RTS_4 "New Graphics, Units & Rivers"

It's been a little over a week and man have I been busy!

First of all, I completely reworked the way the engine looks visually. I want to start moving it away from that plain debug / testing look and move toward a more polished one:

I think it's looking pretty good. Gameplay has also gotten some major work as I finally have added units to the game. This took awhile due to pathfinding but my first test unit is a settler. Their icon displays the primary & secondary color of the player (Which is red & white for testing):

Here you can see some of that hot pathfinding action:

So everything is looking pretty good there. I can press next turn in the editor and the unit will indeed move along that path. I've also implemented checks so 2 military units can't occupy the same tile among other things.

So all of that took freaking forever to do, but I was downstate for awhile and had nothing but my laptop so I worked on this a lot, just waking up and working until I go to sleep.

But even with all of that, I'm still not finished. Like an absolute mad lad I've logged a good 80+ hours since the last update to bring you all this, and that includes: Rivers!

This was a lot harder than I had anticipated but it was also very rewarding to finish. As you can see the rendering position of the tiles is a bit glitchy creating cracks between them but after spending this long making this I think that's a bug I can let slide for now.

That's everything for this update. As you can see I've been logging some pretty heavy hours (10+ a day) to try and get you guys these updates. I'm also spacing the updates out a bit more so that they include more features. I plan on working on more map-related stuff like generating trees so expect that in the next update!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

RTS_3 Territory & Oceans

Now that the map engine has been established I've been able to focus on other features. One of which is generating oceans around the map so that I can start working on continents, islands, or whatever other generating I want to do:

(I removed beach for the now because instead of being its own tile it'll likely just render on the side of grass tiles)

Beside that though I've also been working on a territory system, which so far works pretty well:

I know I said to expect units in the next update but since the first unit I'm making is a settler unit I figured I should make a territory system for when I'm ready to work on creating cities. But hopefully, expect units in the next update probably maybe!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

RTS_2 - More map stuff

I've literally reprogrammed the map system 5 times because of various things. But it's now fully 3D and working. I've also made the tiles hex's now instead of squares:

That's a debug mode where I can see the coordinates of each hexagon. The reason this new map system took so long is that I'm now using a 3-axis system to track the position of each hexagon, which will let me perform math functions like pathfinding a lot easier.

Here's what it looks like outside of debug mode (and more zoomed out):

Because I'm using a 3D coordinate system to store the position of hex's it forms the shape of a rhombus instead of a rectangle or square. This works for now since it's better for testing the math, so making it square/rectangular is likely the last thing I'll ever do.

I had to reprogram it so many times because the 3D system was very hard to learn and adapt to but I've finally managed to pull it off. I'm working on units right now so expect that in the next update!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

My next project planned for Steam

Wow has it been a while! I'm so grateful though because all that time I wasn't posting was the time I was getting paid. I'm so used to doing revenue share work that never gets published or working part-time it just feels immensely satisfying to being doing contracts now in game development programming.

So now being more financially secure than I was, I have finally been able to get back to work on some of my own games!

DEEP SPACE 2

Just kidding. I really do want to do a Deep Space 2 in the future but it's a big high-budget of a project since it would be a long first-person singleplayer story game (literally entirely different from the first game) and that sort of game takes quite a bit of development time & budget to pull off.

No, for now, I thought I'd work on something more practical. I've really been wanting to do an RTS for a while (If you look at my "What I've been doing these 5 months" post you'll see that I worked on several procedural generating projects & RTS's. Well, I'm back at it!

This project was inspired by Steel Division: Normandy 44, a war game by Paradox Interactive. I just thought that the territory system was so cool that it'd be amazing to be implemented into other genre's. I've been calling my new game RTS but it will be turn-based. The best way I can describe it is it's basically like Civ V (not 6 >:c ) mixed with Steel Division's territory system, with more focus on war than civ had. Unlike Civilization, however, the game will most likely not be about advancing through the ages and instead just upgrading the fantasy/medieval age that you're already in (Like going from a wooden sword to iron, etc.)

I've literally only just started on the project. I've taken everything I learned from the procedural generating I did those last months and applied it here. This is the single most optimized generating system I have ever designed, able to generate a 128x128 (16,384 tiles) map w/ color in 0.14 seconds.

Now, of course, that sounds impressive and all (and it is) but that number will grow exponentially when I start adding the actually intensive generating like trees, resources, etc. And not to mention when the map isn't flat and actually has hills & such that'll make rendering take a lot longer.

