January Report
Another first Saturday of the month has arrived and with it another update post.
These aren't yet totally finished, but they are pretty close. There is enough done to discuss them at least!
In common with many strategy games dealing with medieval warfare, Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex breaks battles into a series of phases. These battles start with a deployment phase as shown above. Each arrangement will unlock different tactics in the next phase, the approach.
Here are a few different possibilities. At the start of battle there is a certain distance between the armies. Depending on which tactics are used, that distance is reduced (or not) at a commensurate rate. When the distance reaches zero, the melee phase begins.
Melee phase is still under too active development to show screens, but it works in a very similar way. A number of tactics will be available based on how things are going. The opposition chooses a tactic simultaneously and the results of these choices will result in damage to one or both armies based on the specifics and the sizes of the armies.
When morale on one side falls too low, it will break and run. Pitched battles were generally uncommon during this period, and even rarer were battles fought to the last man. When this happens combat transitions into a pursuit phase — but be on guard against feint tactics!
Pitched battles aren't the only sort of battle. It's often advantageous to engage in limited skirmishes instead. There are fewer risks, especially if you have an advantage in light infantry and men-at-arms.
Testing out combat revealed some funny cases in which a force could be reduced to nothing. This ended up needing some special logic to bounce the skeleton force to a safe county where it could try to reinforce. This naturally comes with a heavy war score penalty and balanced values hit.
The AI is now a little smarter about seeking out or avoiding battles and skirmishes as well. On the other hand, the AI no longer cheats to have perfect reconnaissance while the player must expend precious time to get that information.
I'm pleased to announce that I have in fact approved a new batch of art and it is well under way! It will be some time before there are things to show, but I'm excited to see what will come. Hopefully there will soon be additional news on this front as well.
I also wrote a launcher for the game! DGR is actually made using web technology, targeting the desktop via NW.js (think Electron). Some people have some legitimate grievances against this technology, but if you're making a game this is overwhelmingly styled text, 2D images, and a few animations, I content that it's one of the best choices. However one weakness is that packaging an app for launch is a bit of a process. There are some solutions provided, but I just went ahead and dusted off my C programming skills to make a standalone launcher. This is perhaps the most boring thing I'll ever write about in these updates, but it's a real step in my mind toward this game actually, you know, shipping.
In a previous update I mentioned that my local game dev group was having its second annual summit in January. Unfortunately this did not actually happen. Given pandemic conditions it was scheduled to be a digital only event. Some things came up and a few people had to pull out, resulting in cancellation. By that time however I had already written my talk, so I just recorded for YouTube.
I'm not very good at recording video and this was a very spur of the moment thing without a lot of preparation. My apologies for the quality here. That said, if you're interested in a short talk about one method of dealing with the combinatorial explosion in narrative design (or alternatively some nuts and bolts of DGR events) here's that video:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Thanks for reading, more to come next month!
Pitched battles
These aren't yet totally finished, but they are pretty close. There is enough done to discuss them at least!
In common with many strategy games dealing with medieval warfare, Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex breaks battles into a series of phases. These battles start with a deployment phase as shown above. Each arrangement will unlock different tactics in the next phase, the approach.
Here are a few different possibilities. At the start of battle there is a certain distance between the armies. Depending on which tactics are used, that distance is reduced (or not) at a commensurate rate. When the distance reaches zero, the melee phase begins.
Melee phase is still under too active development to show screens, but it works in a very similar way. A number of tactics will be available based on how things are going. The opposition chooses a tactic simultaneously and the results of these choices will result in damage to one or both armies based on the specifics and the sizes of the armies.
When morale on one side falls too low, it will break and run. Pitched battles were generally uncommon during this period, and even rarer were battles fought to the last man. When this happens combat transitions into a pursuit phase — but be on guard against feint tactics!
Skirmishes
Pitched battles aren't the only sort of battle. It's often advantageous to engage in limited skirmishes instead. There are fewer risks, especially if you have an advantage in light infantry and men-at-arms.
Map logic
Testing out combat revealed some funny cases in which a force could be reduced to nothing. This ended up needing some special logic to bounce the skeleton force to a safe county where it could try to reinforce. This naturally comes with a heavy war score penalty and balanced values hit.
The AI is now a little smarter about seeking out or avoiding battles and skirmishes as well. On the other hand, the AI no longer cheats to have perfect reconnaissance while the player must expend precious time to get that information.
Miscellaneous
I'm pleased to announce that I have in fact approved a new batch of art and it is well under way! It will be some time before there are things to show, but I'm excited to see what will come. Hopefully there will soon be additional news on this front as well.
I also wrote a launcher for the game! DGR is actually made using web technology, targeting the desktop via NW.js (think Electron). Some people have some legitimate grievances against this technology, but if you're making a game this is overwhelmingly styled text, 2D images, and a few animations, I content that it's one of the best choices. However one weakness is that packaging an app for launch is a bit of a process. There are some solutions provided, but I just went ahead and dusted off my C programming skills to make a standalone launcher. This is perhaps the most boring thing I'll ever write about in these updates, but it's a real step in my mind toward this game actually, you know, shipping.
A video
In a previous update I mentioned that my local game dev group was having its second annual summit in January. Unfortunately this did not actually happen. Given pandemic conditions it was scheduled to be a digital only event. Some things came up and a few people had to pull out, resulting in cancellation. By that time however I had already written my talk, so I just recorded for YouTube.
I'm not very good at recording video and this was a very spur of the moment thing without a lot of preparation. My apologies for the quality here. That said, if you're interested in a short talk about one method of dealing with the combinatorial explosion in narrative design (or alternatively some nuts and bolts of DGR events) here's that video:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Thanks for reading, more to come next month!