did not rip off made our own low-poly version of it.
Down here you can see the comparison of the old and new hangar textures.
From the perspective of UI, nearly every aspect of it has been refined from visual perspective. We've also changed Font for most of the parts, to improve readability over the last iteration. Special feature implementing called "game rules", which basically can monitor game for special events. The main use of this is detection of two types of endgame - if the planet population drops below some threshold or all the countries military strength is diminished. We've also added some story/descriptions for tech/endgame. as well as playable actions for Player.
The game is now mostly playable. though some aspects are still glitchy and there are still some UI inconsistencies.
We will continue to polish and add features in the future.
Youtube video of the Demo:
Project Download: https://1drv.ms/u/s!Aq-HCGz9K0EDhNgsIM5JpoT6Hghb0w