Devlog 8

Once again, it's been awhile since my last update. Really gotta get more consistent with these, but work has continued on this project. Last time, all I had was the basic troop movements. There was no UI, no game over state, no cards, etc. All of that has changed now: the underlying systems for the cards has been added, the game can now end, and the barebones version of the UI has been added! I got a couple of cool vids of this stuff in action, so lets hop right in! 

The cards

The game features 8 different cards (and more may be added) that each add other methods for you to strategically defeat your opponent. There are 4 cards in the lethal category, meaning they directly harm troops, and 4 cards in the tactical category, meaning they indirectly harm the enemy team. Here are several of these cards in action:

Grenade Card

This is a card that allows you to pick 1 of your troops to throw out a grenade! Note the the explosion used in the video is temp art and is not mine. Also, still working on a death animation for explosions, for now, just using one of the standard death sequences:

Artillery Card

With this card, players will be able to set a target anywhere on the battlefield, and send a shell flying toward it to create a devastating explosion. As with the grenade card, the explosion effect is temp art. Future plans include having a little camera popup that shows the canon actually firing the shell, and then shaking the entire scene to add greater energy to the shell's impact!

Chlorine Gas Card

A card that allows you to shoot a shell loaded with chlorine gas, which created a dead zone that slowly travels toward the enemy! Any troops caught in it are lost. Note that the green square is just temp art as well.

Reinforcements Card

Allows you to spawn in 2 more friendly troops in case the battle is not going your way!

Special troop action

When troops are moving, and they cross paths with an enemy troop, they will perform a melee attack on that enemy, allowing you to essentially get a free kill via strategic movements (you may even be able to get a streak)! Of course, only the side view animations are in place, still need to do melee sequences for facing down and up:

The new UI

You may have also noticed that I worked a bit more on the UI setup: we now have the actual confirmation button (a telegraph button), and a dice counter for tracking the number rolled. A little light has also been added, where red indicates that you still have moves to make, and green indicates you can confirm all troop movements. Still need to add in special UI effects, and the 2 decks for lethal cards and tactical cards will need to be flipped hehe.

Also, got started on NETWORKING the game, yay!

To cap things off, I also made some major progress on my networking solution. This part has been one of the most time consuming parts (aside from doing the animations), since I had to do a fair bit of research and whatnot.  In the end, I decided to go with Mirror as the underlying networking package, as opposed to Photon (which I have usually used up to now). I decided on this route so that I can give myself more freedom over which hosting service I use, and to potentially have more control over my costs. 

While setting up Mirror, I have also found that it seems a little more straightforward in comparison to Photon, especially when it came to setting up the room system here, along with RPCs, etc. As of now, I got the underlying system for public and private rooms in place (with a little bit of bugs to work out still). The next big step is to get the game itself networked, and once that is done, playtesting should be possible! Here is a vid of the room systems in action:

The server itself doesn't look like much, but I did take some time to add in a menu that allows me to sort of poke through the data the server is creating, such as the rooms, the players in those rooms, account info, etc:

New Debug tools

Nothing to big here, but also took some time to touch up some of my debug tools. Firstly, I added in the ability to see the battlefield grid data, where each color represents the type of grid (is it a trench grid, a barrier, etc):

Secondly, I added in the ability to quickly use any card, at any time, rather than having to waste time going through the random draw card system on the 2 decks:

Both of these new additions have made debugging things a bit more smooth, so super glad I took the time to make these!

Final notes

So I think my next focus will be on getting the game scene networked, and making the room system fully stable. I also will be making a major push to do another round of art creation and enhancements, particularly for creating the missing frames on the british troops, the UI, and the German troops. I also want to redesign the tileset itself, particularly the dirt patterns, since those seem to be getting too busy and boring...

I will also be aiming to polish up the UI effects and making things a bit more clear for when it comes to troop selection and card usage, as I feel that can be a bit confusing right now.

