New Build Release Schedule!

Hey guys, I bring you great news.

We’re changing up the way we release builds. Instead of builds that take forever to release and are packed with new features and practically feel like a different game, we’re going to release smaller, more frequent builds.

Summarized:

What does this mean?

The Good:

Builds are released more often – no more dealing with the god-awful gaps between releases that end up loosing us popularity and allow time for people to forget to keep looking after this game. With more freuquent builds that seem just-over-the-corner, the game will seem to improve faster (even though that will stay the same) and modders and community members won’t have to deal with nasty slumps in between builds.

The Bad:

Builds are smaller – each one won’t have an absolutely crazy effect on how the game is played, and they won’t add enough new features to make you play hours more over the previous ones. Two to three of these new builds will pack the same features as one of the old ones.

Some of the items on the build 2 list (spells, skills, minimap, ranged weapon revamp) are moved to build 3, which will be the actual finish of the battle system. D:

Progress Report (23-11-09)

The gears are spinning again – we got a bunch of stuff done – and I have a screenshot to prove it!

If you go check the Checklist, you’ll notice a couple of things have turned a beautiful green.

I managed to show them all off with a single screenshot (yay!)

Notice:

The HUD is gone, excpet for the stats of the unit you selected and the end turn button. The other button you see is a notifier that tells you if you’ll have enough AP to take an action after you move to the cursor.

There’s a horse (yay!) and a guy riding it. Calvary. With working collisions. Oh yes. Notice: I actually took my time spriting the horse – trying to get a style down for the rest of the graphical revamp later. Check it out: 

It’s in widescreen – this isn’t default! It’s a custom resolution! Now anyone can have the game fit their monitor, yay! (Shown at my 1440×900 resolution)

Screenshot: http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/71/horseshudwidescreen.png

(Linked because it’s too big to post here)

Pretty nice, huh? Next up will be speed bonuses, and after that the collision revamp and ai revamp. Good things are in the future.

Also notice: The website’s been cleaned up. Now you can access the latest build AND the latest checklist through the navagation bar at the top of the screen! Classy!

Until next update,

SunnyKatt

Pre-Build 2 Checklist

THIS CHECKLIST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://blearekingdoms.wordpress.com/checklist/

Go there for updates to the checklist!

You can click the link on the navagation bar at the top of the site.

-SunnyKatt

Build 1 Impressions

After every build we’re going to try and do an “Impressions” post, where we gather the most important of the feedback we’ve gotten and put it to use. This is 6 days after the release of the first build, and the young, unstable forum threads and topics are sliding past the first page (anyone that wants to legally bump them would be great).

So now’s the time to think about the next build. Here’s a couple of comments that I thought were very relevant and shows us something we had to do.  Feel free to chime in and help us with our brainstorm.

1.) The HUD/GUI – This has been a concern for a couple of people, so it’s our concern now. It’s taking up too much of the screen, and it’s bothersome to click for simple tasks such as moving and attacking. Nailog had already suggested to get rid of it entirely, and I actually may do that, but instead just opening a “mini hud” over the heads of units when you hover over them for a second. This will have thier stats and special abilities, but things like moving and attacking will be done just by clicking on the proper target.

A random comment to back this up (not Nailog, discussed that already):

I can see a lot of work went into this. Presentation is very nice, unfortunately controlling your army is kinda awkward. Having to click each individual soldier and then moving over to click the “move” box is really cumbersome. Why can’t i just select where I want him to move after selecting him by left clicking on the field. And then just right click an enemy to attack him. Great base engine though.

The problem of micro-controlling your army can be fixed as well with multi-selection and temporary ai switching, however I’m not sure if that idea will make build 2 or not.

2.) The Graphics – While at one point during the development process I decided to beef the graphics, I had changed my mind and instead made them not-placeholder. Currently the graphic style is in limbo – Pixelled soldiers but with photoshopped backgrounds and low-res scaled textures? Gross. I figured because we were focusing on the engine, many people would not notice in the first build. Wrong.

Comments used to back this up:

The graphics is very low-def the game would work a lot more better with high resolution textures.

And a bunch of other less-helpful ones like “graphics could use some work” etc.

I think first off, we need to establish a set style for our game. We need to stop being lazy photoshoppers and get down and pixel those huge annoying trees. After I do all then and don’t scale them, it should look nice. However, it will run slower, but I have some optimization ideas in mind. (By the way, we had 0 complaints about the game speed as of now! Great!)

