Gangster Tactics: Pile Them In

Aesthetically and technically It looks great, but a game depicting rape probably isn't appropriate for the forums.

Don't worry. It's just a joke and as a technical presentation to showcase the dialog features in the game.

The real game just contain a lot of pure and honest violence, that's all

Alright, progress report time.

Finish designing my isometric tiling and other associated functions to work together.

Also prepared some notes on importance of origin points in isometric projections.

Most of my dev time today is to design a isometric battlefield template so i can easily dump tiles from Photoshop to Rexrainbow's Board's arrays very quickly.

This allow me to design the battlefield in Photoshop instead of in Construct 2 layout, which is less convenient.

The picture shown is a in-game view of my tutorial battlefield. There are no characters yet. Which will be remedied soon enough.

Some progress from the past few days.

Finish creating the female model to represent the females of Casa City.

Can't have the game turn into a sausage party, can't we ?

The image above is

totally not before and after Hanks have a sexual change operations. And those lumps are totally not oranges.

Finish creating the first animation in the game, the walking animation.

This take me a lot of time to get it done and look good in a few frames but I think I succeed in it. Have a look and judge for yourself.

Not enough ass-shaking but hey this is fighting game, not a modeling one.

I have also finished the chess placement functions for the game, allowing me to place the sprites I have created into the game and onto a battlefield.

Roger, my man. Why in the world do we keep walking in the same spot over and over again?

All in all, that's quite some progress but I still have a lot to do.

Some of my immediate future tasks to complete:

• Finish the stats system and link it to the characters in the battlefield
• Create the battlefield UI so everything's description can be read ala Tactics Ogre style.
• Port over my previous AIs to this game so the enemies can fight back.

You make it look so easy to do such a damn complex game..

I have a strong believe if you keep going, the game is going to be a wild success, steam greenlight and all that jazz for sure.

This looks great!! Would love if you could point me to some Construct 2 Isometric tutorial or material. Really interested to learn how to create an isometric level in C2.

Thanks!

This looks great!! Would love if you could point me to some Construct 2 Isometric tutorial or material. Really interested to learn how to create an isometric level in C2.

Thanks!

I am sorry. I learned most of the isometric stuff I implemented through trial and error. Apparently, there's no isometric guide out there, excepting Kyatric isometric guide thread.

Good luck on your effort!

Progress report for the past week!

For the past weekend, I replay Tactics Ogre and have found several key gameplay issues that irked me. This, of course, helps to improve my gameplay design for this game to ensure those issues, such as the overpowerness of the archer class do not happen.

Also, I have finished the stat system for the game.

I have also finished the level up algorithm, the damage calculation for the game, the skills and abilities system.

All of them are done in excel for easier updating and maintenance since there is a Rexrainbow csv plugin that helps to transfer excel tables in .csv format into datatable format quickly and easily.

All there is left is to create the class variables for the characters in the battlefield and it's most of the engine work is pretty much done, at least for the planned demo.

So basically no visual progress..... Sorry for that.

In exchange, let me tell you how I designed the classes (called stereotypes in-game).

If you are familiar with the MMORPG scene or with tabletop gaming, you know in a good party, there would be a tank, a glass cannon, a healer/buffer and a controller. Those are called archetypes and it help the player/group to determine how to better use a specific class in the battle or how to redesign his tactical plan to suit the available classes or lack of, in his current party.

For my game, there are several archetypes, each classes usually have a huge part in one while dipping in another one or several. Here are them as they currently are in my spreadsheet:

Tank

Description: Basically stereotypes with high defenses/hp. Most of them have unique mechanics to keep enemies attention to them despite their plans. An example would be Brutes project Intimidating Aura that turn all surrounding tiles around them into difficult terrain which cost more to move into. The size of this aura can be enlarged via appropriate skills.

Stereotype (Major): Brute, Luchador, Firebrand

Stereotype (Minor): Drunk

Glass Cannon

Description: Weaklings with usually low HP/Defenses but possess strong attack abilities. Many have extra mechanics to improve their damage capabilities even further provided appropriate situation. Punks can dealt extra damage to an enemy if the enemy have a prior negative condition on him regardless of how it got there. As usual, this mechanic can be enhanced via skills.

Stereotype (Major): Punk, Provocateur, Smarty Pant, Drunk, Wiseguy

Stereotype (Minor): Brute

Healer

Description: Capable of healing hp damage and removing status effects. They have a unique individual mechanics to improve their healing abilities. Social activist got a point blank level-dependent boost to all their healing abilities.

Stereotype (Major): Social Activist, Dealer

Stereotype (Minor): Rapper, Firebrand, GRO (Guest Relations Officer), Merchant, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

Buffer

Description: Capable of giving positive status effects to friendlies. Their mechanics is designed to help out their mates. The presence of a rapper in the party give "Encouraged" effect to any friendlies who have just took down an enemy for a turn. Needless to said, there are skills to improve on that mechanic.

Stereotype (Major): Rapper, GRO, Merchant

Stereotype (Minor): Provocateur, Firebrand, Social Activist, Dealer, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

Debuffer

Description: Capable of giving negative status effects to enemies. Also push and pull enemies into positions that are always bad for them. There are certain skills that improve debuffing abilities but no mechanics of yet.

Stereotype (Major): Rapper, GRO, Merchant

Stereotype (Minor): Luchador, Brute, Drunk, Smarty Pants, Provocateur, Wiseguy, Dealer, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

And that pretty much what I planned for now.

Only six of these classes will be available in the demo.

Five of those will be available in the player's gang for the demo.

