Beta Castle Mashers

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Taddio

Guest
Castle Mashers

Castle Mashers (working title) is my take on the "Tower Offense" genre.
It has a Single Player campaign and a 2-Players battle mode.

In Versus mode, the goal is simple, destroy the opponent base before he destroys yours!
You build units on one of the five lanes that lead to the opponent's castle, but these units will only engage in fights with opposing units that are one the same lane.
Each of the seven available factions (some are unlockables by in-game achivements) has 4 unique unit types:
- Archers: Can only defend the base
- Melee: Basic fighting unit, usually kind of slow and weak, but quick to build
- Mounted: Strong and fast unit, but slower to build
- Siege: Very slow to advance, vulnerable against melee attack, but ultimate damage against enemy base. Very long build time.

You can shoot your archers to defend your base, and there's also a way to repair it (as well as upgrading the archer's garrison)

This .GIF of dubious quality shows the menu page where you can select your faction:


And this screenshot shows a battle about to begin between the Aliens and the Vikings (yup, you read that right):


Ad this is a battle between Knights and the Vikings, on the Viking level:

There's a couple of modes that allow you to build units, and you can switch gamepad modes in-game. Each mode has it's pros and cons.
- Speed Mode: You mash the buttons as fast as you can. It's that simple, and can be very efficient. Very painful during long sprints, tho.
- Reflex Mode: Press the random button shown on screen as fast as you can. Good way yo rest after a Speed Mode Sprint.
- Brain Mode: Asks a random question (maths, general culture, etc) with 4 answer choices. The efficiency will depend on your wits alone.

The Single Player campaign mechanics are still being worked on, as I want to add quite a bit more strategy in there, but there will be a storyline intertwining between all 7 factions (Knights, Orcs, Vikings, Cavemen, Aliens, Night Prowlers and (of course) Zombies). Altough the graphics are very cartoony-looking, my plan is to have pretty crude/ironic dialogs, so it probably won't be a game for kids (in the dialogs, anyway!).

I'm planning to release a demo soon with pretty much all the 2-Players mode in it, and maybe a couple single-player missions, so I will keep posting updates here as I get further down the road with it.

Let me know if you have thoughts, questions or comments!

Cheers
 
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mamacato

Guest
Altough the graphics are very cartoony-looking, my plan is to have pretty crude/ironic dialogs, so it probably won't be a game for kids (in the dialogs, anyway!).
I wouldn't worry about cartoon-ish characters being perceived as kid-only. A curmudgeon, perhaps, might take exception. The characters and faction ideas are really fun! Keep it up
 
T

Taddio

Guest
Why make it crude? Keep it kid-friendly and sell more tickets.
That's just my twisted sense of humor, I guess... All the dialogs will pretty much be in the tutorial and for storytelling and will all be done by a narrator character which has drunken/crude/passive-agressive attitude (trying to make it as funny/clever as possible, tho).
Who would want to go in a battle with someone who never says ****, **** or ****** this *** ***** of *************, anyway, right? :D
Oh, and yeah, my marketing strategy is poop, I just do games I would like or I find interesting to develop mechanics I came up with. If I was in it for the money, I would just push casual puzzle mobile games one after the other!
These kids will grow up to talk like pirates (and get a credit card) soon enough anyway!
 
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T

Taddio

Guest
This was another pretty busy week where I mainly focused on giving visual cues to the players as to what's going on in the game.
I ditched the regular loading bar concept and went with something else altogether, which can be seen in this .gif

To my eyes, the particles still need a little love, but I like the concept so far.

I also messed with draw_sprite_part and particles on the next one, which is what happens when a castle gets destroyed. You can clearly see I drew my inspiration from the best and most classic platformer of all time (and the game that got me hooked on gaming). Ignore the white horizontal bar, it's just a debugging tool I forgot to hide before taking the gif.


Finally added a name input screen for when the player first starts a profile. This one was a little trickier than expected to make it work with regular keyboard inputs as well as gamepad, plus the fact I'm using sprites as font...anyway, that's how it looks so far.


This week is going to be spent more in Inskcape and Dragonbones than in GM, as I'm moving on unit animations. It's going to take a little while, as it's not my field of expertise, and there's a lot to do (over 30 units with 4 animation states each...just thinking about it makes me want to get ****faced :confused:), but I'll get through...
Until then, happy deving to you, and thanks for reading.
 
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Taddio

Guest
These last two weeks were good again. Very good!
Worked on animations which turned out better than expected, due to the technique I use (frame-by-frame with vector body parts, it's painstaking, but I like the workflow and the "not that smooth" animations work great with the cartoon look).
I added a main menu, a victory screen and conditions, tweaked everything for the second player, added rumbling when the castles crumble/gets attacked.
Getting the rumbling to feel good was a lot more fine-tuning than expected, and has different results with different controllers, so not sure if I won't just set the rotors to 1 all the way and be done with the subtilties.
Anyway, I know you guys like GIFs, so I plugged 2 controllers and played with myself to show you guys where it's at (yeah, sounds weird, but you know...).
Spoiler: I won.


The game is at the point that I will soon be looking for testers outside my real-life buddies (sort of my closed-beta), so if you have 2x directX controller (XBox 360 and the likes), a real-life buddy and are interested in giving me a hand with feedback, bug finding, and such, you're very welcome to contact me here or in private.

In the meantime, happy deving to you, and thanks for following my stuff! :)
 
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