#LOWREZJAM 2017

I've had orcs on my mind ever since watching the Warcraft movie. Warcraft II was totally my thing when I was a kid, and I loved building bases, gathering resources, researching upgrades... If I can capture a bit of that feeling, then I'll have accomplished the primary goal of this game.

Graphics

One of the previous #LOWREZ games that caught my eye was Norman's Sky -- I had no idea that that kind of rendering would look so great in 64x64. I'm curious to see how far I can push these pixels myself (in 2D).

Control

A pet peeve that I have with strategy games is that unit control doesn't scale (for me as a player) at the endgame. I always lose track of units/areas because I'm busy micromanaging, when I'd rather be sitting back focused on strategy. This seems like it'll need some heavy AI lifting.

Tech

To make things "interesting" I've stacked on a couple more tech constraints: make the game with HTML5, and use a Functional Core, Imperative Shell architecture. This will be my first big program to use functional programming through the whole core, and I'm really interested to see what benefits it brings.

Anyways, I'm finally at a stage now where the first orc shows some interesting behaviour. Here's the build process (sped up for the GIF):

The next thing for me to add is that once the first building (HQ) is built, new orcs will come, and you can start expanding the settlement. I'll have to see if you'll defend against nightly waves of demons before this jam finishes 😅

What do you think? Is there anything that you'd love to see in this kind of game?

Oh, and if curious to see what Scala.js game code looks like, I've got everything over on GitHub

Dan Cecile6 years ago (1 edit)

Update 1

The default cursor for the player is the "inspection" cursor. You can click on an area of the map to inspect those tiles:

This was a fun feature to implement because I got to design my own font. Once I realized that I wanted ASDFG hotkey indicators at the bottom of the screen, I'd picked my glyph size: 6 by 6 pixels. And at the top of the inspection screen, I wanted a big title, so why not just double-tall, at 6 by 12 pixels.

Rather than find a font, I decided to create my own with a "stocky" feel. Thick vertical lines, thin horizontal lines, x-height slightly below centre to give the glyphs a top-heavy feel. For workflow, I didn't want to have to export PNGs from an editor before reloading, and I wanted an easy way to get the tall glyphs, so I just put everything into my Scala code:

    Glyph.build('A')(
      "                ",
      "    [][][][][]  ", 1,
      "  [][]    [][]  ", 1,
      "  [][]    [][]  ", 4,
      "  [][][][][][]  ", 1,
      "  [][]    [][]  ", 1,
      "  [][]    [][]  ", 4,
      "                "),

(The numbers in the margin add up to 12 and represent the height of each row when the glyph is 6x12.)

It's really easy to see the shapes just scrolling through this file, and modifications are a breeze. Also, no resource loading delays, and I was able to use Scala's fancy "lazy" keyword to avoid creating bitmaps for glyph/colour/size combinations that aren't needed yet:

  lazy val boldLargeBitmap = makeLargeBitmap(Colors.OverlayBoldForeground)

Not a ton of time left, but I'll keep working through my plan...

Dan Cecile6 years ago

Update 2

Only a bit of time left before submissions close, so here's today's update:

Now building tasks will use up wood, and the orc will need to go chop extra wood (beyond just clearing the lot). Amit Patel's interactive guide to bread-first search pathfinding was a great resource here 👍

With this change, it's finally starting to feel more like a resource/management sim. But one orc is a bit lonely...

Dan Cecile6 years ago (1 edit)

Update 3

Multiple orcs have arrived!

And my game page is also online now, just in time for the end of the jam:

Dan Cecile6 years ago

Update 4

Final submission for the jam! This time, I implemented a very simple demonic enemy that attacks the orc settlement in waves:

Very simple: does not specifically try to target orcs or buildings, just moves down the map
Orcs attack first, but only have 25% hit rate -- if any demons are left after the orcs have attacked, then say goodbye to those orcs
The "F" key is now used to bring up a status screen that shows your current number of orcs and your current survival time
If you're left with no orcs, you'll be greeted by the game over screen which shows the final survival time

I've been to focused on implementing the features and tweaking a few parameters that I'm not sure how long a player will be able to survive. I've toned down the difficulty to avoid beginners from getting blocked right away, so maybe it'll be too easy?

Anyways, I'm glad I was able to reach this point, and I hope you have fun playing the game 😃

itch.io

#LOWREZJAM 2017

Off-Grid Orcs

Latest update: demons have arrived

Intro

Update 1

Update 2

Update 3

Update 4