Progress Closer to Play

Due to other distractions I took a short break from developing DragonSiege.
But since last week, I'm back in full action.


The world controller controls the progress of seasons, and triggers seasonal events.

• Growing of farm produce.
• Triggers yearly consumption of food for each unit

The buildings can be used by clicking on action buttons.

• Building other buildings
• Placing units in a production queue

I've also implement tooltips on various gui areas.


The current goal is to implement

• a particular gameplay system,
• keep the implementation of the gameplay system contained.

Thereby we have a playable game in a reasonable time, but the implementation is contained and we can swop the gameplay system to accommodate other gameplay systems in future.

The current gameplay system idea is:

The players start with nothing but a Town Hall in an untamed area of wilderness.
A series of monster dens and dungeons are distributed across the wilderness.
The players must tame the wilderness by achieving some objective.
- Conquer all monster dens/dungeons
- Conquer particular monster den/dungeon
The objectives can be expanded at a later stage.

• Buildings and Units require gold to be constructed/trained

• Each units require food every year
• Farms produce food every year
• Players acquire gold by killing monsters and raiding dungeons.

Players must therefore build farms to support units.
And kill monsters for gold to replace killed units and demolished buildings.

At a later stage I will implement heroes:

• If a normal unit survives impossible odds (such as single handedly slaying 5 difficult monsters in 1 minute) the unit will be flagged for becoming a hero and the player notified
• The player can then "recognise" the unit as a hero
• The hero will then begin acquiring experience to gain levels and abilities.
• The hero will also require additional gold payable yearly for its services. The player will be able to control the actual gold allocated to the unit.
  
• The hero will have a personality and may, refuse to do the commands issued by the player or prematurely run from battle if he is underpaid, or even do damage to allied units (without the intent to kill). A well paid unit may only run from battle if his life is threatened.
• Only a limited number of heroes will be allowed.
• Each hero will have a name and a standard voice recording. The player may interact with the hero in some fashion.
  

I've noticed that Reiner created a mounted knight in March. Graphics for mounted units are quire rare. It is a pity that the mounted knight does not have any attack frames.
It seems that Reiner plans to create attack frames.

I will add the mounted knight as a player unit as soon as attack frames become available.

Next on my agenda:

• Create monster dens
• Implement spawning of monsters
  
• Implement controllers for monster units.
• Create gold reward for killing monsters
• Implement path finding for units

I've implemented a fairly nice path finding algorithm for a previous strategy game before (Siege). Since the very beginning of developing DragonSiege I planned for the later requirement of path finding, so the game implementation lends itself well to implementing a fast path finding algorithm. A nice feature of Dragonsiege is that units push each other out of the way if they collide. (A larger unit will push a smaller unit away and a smaller unit will sidestep a larger unit). The path finding therefore does not have to worry about sidestepping other units.

For those that are interested: the collision detections between units are spacial disjoint. Units only consider other units in its vicinity for collision detection. This allows for a large number of units in the game. (My last test was with 6 000-10 000).
The collision detection also protects the game processing by disabling collision detection for any units more than X number of units appearing in the same vicinity. (Who cares about the collision detection of goblin number 51 if you already have 50 goblins on a pin all pushing and bumping each other for a place to stand)

Anyway, I'm excited to get the first playable version of DragonSiege ready!