A turn-based tactical multiplayer online battle arena. You can hire units during the battle to adapt to the opponent forces composition and rich the primary goal defeating enemy king. Simple rules, fifteen minutes per match and no random values. Pure battle of wits. Yes, here you can do checkmate in three moves.
GAME FEATURES
Simple rules. Three minutes and you are in game
You can hire units during the battle
Very quick initial squad pickup. No tuning. Just hire and rush into the battle in ten seconds
No random values. No “luck”. Here you can do checkmate in several moves
Artificial Intelligence? Ok, we made it! After weeks of sleepless nights, we can say: “It’s alive!”. It was really much more difficult than we thought.
In action games the AI opponent always has the natural advantage: perfect accuracy and lightning fast reflexes, so the challenge in designing the AI for those games is making it act more human and to be beatable.
In turn-based strategy games the tables are turned. Speed and accuracy are no longer important factors and the cunning and intuition of the human player will easily out match AI opponent.
The task becomes even more complicated, if we take into account that here we have not one, but two different goals: destroy opponent king, save ours. And each player can buy additional units each turn, that can be placed on several starting positions.
As I said before, we try to use an approach based on the chess intelligence. And we have done it with a few remarks. In Tactical Legends much more combinations even at the start of a game, because the player can move all the units during single turn.
Thus, in the first turn we can get over 100 action variants. Each variant should be considered in conjunction with the opponent possible actions. So, we have 100×100=10000 combinations in the first turn, and 10000х10000=100000000 in the second!
Yes, it’s “brute force”, but even after some optimization AI cannot think in three turns ahead. It can, but it will take hours.
Now we have several AI presets, that can be treated as “easy” and “normal” with some differences as “favorite” units and tactics. Hope that in future we find the way to improve AI and to make it think in five turns. That will be nice
P.S. I’ll try to make some video that shows AI capabilities in late September.
After hundreds and hundreds of test matches and a lot of hard work, we have done the ingame battle interface. We spent much time to do it as friendly as possible. Here some screens that shows our work.
There is a list of units avatars in bottom-left corner where you can see:
a) Detailed info about selected character. On the left side listed current/max health, attack strength and defence. Attack strength is always the same, without any “you miss” so you can plan your actions. Defence is simply the number of damage points that armor absorbs.
b) Health points (red semicircle) and action points (green semicircle) of every unit to determine which unit already made the move and which didn’t move yet.
с) Marked avatar of the сurrently selected unit in the list of all units.
In the turn menu at the bottom-right corner you can find:
a) “End turn” button at it’s usual position in turn-based games.
b) Button of battle changing mode to walk/attack. Of course you can do this in many other ways like clicking on the same unit on the map or in units list, but gameplay shows us that this button must be right there.
c) Radial indicator with the current number of action points and the minimal number of action points needed for attack.
In the top-right menu you can turn on the map grid, which not only shows walkable tiles, but marks the tiles which that are hard to pass and need two or three action points. There also located “add unit” button, that opens window where the player can hire new warriors during the battle. Options button located, as usual, in the top-right corner.
At the top-left corner you can see player nick, current gold (each turn player earn 10 more), and current turn.
Besides widgets, there are some visual effects that makes planning the turn actions really comfortable. You can see not only highlighted tiles that shows you where unit can move, but “attack icons” on them, which identify tiles where unit can attack after going to. Tiles that are hard to pass highlighted with different colors.
Also you can hover the cursor over the enemy unit to see its move range and tiles where it can attack.
Of course you can rotate the map. It’s a 3D game
As we promised, here is the video with the gameplay of Tactical Legends. You can see full process from the hotseat menu to the end of the battle. In this video we try to show you features of the game that are already done. Despite the fact that Tactical Legends will be online game, we pay a lot of attention to AI, because it plays role of a teacher that shows you abilities of units, and let you test new tactics.
A few words about game mechanics:
To achive the vistory in the game you must defeat opponent king. Each team starts with 30 gold coins (+10 each turn) and The King. At any moment you can hire additional units that help you to reach you goal.
Every unit has several attributes:
Health – Number of health points. Nothing special
Attack – Damage that unit do to the enemy each attack
Defence – Reduces opponent attack damage. Total damage = Attack – Defence
Range – Attack distance in tiles
Action points (AP) – Number of tiles to move or spend on attacks or environment interactions
Action points per attack (AAP) – Number of action points for each attack
Price – Gold coins that player need to spend to hire the unit
More info about gameplay and mechanics you can find on our site.
At the stage of Pre-Alpha there will be a lot of updates that will come at daily basis.
For the brave alpha-testers, frequent downloading tons of files and infinite installation process may be a real problem.Knowing that, we prepare some kind of a launcher that downloads and updates only parts of the game that was changed.
We try to do our best to gamers having fun playing Tactical Legends.
TECHNICAL PART
Two words about how it was done. I am not gonna talking about Unreal patching system because now it is like a snowball, that make the game bigger and bigger each time. And using thousands of asset files, without any packaging is not very good idea too. To achieve best result, as we see it, we split our huge PAK file into several “clusters”. Many developers are thinking about it, but doesn’t know how to implement this method.