Overall my estimate is that my current optimized system will be capable of generating a 200x200 map in 20 seconds when everything is finished, which is still faster than Civilization V. But that's high hopes haha! I'm pretty slow at loading/saving though so that'll probably be slower than Civilization.

Anyway, with all that text here's an example of a 128x128 map that was generated in 0.14 seconds:

Again, the map is completely flat (2D) at the moment, but the actual game will be 3D so it'll take a lot longer to render in the future. But I made it 2D for now so that I could test generating without having to worry about looks.

Thanks for reading! And sincerely,
Blake Gillman

New Screenshots

I've been working really hard to write a story for my new game, as well as create maps for it. Right now there's only one map, and so to show you guys what I've been up to - here are some screenshots:

Hope that helps. This level is most likely not going to be used in the final cut of the game and was created more for testing, but who knows.

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

The last 5 months

It's amazing how quickly time flies! It honestly felt like I released Deep Space only a couple months ago yet here we are nearly 5 months later.

So what has Blake been up to in all that time? Well, its been a rollercoaster of things. In that time I've gone through project after project and each time getting depressed, because I'm not doing what I want to be doing.

After Deep Space I started working on voxel-based procedural generating for the first time, which came in the form of a project called "Deep Sea" where you were going to build a submarine and do missions on an alien world:

But soon after I decided I didn't like the setting and decided to take on something more ambitious - Perlinia! Cube World was absolutely one of my favorite games to play with my friend when I was younger and its been really sad seeing it get no development. So I set out to make my own voxel-based RPG!

An unreleased screenshot of the player with equipment on

An unreleased screenshot (from the editor's point of view) of
"Point of Interest" locations being determined (Spots where things
like cities or dungeons might spawn)

It was loads of fun and taught me a lot about optimization, but I just didn't see it as something I could complete in a reasonable amount of time.

I worked on a ton of other projects during this time too. Far too many to give a full explanation on each one so here's a breakdown:

Project_War2 - A turn-based strategy game set in a medieval/fantasy setting

A recreation of DOOM but with COD Zombies mechanics (Made for a Game Jam)

An RTS where you pick a faction in a civil war and fight over the country

A Unity editor extension I named "Ultimate Stealth Engine" that I was going to sell, it'd allow people to make stealth games easily inside of Unity3D

A SimCity game where you play as the Klingon Empire (This one was made as programming practice - never intended to release)

A menu concept for the civil war RTS

Some work on RTS procedural generating

Some work on RTS procedural generating

A low-poly "Men of War" strategy game - this was the map editor
I was making for it

That list is in no particular order - a lot of it is out of place. But as you can see I haven't been idle these last ~5 months. Its been nothing but hard work, yet here I am without a game to show you! During all these projects the process has been the same:

1) Think of something big
2) Try to reduce it to a reasonable size that could be completed in a reasonable amount of time
3) Get a few days (or even a week) into making it then wonder who would ever play it
4) Get depressed
5) Spend a few days trying to come up with a new idea
6) Restart the process

Each time I did this I got more and more depressed and it took longer and longer for me to recover. After all those projects though I finally said 'fuck it'. I recognize that what I'd been doing wasn't making me happy - so I decided to go back to my roots, what made me want to do game development in the first place? What are the games that I enjoy the most?

The first thing that popped into my mind was Final Fantasy 12 & Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (Both for PS2). The story, the narrative - but I think above all else: the company. Maybe on its own Baldur's Gate isn't quite the game I think of as groundbreaking, but I'll never forget the endless hours I spent with my brother fighting over loot and questing. Although as someone without access to a console & PC's not exactly having good couch-gameplay ability I knew that I was more limited. So I decided to set out on telling a story.

I knew that I couldn't create quite the grand epic of a game like Final Fantasy 12 (due to all the amazing worlds in my head being way more graphically complex than I'm capable), but I did know of another game which featured a grand story and was singleplayer too - Half Life.

I never played the original Half-Life but I do own Half-Life 2 & Episode 1, 2 & Lost Coast. I only played these games recently (May 2018), but they were still loads of fun. It really got me thinking about old vs modern scene design & storytelling.

So now, I've finally decided - I'm going to work on a singleplayer grand story game. A lot of people give games crap for being linear, but I still think they're great - they let the writer express a rich and colorful story and that's exactly what I want to do. Finally, I'm going to start work on one of those grand projects you think about when first getting into game development.

Everyone has their set of 'dream games' when they get into game development. I've got 3, and now it's time to finally cross one off - after 5 years of work in this field, it's finally time to create the grand journey I've always dreamed of creating.

I'm not quite sure what the story will be - but I was so excited I started work on a concept level:

I'll be posting any future updates to this blog!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman