Weeks 144-145: Mini RTS (Patreon)

Ok weeks.

These two weeks I've been making a new game for Castle!

This one would be a minimalist multiplayer RTS, grid-based, where you have to cover most of the playing board with your color! (maybe not my least ambitious project, I'll grant you)

This idea was one of the game ideas that I came up with daily at the start of the year! These last two weeks I stopped doing them because I lacked energy. I think I will start uploading more soon but not on a regular, let alone daily, basis.

Still, this idea is one of the first I came up with and I was pretty excited about it and I thought it could work super well with Castle's dev-friendly network library! So I pitched it to Castle, they liked it, and here we are!

The issue is that I've never made a strategy game before, nor a grid-based one. (except Tetris I guess) And I only realized that after three days of work on the game. I understood that the reason I wasn't feeling comfortable developing this game was that I had no automatism for it, like I would for an action game.

This was a pretty tough realization but I decided to go ahead with the game anyway. After all, being afraid of learning is generally pretty dumb. But still, it was difficult, especially that first week where you lay out the foundations of the game.

I had to implement a pathfinding algorithm and that gave me the perfect occasion for this gif you see above. The algorithm is my take on a faded memory of the A* algorithm, which I read about maybe two years ago. My version actually starts from both the starting point and the goal point, to find the middle point, which I thought was optimized and clever and cool. (I was told it was already done before but who cares)

It didn't work right away, as you can see on the gif, but the next day it was functional! I have to polish it some, to make it more consistent in particular, but I'm already quite happy with it!

That was pretty much the first week on the game. The second week I tried to go a little faster and implement all the important game mechanics, like coloring the board, building, making more units, and attacking enemies.

I've come up with a task system which I'm super proud of and I want to write about in a separate post! It works with a user-defined task library, and timers, and callbacks, and it's really compact and neat!

After all this I'm finally starting to put some love into the graphics of the game. I actually regret not doing so earlier because I think it would have given me a much-needed motivation boost, but still it's nice to have that now.

I'm still working on those graphics, all the animations are missing right now. And I'm also working on the network side at the same time, because I really want to start testing the game for real to see what needs to be changed in terms of both balancing and mechanics.

Much of that should be for this week. This week and the next are actually all I have left for this game, so I better pick up the pace. But at least I'm excited to see what comes out of this project!

That's it for these two weeks! I want to thank all my Patreon supporters as usual for being so awesomely generous! Here are the names of the 3$+ supporters for the month of January! (btw, it is beginning of a new month, now is a great time to start supporting me!)

★Joseph White, ★Spaceling, rotatetranslate, Anne Le Clech, bbsamurai, HJS, slono, Austin East, Zachary Cook, Jefff, Meru, Bitzawolf, Paul Nguyen, Dan Lewis, Christian Östman, Dan Rees-Jones, Reza Esmaili, Andreas Bretteville, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Giles Graham, Flo Devaux, Cole Smith, Thomas Wright, HERVAN, berkfrei, Tim and Alexandra Swast, Jearl, Chris McCluskey, Raphael Gaschignard, Eiyeron, Sam Loeschen, Collin Caldwell, Andrew Reitano, Qristy Overton, amy, yunowadidis-musik, Max Cahill, hushcoil, Jacel the Thing, Gruber, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, Andrew Reist, vaporstack, Jakub Wasilewski, vaporstack, Jakub Wasilewski

Thank you again! You guys are extremely cool!

This next week I'll be hard at work on this minimalist RTS game, which I need to find a name for. I'll be implementing online play and continuing the work on graphic assets!

Have a great week and a nice month of February!

Take care!

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