Posted October 02, 2018 by LincRead
#polish #bug fixing #road map
This update was supposed to address mainly two critical issues.
1. Difficulty level: we've received many comments about the BEGINNER difficulty level. We've addressed this by tweaking all the difficulty levels and adding a new difficulty level named SANDBOX. SANDBOX allows you to play without getting attacked, so you can fiddle with the game without stressing about enemy attacks. The enemy tribe is still added to the map though so you can still have fun building an army and attacking it.
We also tested the game on someone who's never touched an RTS game before in her life, and we immediately saw the need to implement learning missions. We don't know when we will add this, but we have it closer to our radar now.
2. Villagers deciding to strike out of nowhere: this was a particular annoying bug that took weeks to figure out. It would happen quite sparsely, but often enough to become a real frustration while playing. We came up with loads of theories on why this happened, but none of them were correct. The bug was hard to replicate because it seemed to happen randomly, and also because the code seemed really robust. We went over the code over and over again without finding any flaws. Happily, in the end we figured it out and it was due to Fixed Points Maths. When normalising the direction of the Villager the code would normalise to zero velocity because the numbers it took into account were in rare cases too small.
While working on this we got sucked into addressing a lot of other miscellaneous bugs and areas that needed improvement. We're pretty happy with this update because the game feels more polished now!
Read the entire change log at the bottom of this development blog.
Speaking of polish. That is our main goal. Apart from the fun factor, of course!
Even if it's early we want the game experience to feel rock solid. However, there are still many areas we need to address to get there.
This is a list of examples that is not sorted on priority:
Pathfinding: there are too many cases where a unit will not find a path and when the pathfinding ends up traversing every single node on the map. This causes annoying hicks. We therefore want to implement hierarchical A* to improve performance.
Unit movement: you've probably noticed (if you're a veteran when it comes to RTS) that units behave like in Age of Empires 1. This can make micro management frustrating. We want units in a group to attempt to traverse to the same location instead.
Team games: right now you can only play 1 on 1 online. We would love to add the possibilities to play 2 on 2 or Free For All.
Base defence: we need to add some kind of cheap base defence, like a Watch Tower, so it gets easier to repel early attacks.
Learning mission: this was already mentioned further up.
We don't have an estimate on any of this. Development is currently pretty iterative and we mostly implement what we feel the most inspired to work on.
As always, you're welcome to join our Discord if you have any suggestions, problems or just wanna have a casual chat:
Sandbox mode
- Added a new difficulty level SANDBOX: enemy tribe never attacks you nor produces any new units, so you can play around with the controls and game mechanics uninterrupted
Enemy Tribe (Single Player Demo)
- BEGINNER is now easier
- EXPERIENCED is now slightly easier
- EXPERT was broken but is now fixed
- EXPERT is now slightly easier
Farm
- New art making the farm look less "rectangular" and blend better with the environment
- Villager always picks a random position from the most inner tile so that it's easier to see who is farming which farm
- Destroying farm causes Villager moving towards it to idle
- Destroying a farm that a Villager is currently harvesting from now causes farmer to seek nearby delivery points to attempt to deliver any food the Villager had gathered
- Destroying a farm a Villager is delivering resources from will now prevent farmer from moving back to it
- Fixed a bug where Villager would not construct a farm if placed precisely on top of the Villager
- Villager can no longer take over enemy farm
Projectiles
- Fixed a bug that cased ranged units not always to damage units who were moving even if they were moving straight towards the ranged unit and the projectile intersected with the moving enemy unit
- Projectiles move towards middle of building instead of bottom node of building; this makes it easier to see which building ranged units are attacking
- Projectiles don't have to travel all the way through multiple building occupied nodes to get to the target destination node before projectile disappears and damage is inflicted; any node the projectile enters and that a building occupies will inflict damage straight away (this looks much better than previously)
- Projectiles always point towards target node
Pathfinding
- Units no longer get stuck because of Fixed-Point Maths error (this was especially annoying with Villagers)
- If Villager can't find a path to resource because it's blocked by other units it will seek another nearby resource of same type to harvest instead
- Clicking in the middle of a group of units close to each no longer causes paths to not be found and performance to be severely halted
Remembering preferences
- FTC now remembers your preferred difficulty level between game sessions
- FTC now remembers your preferred map size between game sessions
- FTC now remembers your preferred scroll speed between game sessions
Other
- Fixed a bug that happened if you commanded one or more Villagers to harvest a resource while at the same time in placement mode with a building you didn't have enough resources to construct
- Buildings are now correctly snapped to tiles (they looked like they were a tad out of position)
- No longer masking colour of selection circles and rectangles (applies to buildings, units and resources)
- Pressing DELETE to destroy a building now gives back resources if building was under construction
- Fixed shadow offset on Villagers constructing and foraging (looked out of place)
- Fog of War is now updating properly even when selecting new positions for units to move to very rapidly
- Fixed several typos