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[Muz]

So, there's been some talk about starting a game based around Mini Troopers.

For those who don't know the game, it's sort of like Progress Quest (zero player) game where you choose a bunch of troops, level them up, pick skills for them, and watch them fight. The downside right now is that it only allows a few battles a day and has extremely slow progress.

What I'd like to work on now is a very simple single player version. I had worked on my own interpretation of the genre for a few weeks, but stuff kept getting in the way.

Anyway, here's my outline for the game:

• Similar watch-and-level-up gameplay
• Roguelike-ish gameplay. No saving, you run through the game without a single save and try to survive on luck and knowledge of the game.
• Quick gameplay, you can probably play the whole game in about 3-4 hours, but most of the time you'll die much earlier.
• Cover mechanics, one shot can kill, but cover and a little armor will prevent deaths.
• A simple equipment system.. body armor, head armor, main weapon, side weapon, weapon mods.
• Game storyline will be fairly linear. You click on missions on the map, and as you complete some missions, you'll unlock several others.

However, I'm a little too busy to work on it (have a ton of things I have on higher priority than this). I do have a bit of experience working on games in a group, and I'd be happy to help direct this or help with the game design. I'll also keep this OP updated on the latest progress, if any.

My version of the code was screwed a few times thanks to some bugs in Construct, so if anyone wants to code it over from scratch, not much is lost. I spent most of my time on the game design so far anyway. I'd prefer not to code it really, since it's a bit too time consuming, and I don't really have a lot of skill with coding, compared with some of you. The game is simple enough to make in something like Game Maker, and very simple if you left out things like cover and equipment.

[Scelly9]

Cool. That would be awesome, although I can't help with coding.

[Muz]

Hmm... just figured something out. My original approach was to try to triangulate the shots trajectory by giving the attackers a targeted point, and then tweaking the angle a little based on the weapon's accuracy to determine what it actually hits. It's probably the most accurate system, but harder to code and maybe more computationally intensive for lots of bullets flying at once and having lots of cover in the area to factor in.

A simpler way would be perhaps to just apply some kind of 'dice' approach, similar to old RPGs. For example, have a shot, roll how far it'll stray (e.g. whether it hits head instead of chest, or another person entirely), multiply by distance, and just have a zonal cover thing so that they get a bonus by sitting in cover areas. Other characters in the region, friendly or not, could just be treated as cover. I think this is how Minitroopers does it.

If someone wants to code this, I could just dump some pseudocode and/or design here or somewhere else.

[Virex]

Hmm... just figured something out. My original approach was to try to triangulate the shots trajectory by giving the attackers a targeted point, and then tweaking the angle a little based on the weapon's accuracy to determine what it actually hits. It's probably the most accurate system, but harder to code and maybe more computationally intensive for lots of bullets flying at once and having lots of cover in the area to factor in.

How many bullets do you want to simulate? Anyway, we can cut some corners. Basically, if the graphics are of sufficiently low detail, you can simulate anyone as a bunch of stacked spheres representing the different body parts. Now, collision checking between rays (your weapons are hitscan, right?) and spheres is easy and cheap, you can read about it here.

[Muz]

Lol, I'll look at that formula tomorrow morning after coffee when I'm more awake. Yeah, using hitscan.

Well, the original way was more of simplifying everything into rectangular boxes. Like 50 bullets per second flying around at max, all checking collision against about 100 or so bits of cover. Meaning, that the ultimate lazy way of doing this has about 5000 calculations per second. Not really as bad as I initially thought. Though trying to actually determine the size of these boxes is a lot of manual labor.. so that ray sphere thing looks like a great alternative.

It's a delicate balance between actually making the game and making it right

[Valid_Dark]

you should maybe post some design docs or start working on some graphics for it?

I like this idea, and want to know a bit more of what you have in mind.
and isn't ray tracing for 3d environments?  2d can do bullet tracing with a simple linear equation. or random number system like Muz was talking about, or a mix of the two.
for accuracy I like the idea of a parabola or a bell curve, with the middle being on target, and the Y level being accuracy and the X level being a random number decided each shot, idk it's hard to put into words right now so I hope you get what I'm saying.
That way you're more likely to be accurate or a little off, rather than all over the place.
or maybe I'm just crazy and love using parabolas and sin waves in programming more than they're needed.