Once all that is done, I will turn my attention to implementing some AI for single player mode, though I think that won't appear until a devlog after the next one. Anyways, exciting things on the way hopefully! Super eager to do another art round, I think the game is sort of faltering on that side a bit, and I want to correct that! 

Well, as usual, thanks for checking this out! Hopefully I can at last have a playable version of this out on next devlog! Also, if this poked your interest, there is a whole main page for this project right here: 

https://diegendo.itch.io/ww1-no-mans-land

Feel free to check it out!

WW1 - No Man's Land Devlog 9

This one is going to be brief, but wanted to share some of the progress i've made on art, one of the things I mentioned last time as on my TODO list.

The Tileset

I mentioned in my last devlog, I wasn't quite happy with the tileset, as it felt too busy. Due to this, I experimented with a more simplified design for the dirt patterns, and this is the result:

Overall, i'm way happier with this one. I think the smaller amount of detail allows the troops and battlefield decorations (like broken trees) to stand out way better. (By the way, did I mention that the trees will not only be there for looks? They too will have a mechanic wherein troops can take cover behind them, and they will also react to battlefield events like shells blowing up next to them). 

My own explosion effects

Also mentioned last time, the explosion effects used up to now have been temp art. I finally got around to making my own. I went with 2 variants, 1 for the larger artillery shells and another smaller one for grenades: 

New UI Art

Also made some huge progress on a lot of the final UI art for the game, varying from the main menu, to the multiplayer room slots, to updating the card art, etc. 

Was trying to think of a way to present in-game dialogs like drawn card info, battle results, etc., to the player in such a way that it fits with the theme of the game. With that goal in mind, I came up with using an opening war-letter envelope, from which things like drawn card dialogs, or battle results, will then slide out of:

The drawn card UI, along with various other in-game dialog boxes and drop down menus will make use of UI similar to what the room slot UI shown above is using: weathered paper that has space for text to be displayed on it, or images (for the cards), etc:

German Troops

Perhaps the biggest thing I am about to do: the frames for the german troops. I already got the design for this troop, so now it's just a matter of extending it into all the frames needed to get it animated, which is probably going to be a tedious process. Here is a quick pic though of what the first idle frame looks like:

Final notes

For my next steps, going to keep hammering on the German troop frames, since having the 2 factions will be crucial for the playable version. 

 As usual, thanks for checking this out! Here is a link to the main page for this game if you're interested in more!

https://diegendo.itch.io/ww1-no-mans-land

Feel free to check it out!

WW1 - No Man's Land Devlog 10

Sorry for another small progress report. This took awhile, but I finally got all 292 frames for the German troops done! Hit a little roadblock along the way too: the old pixel art editor I was using kept crashing on me due to the number of frames, so I ended up having to transfer a fair amount of frames over into a new pixel art editor called Aseprite. Also, whilst trying to actually import these into Unity, I found that I needed to do some major reworks to my animation system, but it's all back in business now! 

With the completion of these frames, both the British and German troops now have the majority of their side view animations complete. Now, they just need the front and back view frames, and I wanna go back and spice up the idle animations a bit more (currently those just use 1 frame, which is a bit dull). Also wanna add some more special animations for when troops are hit with explosive projectiles (artillery, grenades, etc.), and fix a lot of janky stuff that is still going on in the actual game (sorting orders, movement speeds, etc).

Anyways though, below is a vid of all this in action:

Going to keep pushing forward! Thanks for taking a look, and if all this poked your interest, feel free to check out my other devlogs!

WW1 - No Man's Land Devlog 11

Once again, it's been a super long time since my last update. Since then, I have been slowly working on more stuff for this game, and have a ton of new things to show here for those interested! 

Don't want to take up too much time rambling, so diving right in!

Networking

Prior, I was making use of an  AWS server in conjunction with the Mirror API to support multiplayer; however, AWS only offers a free trial for about 1 year, after which charges would start getting accrued. This is something I wanted to avoid, so I went ahead and switched over to Steam Networking. 

This of course means that multiplayer, in its current form, will only work through steam, but I think that is perfectly fine. I plan to release this game on Steam (perhaps do an early access run?) anyway, and this can always be updated later if I want to release on other platforms.