3.) Glitches – So far (and I’m proud of this, mind you), there have only been two detected bugs with the game. I’ll list them here:

Guys getting stuck in stuff/on other people  – This is a collision glitch we are aware about, and we’ll try and re-write the collision system for the next build so this doesn’t happen. It’s recorded in this humorous account from a player (DataRealms forums):

Interesting game.  I always though a movement system like this would be neat.  It does end up being a lot more work to do it this way, however.
Exhibit A:
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/2149322/screenshot100.png
Can’t get out of that spot even though there is plenty of room.  Also, there was a crossbowman in there that was stuck and forced to shoot this poor bugger point-blank in the forehead to dislodge himself.
There was only one enemy left, too.  He was a crossbowman as well.  He got stuck in a wall, just like Keith here.  Unfortunately, this made it difficult for everyone to finish the battle and go home for lunch.
All in all, interesting premise for a game.  Good luck.

Yeah, that needs being worked on, I think. It’s on the to do list (by the way, the official checklist won’t come out for a little bit more, so don’t expect this to be it – it isn’t!

Health dropping below 0 for a split second just before death – While I actually never saw this one, apparently a couple of people have. They didn’t give much information other than that, so I’ll have to find it. Shouldn’t be hard, shouldn’t take long. :)

4) Annoying Music Loop – We’re aware of this – our music producers are working on this at the moment and will fix the loop. Also, on a very related complaint, people have said that The menu music didn’t fit the game. That’s ok, considering that it was just temporary all along and it will be replaced soon. ;)

Otherwise, no complaints about the battle music.

And besides all that, there were ALOT of good comments. More than there were bad ones (actually, there were no bad comments. Everyone that had something constructive to say also had good stuff to say and they liked the game.)

That’s all for the first week (almost  a whole week, whatever) of impressions. I’ll post up the checklist next, most likely. :)

Feel free to support Bleare Kingdoms in these topics:

Game Torpedo Forums – http://www.gametorpedo.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=76

Game Torpedo Site – http://www.gametorpedo.com/projects/bleare-kingdoms

NOD – http://nationofdesign.7forum.info/general-chat-f3/bleare-kingdoms-build-1-released-t1248.htm#28123

TGC – http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=158776&b=2

YYG - http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/98648#

GMC – http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=449495

GGE – http://www.greatgamesexperiment.com/game/BleareKingdoms

GameJolt - http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/strategy-sim/bleare-kingdoms/884/

GameJolt forums - http://gamejolt.com/community/forums/topics/bleare-kingdoms-strategy-rpg-build-1-released/162/

DA  – http://sunnykatt.deviantart.com/journal/27582752/

DR – http://www.datarealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=16751

YYGF – http://87.117.195.66/forums/4/topics/30597

DDNN – http://www.ddnnteam.com/game-wip-s-beta-incomplete-f4/bleare-kingdoms-build-1-released-my-game-t4353.htm#77799

BUILD 1 RELEASED

That’s right, baby. After lots of sweat, blood, tears, and other things you don’t want to get on your keyboard,  today we have finally finished Build 1. Weighing in at around 13.0 megs, we’re proud of it. Even though it’s just a battle system. A highly moddable one, that is. My kudos to whoever releases the first zombie-killin’ mod on the forums.

Speaking of the forums, we did a bunch of moving around now that people will actually be going there. Please, register and make mods for everyone to enjoy. You may even get featured in the devlog, or get your mod made into official content, or something. ;)

Here she is – enjoy. (click ye link below)

DOWNLOAD BUILD 1

While you’re downloading, check out these cool screenshots!

A little old, but new enough. :P

A little old, but new enough. :P

I’m so happy! Now time to take a few days off. :P

Remember to report any bugs on the forums and to post your mods there too.

SunnyKatt

Progress report 24-8-09

Remember when I said build 1 would be ready in a couple of weeks? Apparently I had no idea what was about to happen. We got tied up big time with outside-of-game-making things, and haven’t been able to work on it much lately. We’re working on the actual demo level at the moment. When that’s done, this is all we need to do, really.

• Sound FX
• Music (Just porting it in, really)
• Main Menu
• Tutorial messages
• Mod documentation

And we’re done! But not yet. I don’t have any clue when we will get this done. I’m still very busy, so when I find time I’ll get working on it some more. Sorry for the huge delays.

Just letting you know we’re still working on it,

SunnyKatt

Progress Report (21-7-09)

Hello everyone, we have some new features added.

First off, Here is a new screenshot so you can get a grasp of what the new hud looks like (this is for you, nailog. Does it still need moving around?)

http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/5668/progress72109.png

There’s the link; it’s too big of an image to put here.

