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[Aklyon]

This reminds me of the Star Twine game I heard from Reddit now.

[Draco18s]

This reminds me of the Star Twine game I heard from Reddit now.

Interesting game.  Hmmmm.

[Draco18s]

Oh yeah.  We got turrets.

One of the first things I did (once I ironed out the bugs) was to lure the AI ships into a trap.  Used 9 units (5 surviving), and 7 hubs with 4 turrets each.



Same URL as always.

Changes:
* Turrets!
  -  Turrets cost a third less than ships do, but have double the range and hit points, no speed, and no crystal cost
    +  They're not excessively beefy, they will die to their counter-unit as expected.
  -  Turrets need to be built within 60 pixels of a "turret hub"
    +  Turret hubs cost 350 metal, 35 minerals, and 1 crystal.
    +  Turret hubs have 1000 HP, 20 Armor, and can support 6 turrets.
    +  A turret that loses its hub will slowly lose HP over time
* Upgraded all the graphics to being Sprites, rather than Bitmaps
  -  This upgrade means you can target objects by clicking on them!  Bitmaps ignore mouse events, but Sprites do not.
  -  Technically everything is a custom class so that the display object has a reference back to the game object, which extends sprite, which contains the bitmap that was being used previously.
* Refactored the paint jobs on the ship a little to be a little nicer (the stripes on the mother ship in particular).  Might tweak them again.
* FRD / Guard range circle.  Indicates the "zone" that the units will protect.

Known issues:
* AI does not use turrets, there's no AI yet.  We're working on it.
* You can stack turrets on top of each other, I haven't made any kind of collision code.
* You can go into negative resources building them.  I didn't put in any kind of check yet.
* I could probably try the red tint / green tint thing again now that the primary display object is a Sprite.
* Turrets that lose their hub and a new one is built, or another is in range, won't see it.

[Aklyon]

a turret build radius circle thing would probably help, show it when you're building turrets or something.

[Draco18s]

a turret build radius circle thing would probably help, show it when you're building turrets or something.

Hmm.  Yes.
*Adds to list*

[Draco18s]

a turret build radius circle thing would probably help, show it when you're building turrets or something.

Done.
Turrets without hubs will now attempt to seek out a new one.  A hub under construction doesn't count.  If a new hub is available the turret won't take any lack-of-supply attrition (7.5 hp/second flat for all turrets, currently).

I've also added in some buttons to play one of 5 music tracks I pulled down from Newgrounds Audio Portal.  I'd like feedback on which ones fit and which ones don't.

[Fayrik]

Well, this is awesome.
Not so sure about the music. (I didn't really feel any of it just click) But some of it might be okay.
Loving the turrets, they're good fun to place strategically. (I.E: Just outside of the enemy's base.)

Though, if it's not too much to ask, could we get a team colours update going? Because, as far as I can tell from the generated sprites of ships, the player's team colour is blue and the AI is green... Yet the minimap shows the player's units as green, and the AI's as red. The main problem though, is some of the hull colours can make it difficult to see which ship is on which team, depending on what design you're using.

[Draco18s]

Yeah, the minimap and the team colors weren't really thought out that well: player team color, yeah blue!  AI team color, yeah green!  Minimap: your stuff is green!  The evil AI is red!  I can make the AI team color red easily enough, though (likewise player/green or minimap blue).

Musics aren't final, of course, I was just browsing Newgrounds to see what sounded "good enough" and thought I'd test the market.

Currently working on procedurally generating that background image.  It's.  Uh.  Not going well.  I might be able to get some generically stary-ish level stuff, but the nebulae are evading capture (fuck, I can't even get something half decent using GIMP without using the brush tool).  This guy has managed a couple, but he's also using a $200+ 3D render engine called Vue.

If I can figure out how to make a sparkle filter in Pixel Blender, then I should be able to do generically starry backgrounds in Flash with minimal effort.  If not, then I'll have generically round generically starry backgrounds of uniform distribution.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   I agree with Fayrik that none of the music matches
it correctly. Some of them where closer then others but
overall nothing clicked for me.
   Next I would like to say that if your trying to make
the same kind of background as you have now but
procedurally made you are in for hard times. If all you
want though is a simple starry back ground that looks
nice that is quite possible.

   As for gameplay, turret stacking could be a problem
but if you don't want to hard code it away you could
just limit the usefulness of it by adding splash damage
to attacks. If you did that though you would probably
have to add some way to make formations with the
ships so they don't just all pile in one spot. Even if you
don't do formations just adding something that makes
the ships stay a certain distance away from each other
would be enough.

   Edit: rude of me to just point out doing the sky is hard
but another way is easy without giving an example of
what I mean. For a starry sky I like how it was done Here.
The guy uses a section of the real sky so the stars look
real but because of how he uses that one piece of it you
won't find a pattern familiar from the real sky.

[Draco18s]

   I agree with Fayrik that none of the music matches
it correctly. Some of them where closer then others but
overall nothing clicked for me.

Agreed.

As for gameplay, turret stacking could be a problem
but if you don't want to hard code it away you could
just limit the usefulness of it by adding splash damage
to attacks. If you did that though you would probably
have to add some way to make formations with the
ships so they don't just all pile in one spot. Even if you
don't do formations just adding something that makes
the ships stay a certain distance away from each other
would be enough.

No, I can do turret stacking, it's not that big of a deal.  I already have a list of all the hubs, and each hub has a list of all its turrets.  It's just a matter of looping through those two lists (er, list of lists) for collisions.

Edit: rude of me to just point out doing the sky is hard
but another way is easy without giving an example of
what I mean. For a starry sky I like how it was done Here.
The guy uses a section of the real sky so the stars look
real but because of how he uses that one piece of it you
won't find a pattern familiar from the real sky.

Sky is hard.  I'm not worried about that.  Splatter patterns are an idea, but that only gets me as far as "generically starry" and doesn't work for nebula like constructs.  If I can't do nebulae, I'll be bummed, but I'll survive.  They just look so much cooler that star fields.

[Haspen]

Oh jesus what am I seeing

I sure weren't peeking into your project for a long time, Draco

It is going slowly into epic. Good work! :3

[Draco18s]

It is going slowly into epic. Good work! :3

Yeah, I get a few hours work each week or so.  Depending on how much real-job-work I have (I'm at work now, but exploring procedural star generation) and how lazy I am on weekends.

[Draco18s]

Om nom nom, stars!



It's a start, at least.  Haven't tried to colorize them yet, just get something basic.  Roughly speaking I've got about 3 steps of the "how to do this in Photoshop" tutorial so far.  The colorize step is going to be a bitch, mainly because there's a lot of "make it look right by hand" fiddling with color values, followed by a layer blend setting I'd have to recreate ("merge color").  Already had to hand-code an HSV noise generator, an HSV -> RGB converter, and brightness and contrast adjusters.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

   Nice if a little busy. It looks a little uniform so maybe
having a few areas of less densely packed stars may be
able to improve how it looks.

[Draco18s]

   Nice if a little busy. It looks a little uniform so maybe
having a few areas of less densely packed stars may be
able to improve how it looks.

Like I said before, "generically round generically starry backgrounds of uniform distribution."
I'm working on it.

Edit:



Better?

They're dimmer than before, but I don't think there's much I can do about it.