The origin
Back in 2014, I released the little Construct 2 game called Shadows of War pitching the shadows of a NATO army against Russian forces in a simple sidescroller strategy game. While it was plagued by a number of bad design choices and development techniques from the start, it still saw at least some sales and inclusions in several bundles, pushing it past the 50,000 owners mark and a peak player base of 264 on Steam. Most of the reviews are negative, and rightfully so —it was never perfect, but constant improvements are part of the fun while developing things.
Working with Construct 3
Since then a lot has happened; much of the fiction turned reality, and Construct 3 has now been around for some time - which meant time to test the new features and work on a remake / successor to the original game.
Development has been off and on for some years (mostly off), but this year seems to be when it finally begins to take shape, with most of the basic systems working.
The new engine proves to pack some punch, and with past errors in mind, the process has been quite fun so far.
A lot of the basic systems and functionality are implemented, for example:
- Unit movement / actions
- Support & Commander system with a total of 18 abilities
- Multiplayer (Syncing, chat, automatch, etc.)
- Procedural background generation
- Options & language localization (Missing accesibility features)
Though currently it is more of a pre-alpha, with most if not all of the proper graphics missing, balancing outstanding and bug hunting on the to-do.
Preview
Here is a quick screenshot of the current progress, and some of the new features really shine through:
While most mechanics do work, there is still a lot of work left...
I will treat this topic as a sort of blog post for the development process, but if you have any questions, please do ask.