Magic Sword

Zibo wrote:That are 2 or so D3 icons, yes - they were nice, so like I give a fuck. I will change colors and they will be different. Sue me!

Yes, AP is army-wide. Usually 1 AP per unit to make move/move+action. It's the only decision possible, you are not thinking about it deep I guess. Just imagine that every pawn has a move - and you can have as big is the board. It would take infinite time to move all of them.

And read the previous posts you ass! I have a concept of factions that I will start working on pretty soon. Darkness with all undeads, vampires, unholy entities and shit is first.

1. Cool!

2. Ok Cool, if you think it´s fun

3. Cool!!!

Release or Riot!!!

This was a year ago already?

Still under development!
Basicly working on it mostly during weekends and when I got time off from work. It's a bit too mind-melting to sit on it after getting back home on regular day.

In general current road map before v1.0 looks more of such:
- board adjusting to window size (after 2 years did it finally today!!!11)
- 5-6 more units to finish 2 fractions
- chat in-game
- tutorial / help
- upgrades for all units
- AI adjustment to new mechanics
- campaign / story mode

Aaand of course I will need to educate myself how to make some stray travellers come to such website at all.

Couple of months ago I thought I'll be able to finish all that by the end of the year, but lol - after 8 years working in IT I should know better how estimations work.

A storyline even? Well it´s getting interesting. So you will remain with 2 "races" (understandably since other things have higher priority) or are you planning to invent more over time? Also: Graphics upgrade planned or will you be staying on a really simple look by choice?

I can think of like 7 fractions right now, but I will see what will be my plans after the "launch". No point to spend so much time on this part now. To improve graphics I probably would need an actual graphics designer, so probably not.

Yea i see and graphics could rather easily being overhauled i guess, once the core game features are in place, right?
7 factions? May we get DARK ELVES?

Screw Dark Elves, Dwarves and Orcs ---> ROBOTS!

For some units I've put little effort, for other more. In general a couple units ended up looking quite ok. You be the judge.

Exemplar Demigod units (highest tier):

Eternal Warrior - Superior entity that has no equal in combat. He spent entirety of his life on gaining absolute mastery in art of war. Partaker of countless conflicts, conqueror of multiple kingdoms, killer of tens of thousands.



Duelist - Dual wielding first line warrior that has been acclaimed inhuman by the fleeing foes after slaying 3 squads of defensive fighters in a blade whirlwind. His swiftness allows him to release strikes in a blink of an eye.

Oh, the Eternal Warrior is pretty dope. If you wanted you could use a tool to calculate intermediate frames to give the animations more phases (more fluency).
So how about Robotic Dark Elves? :twitsted:

Some time ago I thought such tool exists, but in the end I didn't find it. Got a name? Would definetely check it.

So, another couple of months pass and Magic Sword is almost here. Much has been accomplished, even more is planned. The game is already playable, probably still needs polishing and gameplay enhancements to make it more dynamic and entartaining.

Still working on a draft of campaign story and doing some final testing. After that I'm making research on how to position the site on search engines and releasing the project to public in ~alpha/beta stage. Hoping that game gets any attention from time to time, so it motivates me to improve and develop it.

ETA 1-2 days

Oookay now i am excited. Will check it out nao...

EDIT: Has the address been changed? It says it´s unavailable. Or is it the usual Beta thingie (no guarantee that the servers will be up at any time!)?

I'm setting it up at the moment. Making final changes.

 

Magic Sword v0.9a is now live!

http://magicsword.eu-central-1.elasticbeanstalk.com

 

Sorry Zibo, not challenging you when i have forgot most about the game at all. I am going back to noob level 1 campaign. But very impressive what has happened in the meantime. I think especially the accessibility is spot on. And everything works, there are even individual chat rooms for multiplayer action. So you spawn these instances dynamically on the server aka you can handle a lot of players as the demand happens?
Will there be some lore maybe even events inside a mission?
Sound would help the immersion a lot. Or some music!
Not sure but i personally feel that the END turn button would maybe be more suitable in a lower place.
The Zombies look pretty dope --- ugly as heck like they should be!
Good job on the AI, after getting recked in mission 2 i switched to Skirmish and you actually can fully skirmish this AI even with base building! Really impressive!

There are no individual chat rooms yet. Just multiroom, which is global. Chat during battle is planned in v1.1.

Don't know how servers will behave on heavy load, but for now I hope lowest server instance tier should be fine (if some performance-killer bug isn't hiding in there..).