After making the switch to Steam Networking (also still using the Mirror API  for the in-game networking), I was able to setup a public and private lobby system. The private match feature also includes the ability to invite any of your steam friends! The videos below show those 2 things in action:

Public Match Flow:

Private Match Flow:

Oh also, the entire game is now networked. Prior, players could only connect to each other and load into a match, but actions within the match were not synced, and now they are thanks to the Mirror API.

New Card Animations

Did a massive UI overhaul as well (as you most likely realized in the previous section). As part of that overhaul, I added some animations to each of the cards, to spice them up a bit:

Also went ahead and implemented that card displayer art I showed on my last devlog. Cards are now presented in a war-letter like fashion:

Flag Animations

I also want to add more life to the battlefield itself, so got started by adding some wind animations onto the flags. Next steps are to maybe add some sway animations to the knocked out trees, and some more movement to the idle troop animations.

Below are the flag animations as they appear in Aseprite (the pixel art editor I am using), and in-game:

More Troop Animations

Currently working on the front and back facing animation frames for the troops themselves. I am following the same process I followed for the prior frames: sketch the rough poses out on paper first, transfer into Adobe Illustrator to get their vector art forms, and then size those down to produced a pixelized version that I can then cleanup within Aseprite. 

It's definitely a process, but i'm not exactly a god animator haha, so just rolling with what works for me to avoid total deadlock in this area. 

Below are the different stages of this process:

Here are the frames in their vector style forms:

Here are the frames as they appear in Aseprite (still need to do major cleanup on all of them):

Also did a test run of the running (backview) frames in-game:

Main Menu BG update

You may have noticed that the main menu is now looking a bit more fleshed out from the vids above. The initial BG for that was going to be a still image with a tank, but I wanted the main menu to feel a bit more immersive (as was done in the previous game I helped to make called Sengoku), so I went with a trench background that moves as you go through each menu, to invoke that you are sort of moving through a trench, and just beyond lies No Man's Land. 

This is the sketch behind the new idea for the menu BG:

And this is the sketch for the old idea:

I also reworked the game title art, trying to mix in some more key images of WW1 into the title itself (such as barbed wire and helmets):

Final Notes

That's all for now. As mentioned, will continue working on the rest of the animation frames. Going to make a full push to get all of them done and stop pushing it back. Can expect more on that in the next devlog.

Thanks for stopping by!

WW1 - No Man's Land Devlog 12

Bit of a small one this time, but managed to get a couple of those front and back view frames cleaned up. Also added the fire effects for when the weapon is used:

Will be going back to draw out some more frames (for things like surrendering, death to explosions, maybe spice up the idle animations).

That's all for now though! Thanks for stopping by!

WW1 - No Man's Land Devlog 13

Not much to show, but finally got something put together for when troops are hit by an explosive (grenade, artillery, mine, etc):

Working on some other death animations too. Will share as soon as those are done!

Thanks for stopping by!

WW1 - No Man's Land Devlog 14

Got a couple more rough animation frames ready for cleanup!

Surrender

This sequence will play when the battle is lost: all your troops will immediately jump into this surrendering pose.

Fly back

I'm thinking this little fly back animation can be pretty sweet to play when an explosion occurs and the troop is right on the edge of that explosion's blast radius.

Death from above and below while prone 

Currently, I only have a death while prone animation for when the troop is shot at from the left or right sides, but not from the top or bottom. These frames should fill that gap.

Death from above and below while crouched

Same as with the prone animations, for the crouch animations I did not have animations for when the troop is shot at from the top or bottom. These frames should fill that gap.

Take Cover

The destroyed trees placed on the battlefield aren't just for looks. My plan is to allow these to serve as cover, offering players different ways of moving their troops up strategically. These frames here will be used for when a troop is near a tree and is taking cover behind it. Still have to do the back view frames for this.

That's all for now, thanks for stopping by! 

Also, feel free to poke around the main page for this project if interested, here's the link.