Vapourware Zodiac Legion - X-COM and dungeons

[Ninjerk]

Keep up the good work.

 

[Galdred]

Here are a few exemples of attack animation in engine (I have only extracted attacks and moves so far).
Beware, the gifs are a quite big (my gif skills are horrible...)

Spoiler

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Looking Forward to this!!

 

[KingDinosaurGames]

Hey Galdred, just popping over from the TWS thread after I saw your sig. Love this project and those sprites look fantastic! That first CC map you showed as an example is exactly the reason we went with it, that's the Jon Roberts Annual with some of their layer effects altered.

 

[Galdred]

Thank you all for your words of support! I got lucky with the freelancers I worked with, Cyangmou(art direction, tiles and characters) and Wolfenoctis (mostly characters) as they were highly skilled, and managed to do a lot despite my limited budget. I cannot recommend them enough if you are looking for pixel art freelancers.

 

[TheFilthyJack]

Xcom, JA2? Say no more sir, you got my very first brofist.
The art and animations look really good, can't wait to see more.

 

[cherry blossom]

Surprised at the size of hex-tiles. Wouldn't it be better if the tiles were smaller (or the characters bigger), also meaning that you could pack more tiles into locations ie. more tactical ground?

 

[Galdred]

Surprised at the size of hex-tiles. Wouldn't it be better if the tiles were smaller (or the characters bigger), also meaning that you could pack more tiles into locations ie. more tactical ground?

We originally planned to have bigger characters (We wanted 80*80 at first), but that would have drained the budget too fast(or reduced the amount of assets too much, depending on how you see things) . 64*64 character sprites was the best compromise we found.
There are several reasons for the big hexagons :
- The main reason for the hex size was to allow us to fit bigger monsters later on (multiple tile monsters usually do not work too well), and maybe even mounted units (both would be for an expansion, or as a kickstarter stretch goal, we'll only have humans and summoned skeletons/ghosts in the beginning).
- The hexagons are biger in the gameworld (they are supposed to represent a 3 meter radius hexagon in the game world) :
We wanted the fight to take place over the whole map as a whole, and not result in a succession of small skimishes and it allows us to have a reasonable range for missile weapons.

As you pointed out, there are some problems indeed with this approach : an obstacle needs to be very big to block a tile (otherwise, it makes no sense that the tile is blocked if you see that the character could just go through the tile around the obstacle, so many props had to be located on hex corners (and I had to veto several props design because they were supposed to block a hex, but that did not appear clearly).

 

[Galdred]

Given that the hexagon height is not very different from character height, how do you think mouse targeting would be the less confusing? click on an hexagon to select or interact with the object/ character present, or click on the character or object directly?
Or put an attack/whatever icon on top of the character to interact with it (but I don't think it would work well for selection).

 

[Galdred]

I have finished the animation part (some gifs to come soon), then a lot of things have happened at the same time :
Us moving back to France (so lots of paperwork to do, and I had to take care of packing and unpacking our things), then a second child arrived (which makes working from home not that easy anymore).
I am currently working on the UI (boring stuff like drop down list, which makes me regret not to have chosen unity for its assets shop), the editor, and the initial balancing.

 

[Galdred]

Here are a few attack animations with special effects :
Firesword :

Lightning sword :

I know this won't score us much in the originality department

 

[Ninjerk]

 

[Siveon]

 

[Cosmo]

Here are a few attack animations with special effects :
Firesword :

Lightning sword :


I know this won't score us much in the originality department

Don't sell yourself short, it looks great...

 

[Galdred]

Here are a few attack animations with special effects :

Spoiler

Firesword :


Lightning sword :

I know this won't score us much in the originality department

Don't sell yourself short, it looks great...

I was talking about the underlying magic system and its elemental attacks. The artists did a great job indeed.
I will present the lore a bit more next time, even though there is still much left to flesh out.

 

[Cosmo]

I was talking about the underlying magic system and its elemental attacks. The artists did a great job indeed.
I will present the lore a bit more next time, even though there is still much left to flesh out.

