#2 Act of War

Well, it’s game no. 2 and I’m already asking myself what I’ve myself into with this project 😆 Act of War is a turn-based strategy/tactic game from 1992, a bit like the X-Com series but stripped-down a lot due to it’s PD nature. It’s again written in AMOS.

Phew, this won’t be easy. I mean, all the elements seem manageable (except for AI which I never really worked on before) but there are quite a lot of them. I think, I’ll implement only the basic elements so I won’t get bogged down by all the details. Assemble the parts and see that it works, that should be enough for now.

 So let’s see where this will take me.

Update #1

This was simple enough after I figured out the Clip Content feature…

Spent most of time on recreate the layout of the game’s UI. I’m pretty happy for the start, but it took me bit since Godot’s UI system felt almost impenetrable for a long time and I just started to get the hang of it. It mostly comes down to using the Anchor Presets and enabling the Expand properties for UI areas that should have a semi-fixed size.

Actually, I binned the whole thing today and started fresh, after I discovered the Clip Content feature to clip the Tileset which, so to speak, should be masked by the UI except for the playing field area. Before I had figured this out, I used ColorRects for manually masking the play field which didn’t feel right.

 

All in all, this felt like a Godot UI bootcamp for me—but hey, that’s exactly what I wanted. Much more effect than reading about it (again) and watching tutorial videos (again).

 

 

The UI tree looks nice and clean to me now

Other than that, I started implementing loaders for reading JSON and tsx files coming from Tiled. I realized there’s already an addon for that in Godot, but it helps to trace these steps on my own for now.

Well, I think it’s time to code some basic game functionality now.

Update #2

• Implemented displaying info read from TileSet files in the Status label
• Implemented dragging the map, yay!

Update #3

We now have a single test character to work on

I did some early work on characters stuff. These are loaded from a JSON file, too (well, only one test character for now). Not much in terms of properties though, only ID, name, AP and HP.

Also some further work on shaping up the basic UI. It’s now possible to see display status texts when hovering the map and characters, and you can select a character via click which will display their stats in the large description field.

Next up, basic character movement.

Update #4

Spent far to much time on getting basic camera following (or rather the tilemap moving under UI) to work – this math stuff is always my worst enemy. Anyway, it’s now possible to select and switch selection between characters (with the map focus following), as well as move them around on walkable tiles with the action points tracked and the camera following.

 Update #5

The colored digits in the bottom right corners indicate the associated player.

Implemented basic functionality for 2 (or possibly more) players. Characters are now assigned to each player, positions are loaded from the a new layer on the Tiled map, a bit like in the original game (where character starting positions seemed to be fixed per map). Ending turns is possible now, action points are reset, and the player control is changed to the next player in line. It’s now possible to play an extremely limited round of this. Well, you can’t shoot anyone yet, so it’s running around on the map for eternity ;)

My plan is to implement a simple shooting mechanic so one player can defeat the other, ending the game. After, I think I move on to the next game. I could trying to implement a simple AI but that would eat a lot of time researching and trying to get anywhere, and I’ve already learned so much with this game. Of course, there’s no one keeping me from revisiting this at a later stage.

Update #6

Shooting is implemented now, so it’s finally possible to play is as something akin to a real game :) Of course this doesn’t only include shooting at other characters (would have been trivially simple), this uses RayCasts to shoot at tiles that are in the between the shooting character and the target, and destructible tiles are destroyed. I’ve also implemented some very simple winning mechanics kicking in as soon one party is out of members.

As announced in my last post, I think I have enough for now and will move on to the next game. I’ve already learned a great deal on the way so this was a excellent opportunity.