All lore planned for now is missions description (I tried to be creative also on descriptions of demigod tier of units).

Sound might be achievable, but music might be hard one - I can't create it myself and I don't feel like grabbing some random tune from web.

Use 'Space' shortcut for ending turn. I also planned to assign 1-4 for abilities and so on. There might be more better design choices, but none seems to be easy or web-feasible to go straight at it.

AI still has many flaws, I already got a list of things to improve so it behaves more reasonable. Also new mechanics need to implemented, like retreating.

Good job also on those little animations!
Well... yea of course sound might be something for later iterations. You could consider using a royalty-free source for that. incompetech.com is a really good source imho. Speaking of that, the GFX you use outside the actual combat are more or less "stolen" i suppose. But they probably function more as placeholders, right?
EDIT: Can you decide to which direction of a building units spawn? I placed a building a little "aggressively" and it was quite annoying that my unit spawned on the other side of the battlefield.
EDIT 2: Found it, silly me, you already implemented this.

Yeah, for those you need true talent to make it, lolish Gimp skills are enough to make units, but not actual freaking landscapes and scenes. For each of those images I searched web for hours, then I was remaking it to my own needs. For example menu background source is:

http://magicsword.eu-central-1.elasticbeanstalk.com/assets/img/backgrounds/menu/menu_original.jpg

So I spent 2 days on remaking it and animating. I don't know if those artworks are free or not, don't care too much yet, nobody probably will every see it.

If I would ever had problems with it, I would probably hire some graphic designer to recreate those.

I see!
Anyways, maybe you wanna take a look at incompetech, they really might have something you like for the game, the selection is big and the composer quite talented imho. He did the soundtrack for several games i. e. for "mounting your friends" (even that theme song is license-free, it´s called "eighties action").
I think that sounds/noises/music or some form of a reminder i. e. when a unit is finished or when certain other events happen would not just be cool but also be quite useful.
Also being able to get (limited) info on hostile units when clicking on them would seem cool. Even scouting could become a thing then.

Sound for this game is probably one of the features that I would go with only if I plan to continue this project. There's plenty of features and improvements with much higher priority IMO to take care first. There is lack of notifications when something finishes, I'm aware of it.
At the moment finishing upgrade does not have any indicator, so you need to expand the panel to know it happened.

Inspecing units is planned in future version. Not easy to implement, because clicking enemy unit usually executes action when you are able to, so I will probably go with popup showing over the enemy unit after 1s mouse hover.

Such long discussion, we could just as well use chat ingame! (you can open multiple tabs of the game, but you can only have 1 game started)

Gotta sleep now, i am becoming a teacher! Someone else test if the AI can be exploited by rushing them early with builder units, i wasnt consequent enough to fully go for that strat.

Played a few games.

Music (or sound in general), is something that can have an immensely positive impact on the game, but likewise if it's of poor quality or not implemented properly can be a negative thing.


Some things I noticed:

In skirmish, the AI stops playing - or producing units - at some point, leading to an easy victory.

You already talked about enemy unit information, but also there is no specific information about units you want to build, there's only general description and cost.

The upgrade panel should be a lot more noticeable. Right now it looks like an extended menu button and I didn't discover it until very late in the game.

Smaller maps are zoomed in to fill the screen. I would keep the grid same size, but just have the map smaller instead.


Balance of course needs more testing.

Generally, I would slightly increase map sizes, but also lower unit build times. Gives more options for unit placement as well as army composition.

Nobody reads help!

In skirmish, the AI stops playing - or producing units - at some point, leading to an easy victory.

Interesting. Haven't noticed that yet. I rather saw that they overproduce units and don't have AP for upgrades. But I suspect in your case, while enemy was in battle, was spending all AP on attacking and moving towards battlefront and not balancing it with upgrades/training/building.

You already talked about enemy unit information, but also there is no specific information about units you want to build, there's only general description and cost.

Yep, that's all the `Unit stats in popup` in v1.1 from news page.

The upgrade panel should be a lot more noticeable. Right now it looks like an extended menu button and I didn't discover it until very late in the game.

Any suggestion?

Smaller maps are zoomed in to fill the screen. I would keep the grid same size, but just have the map smaller instead.

Hm, I personally liked the bigger zoom on units that's why board always fits to the screen. Currently max reasonable board is 20x20, I don't think bigger are needed. While that works on desktops, it would be massive issue on mobiles, probably some kind of scrolling would need to be in place.