First 30 Days of Development on a Mobile Wargame | Godot 4 | Manafields Devlog 1

[Music] hi I'm Jordan and I'm developing a 1 V one Fantasy war game for mobile and browsers called manfields the game's going to be asynchronous like online chess and although it's similar in visual style to tactics games like Advanced Wars and wargroove the rules in manfields are really a lot closer to more traditional tabletop war games like Warhammer and kings of War all of your units are going to begin the game on the board and you'll take turns issuing commands to them moving them across the field to claim objectives and to clash headon with enemy units I've already made some pretty significant progress on the game this document here contains all the rules for manif fields and everything in green has already been implemented in this video I want to take you through the first few weeks of development so you can see how the Project's taking shape and if you want to know more about the game in general check out my last video where I gave a more high level overview of manif fields in the first week I needed some placeholder art assets that I could use during development so I went to the Kenny website and I used these assets to sketch out some basic things like the game board terrain objectives not long after that I found this free asset pack from canos on it and I used it to enhance the visuals and then I got started on the first first phase of the game the deployment phase in manfields players deploy units from their army within their territory and in this early version of the game the idea had been that players would take turns dropping one unit at a time but I would later end up changing this and in the most current version of the rules players deploy their entire Army in secret and only get to see their opponent's deployment once the game has begun at first I placed this Obelisk asset from the canos pack in the center of the objectives as I was working on this stuff I was also play testing the rules with friends on tabletop simulator where I used a pillar in the center of the objectives in a similar way I thought these were really great visual features I thought they drew plays attention to the objectives really well but it was around this time that we discovered some issues in play testing firstly the objectives were just way too large in Mana Fields you score points from objectives by having more units on them than your opponent the idea is hopefully that players will fight on objectives to reduce their opponent's numbers and to maintain control what was happening however was that the size of the objectives was just incentivizing players to pile their units up and to spend their turns outnumbering their opponent one unit at a Time Players weren't even engaging in combat until like 10 or 12 12 turns into the game which was a massive problem and although they looked quite cool the pillars in the center ended up just giving players some extra protection from the enemy units on the other side so my solution was to shrink the objectives and to remove the obstacles in the middle suddenly units were dangerously close to enemies and the game was applying much more pressure on players to be the first to attack next I started working on the dice roller for the game after players have deployed their units onto the board they each roll a dice and the winner of the rolloff takes the first turn I took inspiration for this dice roller from the one I use in tabletop simulator where you spawn Dice and then Dro them into a portal to roll them for a while I even tried to create the same kind of dice Gathering feature but it was pretty glitchy and I felt like it was a distraction it's definitely something I'll come back to later on with deployment and priority rolling complete it was time to start working on the core Loop of the game itself in manfields players take turns issuing orders to their units with order points and you get three order points on your turn you can issue those order points all to the same unit or you can spread them out however you like there are five types of orders in the game but at this early stage in development I was mostly focused on the three most basic ones moving fighting and shooting but before I got started on any of that I decided I wanted some Sprites to better reflect the units in the game I found a pixel artist gandal hardcore on Fiverr and I asked him to make some Sprites for the humans in the game I really liked how they turned out I threw them into Ace Sprite I got them animating and then I put them in the game at first I had them at their real size on the grid but I found that the grid squares fully surrounding them made them feel like small and flat so I took a look again at Warg Grove and how their units overflow the grid spaces that they're standing on I really like this approach so I sized my rights up so that they appear to have some height over the grid itself the first and most basic order that I started with was the move order in manif fields each unit has a different speed this is the number of squares that they're allowed to move in a single move order for most units that speed is three and for Cavalry it's four again I looked at Advanced Wars and wargroove and looked at the way that they highlighted legal move squares for their units I especially liked how wargroove also highlighted the squares that the unit would be eligible to fight on after they finished moving very simply these are all the squares that a unit with move speed three is allowed to move on to in manafield field but I knew it wasn't going to be as simple as just highlighting these squares in manif fields units can't move through other units and they can't move through terrain so if a unit with move speed three is blocked by another unit or by terrain their legal move squares actually look more like this I needed a way to calculate these squares from scratch each time a player clicked on a unit I needed a program that would ask for the unit's position on the grid and their move speed and would then tell me which squares it was possible for a unit to reach I did some research and found this article that had a bunch of interactive examples of pathfinding algorith for games when I played around with this one I realized it was exactly what I needed the example here even had pieces of terrain for the algorithm to skip over the algorithm is called flood fill or or bread first search basically the idea is just that it pushes out in all directions at the same time until it finds the thing it's looking for using these steps in the article I read a program that asked me for unit's position and speed and then created a version of the board in a text file that showed all of that unit's legal move squares you can see here that the t's represent terrain the X represents the unit and the O's represent all of that unit's legal move squares and it worked the algorithm took terrain into account and stopped searching for legal squares in that direction once it found an obstacle like terrain or another unit I knew this was also going to be perfect for determining the range of shooting units I ported the algorithm over into the game and I started highlighting move squares this was a really exciting step and I had honestly expected it to be much harder than it ended up being pretty soon I implemented move orders and players were able to click and drag units to move them onto new squares inspired by wargroove I implemented legal Square highlights in a different color for enemy units so that players could click on enemies for information about their movement I added some unit ownership highlights so you could tell which units were yours and which were your opponents even if they all looked the same and then I got started on combat in manfields units can receive a fight order in order to attack enemy units in melee units can attack squares that are north south east or west from them I added some combat highlights in a different color and then I allowed the player to click on an enemy unit in range to Target them at this point I was sick of looking at the gray background behind the board so I took some more assets from the canos pack and I used them to decorate the size of of the board in a more subdued palette that helped to place the battle in some narrative context I have a few other maps in development Each of which will be in a different setting such as the desert or the snow but I'll show those off some more in a future video I made some changes to my dice roller so you could use it to roll attacks and I also changed the way it looked so that it didn't take up the whole screen anymore and it kind of kept the game in context behind it I then added shooting orders and used the same algorithm that I used for the move order to highlight all legal squares for a shooting unit so after about the first month of development the game had its three most Fundamental Orders implemented and ready to go moving fighting and shooting after that I took a look at the basic troops in the game infantry Cavalry and archers each of them has a unique rule that allows them to play a different role in the game and I got to work implementing those infantry Special Rule is that they are the only unit that's allowed to fight diagonally what's so strong about this is that in Mana Fields move orders cost two order points if you're adjacent to an enemy so infantry can move diagonally adjacent to an enemy and start attacking them but the enemy must spend two order points to shuffle up and a third to attack them in response Archer Special Rule is that the shoot order only costs one order Point instead of two if they haven't moved earlier in the turn I think this rule is really cool because it rewards players for setting up their shooting pieces in earlier turns but if you really need to shoot at a Target you can spend one order point to move them and then two order points to shoot which does give you some significant range lastly the Cavalry Special Rule is that they do damage on impact when they move in a straight line towards enemies this is a really good way to get some guaranteed damage onto enemy units and it gives Cavalry a unique role on the battlefield that they were lacking in earlier versions of the game so that's where we're at with manfields at the moment I'm working on adding the final few orders of the game heroic abilities the March order and faction abilities in my next video I'll have received Sprites for the other three factions in the game and I'll let you know all about who they are and how they change the play style of the game in unique and flavorful ways so let me know what you think so far I'm super excited about this project and I can't wait to get it in players hands see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: ManafieldsDev

Views: 5,952

Keywords: wargame, advance wars, warhammer, wargroove, indie, godot, devlog, strategy, tactics, pixel art, retro, sprites

Id: v2kjs7GadAY

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 26 2023