New Features we added:

• Move fields only show were you really can move now. In other words, they conform more accurately. Look at the screenshot above: Before, the move circle would have shown a small sliver travel in-between some of the soldiers that would supposedly say that the character could move there, when in reality he wouldn’t fit. This makes it much easier to move them.
• We now have the effect engine coded in – now we can make cool dust clouds and other effects drawn on top of the screen and load them as easily as decals.
• We added in the memclean DLL, which allows us to reduce our game ram usage to less than half it was before.
• Arrows can stick in people, walls, and the ground, however we need to improve the accuracy it sticks in people. Sometimes they go too far in or they are too far out and not really sticking in them at all.
• We added in an enemy turn progress bar, which shows how far the AI is from finishing their turn.
• Various Bugfixes, and other things I forgot about.

Yeah, it doesn’t seem like much. We were busy the last week with other things, but progress continues. Working hard to get build 1 released!

SunnyKatt

Progress Report 12-7-09

REMEMBER TO KEEP CHECKING THE CHECKLIST TO SEE WHAT STILL NEEDS TO BE DONE!

Hey guys – Build 1 should be available anytime from a week from now to a few weeks.

If you looked at the checklist and didn’t see any new amount of stuff get done, you’ll be wondering if we’ve made any progress. The answer is a huge yes! We fixed a bajillion little bugs and added a bajillion little features to make gameplay easier.

Notable ones among them:

• Pathfinding AI is better now.  Now it can navigate in small spaces and through houses, and it rarely has the “jiggling” glitch. However, now it can appear to get stuck in a dead-end hallway or something, but fixing this one will be complicated and we will leave it for a later build.
• When shooting your bow, you can now “partially” reload if you have extra action points but not enough to reload all the way. This is extremely helpful to players that have extra AP but can’t use it in battle. :)
• We made the HUD button text dynamic and changeable – now during an enemy turn it says ENEMY TURN and when moving the game calculates if you won’t have enough AP left after a certain move when showing the field and it says NOT ENOUGH AP. This helps so players can plan out where they move if they want to attack.
• We changed the font to upheaval, which not only fits the game style better, it is completely free for commercial use.
• We added health, mana, and AP bars under the text in the hud, which allows the player to get at a quick glance around how much health they have without having to read the numbers.
• We (today, actually) are going to add a system where you can still attack if you do not have enough AP, but it will loose power accordingly.  This will be good for those times when you accidentally move too far and cannot attack.
• When moving, attacking, and changing direction there is a little marker that shows how much AP it will use.
• When changing turns, a large ENEMY TURN and YOUR TURN banner shows up, making for easier turn navigation.
• AI modes, though planned in detail for build 2, have been partially integrated to allow for sentry ai (Ai that sits still unless it sees an enemy within a certain distance to it) and flee ai (AI that runs away until it is far enough – this is used for archers when they are too close to an enemy)
• Added a zoom feature – now you can zoom out to see the whole battlefield or zoom in to see individual soldiers. :D

I’ll add these under “small features” in the checklist.

We’re Getting closer!

SunnyKatt

Screenies + Updates! (28-6-09)

NOTE: BE SURE TO KEEP CHECKING THE CHECKLIST TO SEE WHAT IS GETTING DONE!

Hello! We’ve gotten a ton done, but haven’t posted because we’ve just been updating the checklist. To see what we’ve done lately, look at the green stuff there.

But I’ve made a new post to show you the significantly better-looking game at the current state. The graphics aren’t all done yet, and we know that the units look identical (we’ll switch em up for the fist build)

Here they are!

Just some fighting. Pretty Blood.

Some more fighting. Notice the cool blood spurt.

And here are a few big ones you’ll have to open in  a new window:

Mid-combat screenshot

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/2069/bkcombat.png

Archer, showing it’s field and the yellow accuracy circle, the field (like the move field) conforms to objects and shows you where the archer can shoot. The yellow circle grows in size depending on how far away it is from the unit, showing the accuracy and possibilities of where it could land.

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/3254/bkarchers.png

Player lost. Blood!

http://img140.imageshack.us/img140/1069/bkgameover.png

That’s all for today. Notice the trees with the fade-out canopys. :D Work will continue!

and

R.I.P. Billy Mays. I loved his informercials, they brought joy to my soul.

SunnyKatt

***pre-Build 1 checklist***

THIS WILL BE UPDATED AS FEATURES ARE ADDED UNTIL BUILD ONE

Well, it’s the end of another month. Build One is within view! But there are a bunch of things to be done.

Things colored green are finished. Things colored red have to be done.