voxn

a divine exodus of snakes

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pitch: in a confluence of terrible/overambitious ideas, I'm going to try and mix idle thumbs (a video game podcast) with solium infernum (a hex-based strategy game, where nightmare demigods vie for control of hell). Since the two are so similar I don't expect any hiccups.

 

solium is entirely about player manipulation and politicking, which ai can't handle, so predictably there's no singleplayer. As multiplayer is way beyond me, I'm going instead to try and create a (very basic) turn-based strategy game, which should be plenty adequate to stretch my meager ass programming skills to breaking. But mostly I wanna focus on that sweet demonic flavor!

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starting off! whipped up some hexes, and got them drawing in the right place. I'm using gamemaker, so in theory I can export to html5 and host it on itchio, which will be pretty slick if it works:

 

gZJ9y0g.jpg

 

next was (my real passion) some art. Shooting for full thumbs roster representation, here's the initial lineart for Remo The Infinite and The Great Bird:

 

hUwnDEm.jpg

 

 

 

 

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Are you drawing any inspiration from Barlowe for that art style?

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thanks everyone! Ideally the game will look completely serious to anyone unfamiliar with thumbs lore, which is proving an interesting challenge, haha

 

On 11/19/2016 at 6:55 PM, Rilen said:

Are you drawing any inspiration from Barlowe for that art style?

 

not directly; in an effort to keep things light & speedy I didn't lay much groundwork (collecting reference, etc) before starting. I just enjoy sticking horns and floaty bits on everything :B

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Well that's a really cool mentality! (glad you've seen his stuff before, to anyone else who hasn't and loves....really cool stuff: WayneBarlow).

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continued work on the hexes, trying to make a nice looking board. Random vertical shifting on all the tiles made for some interesting texture:

 

JqqmN1R.jpg

 

but I decided I'd rather it look a little less obviously board-gamey - so I made each individual tile more subtle, and ditched the shifting for now:

 

NV5luSa.jpg

 

looks like honeycomb now, but I think if I erase a few of the borders it'll create nice zig-zaggy patterns and start to look more like natural terrain. 

 

I also started adding objects to the tiles (as evidenced by the mountains), but haven't dove too deep on that yet. In the meantime, another character joins the cast!

 

Q5ZfCtT.jpg

 

need to give her a slightly fiercer expression though ( * ^ *  )

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*wiggles eyebrows at jake*

 

and thanks phill, I hope so!

-----

 

progress! Looking less eye-wateringly honeycomby, plus a fair bit of under the hood coding. Objects are now built from a little json database - as opposed to being hard coded - and clicking one sets it as the focus, popping up buttons for each action it has. No idea what those actions actually are yet, but I'm sure it'll be useful!

 

currently I'm thinking the main gimmick of the game will be simultaneous turns. You'll have a small handful of slots to assign actions: move, build, etc. Then, when you end the turn, it executes all your/the ai's actions

at the same time. I'm sure there's a lot of unforeseen programming challenges to this, but I can fall back on more standard turns if it proves too tough. 

 

61EX2EW.jpg

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Simultaneous turns are my favourite thing. Ever play Frozen Synapse? That game was fantastic! Keen to see how you tackle it, I'm sure you're right in that there will be a few weird edge cases that will be annoying to deal with.

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8 hours ago, phill said:

Simultaneous turns are my favourite thing. Ever play Frozen Synapse? That game was fantastic! Keen to see how you tackle it, I'm sure you're right in that there will be a few weird edge cases that will be annoying to deal with.

 

nope, I'm a mega novice when it comes to (non-roguelike) turn-based games. Looks fascinating though, I'll download it tonight.

 

thanks nappi! now if only this junk-ass forum software didn't resize all my precious aliased pixels *shake fist*

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today I added mouse scrolling (thus: giant map), a handful of new tiles, structure/unit databases, a bevy of unseen code, and began a spreadsheet to figure out mechanics -- which I'll make public and throw in here once it's a little further along. Coming up with units is a lot of fun. So far every one is an idle thumbs reference, but they get a little, uh, esoteric, and I'm curious if people will be able to puzzle them out.

 

Kc46oZZ.jpg

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thanks z!

----

 

fog (clouds?) of war, moving units around, and other things I'm forgetting!

sh4q0JL.png

 

started drawing the rest of the cast + progress on the first three:

 

SJGqu7z.png

 

though I've discovered it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a strong likeness the more rendering you do >:-I

 

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Man, peeps are really stepping it up this year. Love those tiles, and the portraits are fantastic.

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Hey @voxn! Just wanted to let you know that we are all very upset in the slack channel that you haven't been updating. Hope all is well and you are able to keep working on this! 

 

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