Initial TideTurner Gameplay Concept

/trunk now contains a very preliminary concept demo of some ideas for TideTurner, here's a video:



I'll have to figure out how to improve the clarity when I prepare a video for the 0.3 release. But here is what you should be seeing:

• The player controls a character that can cast spells. Two spells are shown: Creating a skeleton minion, who fights for the player, and creating a force barrier to keep enemies away.
• Casting spells takes energy, which regenerates, so the player needs to decide which spells to cast at what time.
• Enemies arrive from two entrances to fight the player and his minions (the enemy skeletons are in red).
• A successful strategy should probably involve blocking one entrance while summoning enough minions to overcome those flooding through the other one.
• The force barriers - shown as semitransparent yellow - vanish eventually. Not preparing for that can lead to your demise, as shown in the video ;)

You can playtest this yourself right now, by compiling and running /trunk (use bzr lp:intensityengine to check it out). Revision 209 is what is shown in the video, by the time you read this a later revision might be current (which might be different or even broken; revert to rev. 209 if so). Note that you might need to start with a fresh server for things to work correctly, depending on what you currently have in /storage. This can be done simply by deleting the /storage directory under the installation directory, but note that this deletes all of the server's data, so if you have any maps of your own, back them up first.

Skeletons in /trunk

Work on TideTurner led to various bugfixes and small feature improvements in the engine during the past week (for example, more uniform handling of positioning for both static and dynamic entities). It's always the case that actually using a product leads you to find all sorts of small things that you don't think of during development...

/trunk should now contain a usable environment for testing of TideTurner: I imported all the media files, etc. - I don't like the idea of large binary files in a version control system, but really there is no alternative. I'll also try to set up a hosted server so that multiple people can playtest at once (I need to recompile the server for the appropriate distro). Finally, I set up a section in the forums for discussion of TideTurner development. Meanwhile, here is a random screenshot:


The main character model is by Tiziana aka TiZeta and the skeleton by Adam Ward aka Gixter. Both are models that can be used freely. I intend to replace them eventually, once I find an animator to work with on this project, but for now they should be good for playtesting.

The initial game idea is for the main character to have a few spells, one to summon a skeleton, another to create barriers (you can see one in the screenshot, it's the semi-transparent yellow area), and maybe a fireball for combat. The character will then fight another group of skeletons, perhaps led by another player, with the barriers being of stategic importance, to prevent your opponents from surrounding you, giving you time to regenerate health (the barriers will vanish after a certain time period, or if they have been damaged enough), and so forth. So far in trunk you can create barriers with a click and skeletons with a rightclick, and clicking on a skeleton makes it walk to you - still in a very early stage here.

Here is the code in charge of creating barriers:

create_barrier = StateArrayFloat()

BUTTONS_TO_SPELLS = { BUTTON_LEFT : "create_barrier", BUTTON_RIGHT : "create_minion" }

def click_action(self, button, x, y, z):
    self.clear_actions()
    self.queue_action( SpellcastAction([x,y,z], Commander.BUTTONS_TO_SPELLS[button]) )

def can_modify_create_barrier(self, value, actor_unique_id):
    self.barrier = create_logic_entity(Mapmodel)
    self.barrier.model_name = "forcebarrier"
    self.barrier.position = value
    self.barrier.yaw = yaw_to(value, self.position)

    return False # No need to change this value on the clients

It might not be entirely self-explanatory, as you need to have an idea of what StateVariables are and how can_modify_X functions work, but I think it does show how only a little Python code is necessary to do stuff like this.

Planning a Game

Version 0.2 of the Intensity Engine has been released. Highlights include procedural generation support, faster NPC movement and CEGUI 0.6.2b (for the full announcement see our forum). This incremental release includes most of the basic features I want to have in the engine at this point. I'll be constantly adding more, but major features will wait, as I am now going to focus on creating a game with the engine.

Towards that goal, I'm looking for people to team up with. Specifically, I'm looking for two people:

• a 3D artist/modeler
• a (C++) coder

Formal experience is unnecessary, as long as you know enough to get started and are motivated to learn and improve.

The codename for the game is TideTurner (the actual name will be determined later). The general game concept is a third-person action game, with the players leading NPC minions in battle. Aside from that, the specifics are yet to be determined. Playtesting will decide which ideas end up in the game and which don't.

If you might be interested in collaborating on this game, let me know, on IRC (#intensityengine on FreeNode), or by email at kripken -at- intensityengine dot com. Note that the engine is open source, but that does not preclude the game from being commercial. In particular, we can try in-game advertising to make money. Profits will be shared among all team members, of course.