- Joined
- Mar 29, 2011
- Messages
- 1
This is a year after I abandoned the project, because i had a dream that made me reminisce. and the project was abandoned actually mostly because my windows install completely crashed and I had to format the drive and I failed recovering the project from the drive before formatting. So the files have been lost to the aether and are just an idea at this point. And I don't know if I'll end up working on it again or not, so I'll be putting it on here just for archivals sake. This will mostly be me detailing what I did. apologies if this isn't the best place for this.
so the main crutch of what I was doing was that I didn't want to do a lot of trigger work / similar in depth visual / coding and mostly wanted to see how far I could do with the core mechanics of the units. did end up using some trigger work in the end though.
Before the crash, what I was able to do was prototype the core mechanics of how the game would play out, no actual terrain mapping or anything. it was very early but the main crux was clearly present. these are the 4 screenshots i took of the progress. they don't show a whole lot but I'll explain it all. As stated by the title, the gameplay would be inspired by King Leopolds style, such as Broken Alliances, or War of the Lost / 12 Kingdoms. namely, the core mechanic of them being "X units spawned every Y seconds". I wanted to design something that was more a mixture of this style with more "RTS" - esque elements to it.
Your military units would take up no food, but your workers would. And your workers could be stationed inside a building to make it "work". Each building would have their own resource to spawn units with. that resource being mana.
a buildings mana is regained by "attacking" a central mana crystal / obelisk / mcguffin. each attack "saps mana" from the source, granting the building the ability to spawn a new unit. the attack rate is determined by how many workers are stationed in the building, alongside any upgrades to building attack speed or sap rate. It is the Orcs Burrow ability that was used for this as that allows a non-attacking building to attack. Tweaking the attack settings allowed for it to not target any units naturally. to "sap" mana, you had to activate it using the specific auto-cast ability. It would never target an enemy; don't want free damage with buildings. This aspect required the most triggers to get it to work, and due to the maximum group selection of 12, the central mana source could only be sapped by up to 12 buildings at once. You would need to repair this central source to keep your military numbers up. The intention was it would be a frantic balance between amassing absolutely massive armies and maintaining a base to supply them.
I managed to be able to get the units to spawn immediately around the building, with up to three different types of "spawns". all three being able to be auto-cast, using mana as the only resource. getting them to Rally after being created required trigger work to do as well.
The first image revealed how this all works. There are three "summon X units from corpse" abilities. The Necromancers "Summon Skeleton", Crypt Lords "Carrion Beetles", and the Avatar of Vengeances "Spirit of Vengeance" ability. These are also the only three summon unit abilities that can be auto-cast. They all work slightly different, with the Summon Skeleton base being the most different, however they can all be tweaked to effectively work in the same way. through upgrading and changing out the spell, They can be made to either spawn better units, more units, or both. And it works perfectly.
How I managed to get the buildings to auto-summon, was that the buildings each had their own graveyard skill attached to them, where they only summoned one corpse at a time, but immediately. the unit that the corpse belonged to was an Ancient critter with an invisible corpse. I believe that is the specific set up. Ancients are the elves tree buildings, that are just destroyed when they die. no where in the course of the game would a unit that happens to be an Ancient, also happen to leave behind a corpse. Simply setting each buildings spawn unit skill to target an Ancient corpse was sufficient to make it so then they would never accidentally target a legitimate corpse. And as long as no normal unit is flagged also as an Ancient, this method would work entirely. I can't remember for certain, but I think the corpse could be spawned underneath the units, so right beside the building, but when it is summoned from, it would place the summoned unit in the next available location closest to the building.
Some secondary things I did, was set up a consistent camera zoom function, and used each units custom value variable to hold experience that whenever they passed a threshold amount (based on a calculation) there would be a dropped exp totem besides them that they were immediately triggered to pick up, and it would give them added damage or something similar. not really core to the idea, just something I wanted to add in and I have no idea how to actually implement the more fleshed out versions of this mechanic.
but yeah, the idea was that you would have a base that you would build up, with your military buildings (maybe others?) built around some sort of obelisk crystal things that would charge the buildings, mostly based on the workers inside the buildings, that could then allow you to summon a set of units from them at a given rate. Despite the fact that a unit can only have one auto-cast on at a time, using triggers I was able to make it so then the buildings would switch from "spawning selected units" to "sapping mana" modes.
the map would have been filled with different bases, different units, that you could take over. really from this point it would have played out in a similar style to Lost Kingdoms if I was to have followed through with it. It was mostly just this aspect of the game I wanted to tweak.
so the main crutch of what I was doing was that I didn't want to do a lot of trigger work / similar in depth visual / coding and mostly wanted to see how far I could do with the core mechanics of the units. did end up using some trigger work in the end though.
