(Back to) Game Development Posts

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I don't think I've written (m)any posts about the game I'm creating. So I thought, maybe it's time to ramble on about it for a bit.

Currently the project is ~3 - 3.5k lines (not that line count is really an indication of how good anything is).

The game is intended (no real plan - super agile development!) to be a turn-based strategy game, sort of like the game Frozen Synapse but very different. That's the closest game I could think of. You take control of 1 - 4 characters on a level. And you have to kill all the enemies to win the level. The game is similar to an RTS, in that you click the tile of the map which you want the character to move to, the game will then use the A* algorithm in order to generate the shortest path to the destination. Current the characters are represented by spheres, and the player's characters are based on Ghost in the Shell characters:

Purple - Motoko
Red - Saito
Blue - Togusa
Pink - Batou
Grey - An AI Enemy

The current (debug) HUD is as follow, the enemy's data is in the top left of the screen, and the player's current current is on the left of the screen. Characters can be switched using the 1, 2, 3 or 4 keys.

The screenshot below shows the pathfinding in action.

The black sphere is the cursor to indicate which tile is selected.

The blue squares of the path represent the tiles which are reachable this turn, the red squares mean unreachable tiles.

The grey cubes are the walls of the maps, the brown box are items of cover.

The map is randomly generated using the Drunken Walk algorithm.

All characters are armed with guns, to find out the tiles your current character can shoot, you press S:

 

The algorithm to calculate the tiles that the player can shoot is slow, so slow that I spent a whole day converting it to be multithreaded so that it would run roughly 4 times faster. Currently looking into implementing Bresenham's line algorithm to calculate this, but my first attempt wasn't very successful (much quicker however!)

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