The answer is pretty simple but hard to find. We have the program named “UnrealPak” that located at EPIC\Epic Games\4.9\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealPak.exe and used to form PAK-files.
Here lies some useful info about it UE4 equivalent of AssetBundles (Unity) - C++ - Epic Developer Community Forums
We created .bat file that removes unwanted files and folders from the packaged game (without “Use Pak File”) like that:
rmdir J:\UProjects\TL\Package\WindowsNoEditor\Config /s /q
rmdir J:\UProjects\TL\Package\WindowsNoEditor\Content /s /q
del J:\UProjects\TL\Package\WindowsNoEditor\AssetRegistry.bin
del J:\UProjects\TL\Package\WindowsNoEditor\CookedIniVersion.txt
del J:\UProjects\TL\Package\WindowsNoEditor\.uproject
Then generate our custom PAKs, like that
START /b /w “TL” “J:\Programs\EPIC\Epic Games\4.9\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealPak.exe” “J:\UProjects\TL\Package\WindowsNoEditor\Content\Paks\Textures.pak” “-create=J:\UProjects\TL\Package\PakScript\TextureAssets.txt” “-compress”
START /b /w “TL” “J:\Programs\EPIC\Epic Games\4.9\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealPak.exe” “J:\UProjects\TL\Package\WindowsNoEditor\Content\Paks\Meshes.pak” “-create=J:\UProjects\TL\Package\PakScript\Meshes.txt” “-compress”
START /b /w “TL” “J:\Programs\EPIC\Epic Games\4.9\Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealPak.exe” “J:\UProjects\TL\Package\WindowsNoEditor\Content\Paks\KiteDemo.pak” “-create=J:\UProjects\TL\Package\PakScript\KiteDemo.txt” “-compress”
and so on…
For each PAK there is a “ResponseFile”. Here our example of KiteDemo.txt that is part of our project
J:\UProjects\TL\Saved\Cooked\WindowsNoEditor\Content\KiteDemo*.* …....\Content\KiteDemo*.*
Here is just one string, but there maybe a lot of them to get content from different places.
Don’t forget to put into some response file required:
It is parts of real batch file and it works. So every dot has its place! Just test the game after BAT-file finished its work.
Hope, this will help somebody
Small peace of the battle on the new map, that we call “Blizzard passage”. Here we want to show you that there will be a lot of different locations in our game, as well as many different strategies with various “army” compositions.
And of course you can always plan your actions, because rules strictly determine each action and their effects. Another words, your archer will always hit the target and there will be always the same predictable damage.
Thanks for the Paks technical details but wasn’t it the goal of “Use Chunks” of the deployment process screen (things that I wasn’t be able to manage at all).
Doesn’t the new Patch system of 4.8 solved your incremental paching?
It’s good to know that you can manage it manually, but if would have been great to manage this directly in the editor… - Epic ?
I don’t think Epic will do it soon, because it’s a thing that useful only for Win developers without Steam.
As for “Use Chunks” - it is really hard feature. There you need to assign each (each, one by one!) asset to appropriate PAK.
So, doing packaging using .BAT is pretty nice thing. Anyway, you need to deploy new version of the game to servers and the easiest way to do this = .bat + WinSCP (if someone need explanations “how to” - I’ll do it )
Benefits of using BAT:
Deployment process is one click (double click ). By executing the script you cook the game, generate PAK’s, upload game to the server
You can assign one or several asset folders to appropriate PAKs
There is possibility to publish/update something on the website through CURL
“The Ruins” - decorated version of the very first Tactical Legends map. Here we tested early game mechanics and AI. You can see its phases of evolution on screenshots. Infinity Blade assets perfectly matches our goals to design fantasy world ruins with a lot of obstacles. Maybe later we will rethink some details, but even now you can see the main idea.
We hope that this map will get your sympathy.
New detailed version of interface ready. Sometimes I think, that interface is the main part of the game… It really “eating” our time. Hope, we will start to work on characters in a week or two. At last.
Here we show some basic effects of the game that are already implemented. Also there is a new detailed version of interface, new design of the “Ruins” map and… some ingame soundtrack.
Now we are working on special effects for two new units and from November 20, we, at last, will begin to design game characters.
When we start to prepare the game for testers there was a question: “What is the best way of interacting with them?”. We decided that it is ingame bug reporter.
Really, this idea and its implementation was pretty simple and based on the JSON Query plugin that sends bug info from tester to our site where we can see some additional information like: “what map it was”, “how much gold players has” and so on. Here is the screenshot of bug reporter interface.
We like to play our game and we recorded one of the matches between me and lead programmer to show you the common battle flow and basic Tactical Legends features that are quite different from other turn-based games.
Note that early PRE-ALPHA is already in free access and can be downloaded from http://.com/download
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). By executing the script you cook the game, generate PAK’s, upload game to the server