I think you can afford to have typical magic attacks like these : ok they're "basic", but again your 2d art gives them a flavor that's very much absent from equivalent effects in 3D.

 

[Galdred]

One of the artists (Cyangmou) is live now, working on a street tile :
https://picarto.tv/live/channel.php?watch=Cyangmou

 

[Siveon]

Nice.

 

[Galdred]

Another live stream, now with forest textures, and hills.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Damnit, how could I miss this thread.
Keep up the good work, bro.

Curious about what kind of engine is behind the game.

 

[Galdred]

Damnit, how could I miss this thread.
Keep up the good work, bro.

Curious about what kind of engine is behind the game.

Thank you
I decided to go with MOAI for several reasons :
Unity had no 2D subset at the time I picked (so no specialized sprite functions and things like that), and after having banged my head while trying to make a webgame with Django (Python web framework mostly designed for press websites), I wanted something I could tweak instead of looking for workarounds.
The main problem is that the engine is pretty confidential, so I would have to train anyone else to work with me, and there is nothing like the Unity asset store (I wish I didn't have to redo most basic UI functions for instance).
But now that unity is 2D, and MOAI have bled users(including Shadowrun Return's Harebrained Schemes), I would probably pick unity 2D if I were starting now (but I will still pick MOAI for my next games as I invested a ton in it already).

 

[Galdred]

We are working very hard on the tileset right now. Hexagonal tiles are a pain to use because there are many more border configurations than with square tiles (of course, if you don't mind the borders, it is not a problem).
So it means making a lot of variation for each tile (even if we were to force convex area of a given terrain), and then finding the correct tile for each terrain type depending on its neighbours. It would obviously not be very efficient to do that all by hand(that is what we had to do for the first test map).

For instance, we had to manually pick the relevant wall section or swamp section (there are 64 configurations for swamp/grass, and 50 for walls), which was a very slow and boring process.

Spoiler

But Tiled is pretty awesome, and has a powerful automap function.
We specify "rules" (ie condition on tiles in a layer), and it generates output tiles when we press A.
Exemple of rule :

There are 4 layers combined for this rule :
The region layer tells which areas to consider for matches (so it will try all hexes + neighbours looking for the pattern specified by input and inputnot).
There are 3 regions of 7 hexes there.
the input_groundtype layer has some tiles with a swamp terrain type (in red there) + the middle one (but it is covered by the output tile).
the inputnot_groundtype layer is the reverse of the input_ground layer (it is not visible there, but the tiles with region have a red swamp tile in the inputnot_ground layer).
And finally, the output_ground, which specifies the tile to use when the condition is matched.

So all there is to do, once the rules are specified is to fill the map with generic terrain type tiles and height levels, as follow, and it is transformed into the map you saw above.

Spoiler

In conclusion, I cannot recommend Tiled strongly enough. Sure, there are things that will be better done by a custom solution, but for the terrain edition itself, it is pretty awesome, and it has an unity plugin.
I wish I had known it to do my custom PnP RPG maps back in the days

 

[Galdred]

Due to the cost of redoing all animations, there won't be many different races so it will be largely humans vs humans (with a few summons and allies).
Here are a few additions to the bestiary (basically, we have tried to find designs that would add variety while only requiring minor edits to the animations, except for the head and body, which have much fewer frames than arms and legs. The benefit of doing so is that they can be euipped with all the arms and armors available) :
Orc (ally, neutral minor factions)

Ironman (craftable mini golem)

Homonculus(craftable creature)

Feedback is welcome : torso and head can be modified, but arms and legs cannot (except for colors).
Are they easy to tell from the standard human? Does the ironman feel out of place in a med fan universe?

 

[oscar]

Fighting dangerous humans/humanoids is generally more fun than fighting endless hordes of zombies or goblins anyway.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

So, how much of the game is done, do you plan to stick to it and do you have a composer?