Before the crash, what I was able to do was prototype the core mechanics of how the game would play out, no actual terrain mapping or anything. it was very early but the main crux was clearly present. these are the 4 screenshots i took of the progress. they don't show a whole lot but I'll explain it all. As stated by the title, the gameplay would be inspired by King Leopolds style, such as Broken Alliances, or War of the Lost / 12 Kingdoms. namely, the core mechanic of them being "X units spawned every Y seconds". I wanted to design something that was more a mixture of this style with more "RTS" - esque elements to it.
Your military units would take up no food, but your workers would. And your workers could be stationed inside a building to make it "work". Each building would have their own resource to spawn units with. that resource being mana.
a buildings mana is regained by "attacking" a central mana crystal / obelisk / mcguffin. each attack "saps mana" from the source, granting the building the ability to spawn a new unit. the attack rate is determined by how many workers are stationed in the building, alongside any upgrades to building attack speed or sap rate. It is the Orcs Burrow ability that was used for this as that allows a non-attacking building to attack. Tweaking the attack settings allowed for it to not target any units naturally. to "sap" mana, you had to activate it using the specific auto-cast ability. It would never target an enemy; don't want free damage with buildings. This aspect required the most triggers to get it to work, and due to the maximum group selection of 12, the central mana source could only be sapped by up to 12 buildings at once. You would need to repair this central source to keep your military numbers up. The intention was it would be a frantic balance between amassing absolutely massive armies and maintaining a base to supply them.
I managed to be able to get the units to spawn immediately around the building, with up to three different types of "spawns". all three being able to be auto-cast, using mana as the only resource. getting them to Rally after being created required trigger work to do as well.
The first image revealed how this all works. There are three "summon X units from corpse" abilities. The Necromancers "Summon Skeleton", Crypt Lords "Carrion Beetles", and the Avatar of Vengeances "Spirit of Vengeance" ability. These are also the only three summon unit abilities that can be auto-cast. They all work slightly different, with the Summon Skeleton base being the most different, however they can all be tweaked to effectively work in the same way. through upgrading and changing out the spell, They can be made to either spawn better units, more units, or both. And it works perfectly.
How I managed to get the buildings to auto-summon, was that the buildings each had their own graveyard skill attached to them, where they only summoned one corpse at a time, but immediately. the unit that the corpse belonged to was an Ancient critter with an invisible corpse. I believe that is the specific set up. Ancients are the elves tree buildings, that are just destroyed when they die. no where in the course of the game would a unit that happens to be an Ancient, also happen to leave behind a corpse. Simply setting each buildings spawn unit skill to target an Ancient corpse was sufficient to make it so then they would never accidentally target a legitimate corpse. And as long as no normal unit is flagged also as an Ancient, this method would work entirely. I can't remember for certain, but I think the corpse could be spawned underneath the units, so right beside the building, but when it is summoned from, it would place the summoned unit in the next available location closest to the building.
Some secondary things I did, was set up a consistent camera zoom function, and used each units custom value variable to hold experience that whenever they passed a threshold amount (based on a calculation) there would be a dropped exp totem besides them that they were immediately triggered to pick up, and it would give them added damage or something similar. not really core to the idea, just something I wanted to add in and I have no idea how to actually implement the more fleshed out versions of this mechanic.
but yeah, the idea was that you would have a base that you would build up, with your military buildings (maybe others?) built around some sort of obelisk crystal things that would charge the buildings, mostly based on the workers inside the buildings, that could then allow you to summon a set of units from them at a given rate. Despite the fact that a unit can only have one auto-cast on at a time, using triggers I was able to make it so then the buildings would switch from "spawning selected units" to "sapping mana" modes.
the map would have been filled with different bases, different units, that you could take over. really from this point it would have played out in a similar style to Lost Kingdoms if I was to have followed through with it. It was mostly just this aspect of the game I wanted to tweak.
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