Ruins battlefield video.
Update first post with new screens=)
So, all the characters are ready and here is small early gameplay demo.
Honest preview of our game from gamers=)
We didn’t think that we will meet such a big difficulties with game packaging. But now we have noticed that some gamers encounter problems during installation.
When our game was small, it was just enough to simply use InnoSetup to create single install.exe file. But now, when our assets took 2,5 gigabytes it became a real problem. Even after zip, setup.exe was 1.1GB! On some computers it just lags for a minute or two before starting.
So we decided to make very small setup.exe and then just update the game after first launch with our “updater”. It wasn’t the best idea, because gamers didn’t like it. To many actions they say… (150 downloads of pre-alpha and just 7 installs)
At last, we made InnoSetup project that uploads .pak files without “updater” (it has free and very nice plugins that implement such kind of things). This way, user just need to select the installation folder. It works perfectly!
TWO WEEKS OF EXPERIMENTS!!! TWO WEEKS!!!
One more thing about packaging. Previously we have used compressed .pak files because of a great reduction of the game size. But turned out that we need almost all the data when starting a single level, so the decompression time was incredibly high. The map loading time was nearly 30-40 seconds. Now, when we refused to use compression, it is just 5-7 seconds! Just note it guys…
Really nice battle. It’s much longer than usual, because we try to show game mechanics, interesting tactical solutions and all the units in action. This is the first PvP video with totally completed characters and special effects.
We made our greenlight trailer! Check it out
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=
Please support us on greenlight and say “yes”
Good work guys. Just Installed your prealpha. There is no sound? Is it ok? And where are you get the music? It is awesome! (by the way - voted)
Congratulations for the project and for the thread, too! We can follow all your progression, and it is really interesting for everyone to see how your studio works and how much effort you guys put on the project. Hope every studio will follow this idea!
Nice music, nice concept!
EDIT: Ah, and you have my Greenlight support!
Oh! Thank you for your support!
Guys… What can I say about Greenlight after this three days…
Never submit your game on Friday! It was our awful mistake, that we have started our campaign at Thursday night.
The main flow of people is from the first page on Greenlight. And on Fridays, game will be pushed from it in hours!
Now we see, that if we started the campaign on Monday and prepared .gif icon for it - we would able to achieve TOP 100 in a week. But now, without first page, it is really hard task (just first 20 hours on first page gave us 25% to TOP 100! And now every percent is a hard work)
Here is the first attempt of Kevin McKeown (turn-based strategies reviewer) to play Tactical Legends.
After watching it we see that there are some problems with learning game mechanics by new players. In new releases, we will try to solve them and make interface more friendly and informative. Also we will record a small tutorial video.
It seems Kevin, like many new players, doesn`t understand the basic concept – Action Points. Every movement or attack takes some number of AP. For example Archer. Her shot takes 5 AP, while she has 6 AP in total. So, she can move just one tile and then shoot (or shoot and then move slightly). If you see “sword” or “bow” – that means you have enough AP to move there and attack. Also, in the right-bottom corner you can see total number of Action Points and minimum AP for attack (dark blue).
And we want to say a couple of words about the AI. It is pretty easy at current build, but we will boost and optimize it later. Now it takes too much CPU time if we set “deep thinking” parameters. It doesn’t have any handicaps and must to calculate possibilities of hiring units during the battle. So, it is much more difficult than chess for example. Later there will be online multiplayer and AI will be good used for tutorials and logical puzzles.
DON’T FORGET TO SUPPORT US ON STEAM GREENLIGHT:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=
As promised, here is a tutorial video. Turn-based strategies reviewer Kevin McKeown decided to help new players of our game to avoid problems that he faced. Here he solves “tutorial” puzzles and describes basic game mechanics. The video is short, informative and can be really helpful for beginners.
WE HAVE BEEN GREENLIT!!! Thank you so much for your support! Now we are doing some paperworks and it will take a while. We hope, that first version of the game (yet, non-online) will be available on August. But you can already download it from our site http://.com
Currently working hard on sounds.
People says that music and sounds help to create unique game atmosphere. We’ve just added ambient sounds to each of currently available maps and want to share results.
It’s cool that engine can do some standard work with sound, like select random wave and slightly change it to make it “unique”. And it is really simple!
With such a nice instruments, it was a shock, when we found out, that we need external add-on to change sound class (ambient, music, effects, voice…) volume! Thank you, Rama for your Victory plugin!
Here we try to create our first dynamic sounds in Unreal Engine. It was “surprise” for us that footsteps has different sounds on different surfaces. So, we have here 87 sounds in total for 11 types of surface. Thanks God, there are very handy audio cue tools in UE4, that allows us to manipulate volume and pitch for every step to make every sound “unique” like we do with ambient sounds before.