I am making a free browser game(not a blockchain) and looking for feedback and exposure. I would also like to explain a bit about the design and development. I was told I can write about it on Hive. Not sure if this is the best community, but I read the rules and it seems appropriate. I have not spent much time on Hive blog though so let me know if there's a better place.
Contents of this post:
What is Command Squad Alpha?
Gameplay trailer
City Map Update
Gameplay
How I am building a game like this (tools and methods)
About me
So what is CSA? It is (for the browser) a single player, real time, squad based strategy game which uses procedural generation to create maps. Basically you can create unique maps/missions in seconds with the mission generator. It is a sandbox game (genre) not the blockchain thing.
Here is the first gameplay demo
This is the city map mostly finished and ready soon to play
The gameplay in the first video trailer is already built, but I will probably finish the city map before uploading it. So you can play in the next few days. It will be a sort of Open Alpha, building as I get feedback.
Gameplay will be based around stealth and tactics rather than all out action. AI and using cover will play a major part. You can also issue multiple commands/ waypoints to units. If you remember Rogue Spear had something similar in the mission planner, but in CSA you can do it in real time in the the game, that is where I got the idea anyway, I am sure other games have done something similar. I also want it to feel realistic, especially health, movement and AI and gun play. Almost like a combat sim, but I will sacrifice realism for performance and other design issues.
How am I building it?
I am writing vanilla JS and PHP, no engines, no libraries, no node, just my text editor. I create all the graphics myself in Inkscape and Gimp. I also am doing all the sounds and music, except for the voice samples is the only thing I bought.
Graphics are 2D, but with a 3D feel. Isometric movement with some vertical layers and depth but front facing structures. I am trying to get the benefits of isometric without the pain of coding it and the weird diagonal navigation.
Lets look at designing and coding the units. Obviously they need to face multiple directions, so I created them. I used a clever trick and just reversed left and right.
So coding wise how do you know which to draw? If the unit is moving or facing a direction, you know the unit coordinates and the target coordinates, with these you just normalize them symmetrically with the new unit coordinates being XY 00. Then I used fractions on the target XY to determine the direction, but I only need to do this for one quadrant then I can flip it. These are some blurprints I created to help.
This should be helpful if you want to make a similar game, but note this is something I drew during development a long time ago, it is very possible there are some mistakes in it that I fixed while coding. This is just the general method I used. I ended up with 8 directions for movement and actually I think 40 or 41 for firing / targeting, this is because it looks really odd when the gun laser or bullet fires out at a weird angle. I did also experiment with animating the arms and body separately, but that got a bit messy, so tweaking the gun direction a bit worked well enough to create the full extra sprites.
About me
I am an indie game developer. I went to a music college, then to university to do computer science, dropped out after the first year. Since then I did freelance web design, graphics and music. I no longer freelance. For about 10 years I have been building games for myself now. Although most of that time was on Android, I actually spent some years building something like CSA for Android, even has a map editor. But I did not release it or market. I wanted to finish what I started, but realized I hated working on Android. Also it is probably too complicated for a mobile game. So I started porting it to JS (which I had not built a game on before), and it was very simple and fast to do. In fact writing and testing in JS is amazing to me. While developing for Android/java/mobile was a real pain, it seems those years of my life working on it were not wasted. I am happy that I can write my own game engine for multiple platforms, even if it is only 2D. Maybe I will make a 3D game one day, I would like to, in this case I will just use Unity, because I can't afford to spend years learning how to make a 3D engine. I am getting old! Currently my income is from trading, but it is not enough to live on or pay rent. I would like my games to provide some income. CSA is the main one but there are other smaller mini games I am doing. They will all be free completely, when people play them and enjoy them hopefully they will support my work through donations in crypto or something. I would also like to create some fun merchandise.
Your feedback is much appreciated. Right now just telling me that I am working in the right direction and you can see my vision for CSA would be helpful. The graphics and mechanics will all be improved anyway though.