Also, TO-inspired skills points are out for this game as of now. Skills will be obtained through leveling and are given out on the start and at every third level. Also all passive small bonuses skills are out. There are also no must-have skills which is also known in the tabletop gaming as "feat tax".

This is to stop players to only use their battle-hardened skill points heavy characters and make others, especially new characters, also viable for battle usage.

Don't worry, there will be a hideout feature that can change unwanted skills   , provided the character is assigned there until the next mission is over.

I am a tactics gamer first and foremost, after all  

TL,DR : Engine progress for the past week. No visuals, sorry.

Finished the movement range tiles and animation.

Also linked them up into the game and setup Rexrainbow SLG Movement plugin with appropriate cost and filter custom events to call them up when necessary.

Look, Roger, there are green lights projecting over where I can go! Technology!

What's your opinions of the movement tiles?

I try to be a bit unique while trying to make sure it still convene the range of the characters' movement and also looking good.

Does it work?

FYI, before I continue on to create the battlefield UI, I need to finish the Mission UI and the battle preparation UI firstly.

Totally forgot about the mission UI where the players learn a bit about the turf and its denizens that they are about to fight.

There are more details about the Mission UI and I will explain those when I finish some of its functions and assets.

Ok, after a lot of feedbacks, I decided to go with this tiles to show movement range, mostly because they look tidy, good and also unique enough.

Cleaner! Tidier! That is the Green Spotlights 1000. Get yours today!

Also finish my mockup for the Mission UI.

It supposed to keep track of the progress of the mission and how many battles you have fought and how many still remains in that particular mission.

I haven't finish the second battlefield layout so I am using the first one as placeholder in lieu of the second one temporarily.

After some thoughts, I decided to cut out some planned extra features from it as it is just clutter/ busywork and does not add to the gameplay in a good sense.

In another dimension, Andrew is the one who going to bust Harry's favorite bar

Will now code this portion of the game soon.

Finish coding my mission UI screen.

On the way, I also finish the buttons features and the bottom GUI functionality.

With most of the stuff I have done are using functions, I can call and change each elements easily.

Oh shit! Better go back to my post before Harry noticed I am missing.

Now I will be focusing on the gang screen and the codes to store the player's gang's members.

Yet another progress report (Seriously though, I have no idea how else to start my progress report)

I finish up the player's gang array.

It take helluva lot of time to finish the functions require to populate the array because the array contains 54 columns aside from the first indexing column.

The columns hold vital information from the stats to the current alignment of the character inside the gang.

I also finish up the random name arrays necessary to give names to the characters (aside from the player character, boss and special NPCs)

This is important as player's hired goons need names as do the enemies' mooks.

This also take a fair amount of time as I need to separate the names according to gender and race.

After all, an Irish male named Lakasha is not going to help much in trying to engage the player, isn't it ?

All in all, there are over 1000 plus names in those arrays so that will ensure very rarely any members of yours or the enemies will ever have the same name.

(P.S. Thank you popular baby naming sites that I won't named. You guys are a great help in this!)

To populate the gang screen, i finish creating a portion of the characters that will be in the demo. Basically the Latinos since I have just be only showing off the Irish and the Africans previously.

To show that, I present to you:

From the left to right; Civilian, Brute, Punk, Social Activist, Smarty Pants, Provocateurs

This is definitely not the main cast for a latino pixel version of Glee, I swear

And of course, the female editions, because of equal opportunity

And these are not their love interests, seriously not.

Will finish up the gang screen in the near future.

Also I will be deleting the current progress on the opening post since it is tiring for me to keep updating it.

Progress report for yesterday work.

I finish slicing parts of the character sprites to make it easier to animate and to transfer animations to each different character after just one is done.

This is pretty much based on the techniques used by expert animators for square enix to lessen their workload.

What works for the goose, works for the gander.

Moreover, after some consideration, I decided to changed the way I design characters in the game.

At first, I want the each races in my game to look differently in term of color,clothing and hairstyle despite mostly sharing the same stereotypes.

However, after spending quite some time just animating different characters, I decided that is way too much workload for me to handle.

I am the only developer for this game, with Sam Jones providing the soundtracks.

If I continue with this methodology, I can only finish this game after around 5 years of just animating pixels.

So, I come out with new method, I will try to make each stereotype look different from each other in term of hairstyle and clothing.

However, the difference for each race for the same stereotype is just skin and hair color instead of overall color haul also in clothing and different hairstyles.

With just this and the earlier slicing , I reduce my workload by a huge margin with a dip in variety, which I hope you guys will forgive me.

After all, if possible, I plan to finish this game within a year time frame with the demo coming out hopefully in another two months or so, give or take a few weeks.

The Latino Squad practicing their moves for the dance off

Do not worry, special NPCs and bosses will still have their own character animation and design, separated from mooks (both yours and theirs).

Moreover, racial stereotype unique to each race is still in.

Have you considered headwear or earrings/necklaces etc to increase differentiation between the classes? Atm a few of them look very close and cannot be quickly distinguished. Especially your Civ, Brute, Provo.

Looking forward to play this game. Best.

Have you considered headwear or earrings/necklaces etc to increase differentiation between the classes? Atm a few of them look very close and cannot be quickly distinguished. Especially your Civ, Brute, Provo.

Those are from the previous methodology that I am ditching also partly due to the reason you mentioned.

Using the new methodology, I will ensure that different stereotypes use different clothing , accessories, hairstyles and color.

I just finished Brute and Social Activist for the new character design. The others will come as quickly as I can finished them.

Thanks for your feedback.