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xcal
31-10-2009, 06:07 PM
"Cyber-espionage has become an everyday occurence, with average people involved in remote data theft and warfare. Prepare to take control of your remote drone to eavesdrop on your unsuspecting neighbours or even governments. Evade their defences and gather the data.

Battle it out with a team-mate or enemy over a network to see who has the ultimate tactical and espionage skills. Or play as the defence team, trying to hunt down an invisible enemy."


The tactical interface uses red blocks to represent enemies and a green circle to represent your drone. The enemy drones leave a cyber footprint of information lying around as the patrol the area. You must collect as many of these as you can without having your drone destroyed.

The tactical interface makes estimations at the line of sight of the enemy drones. Stay out of these cones and you'll be ok. Get caught in one and the drone will try to persue you and destroy your drone with its lasers.

Your drone's health is represented by it's color on the tactical display. When it's red you need to evade the enemy drones immediately!

Download Link (http://www.box.net/shared/5m1x9qkvq5)

Good luck!

[OUT OF CHARACTER]
Java had me up and down, up and down.... The coolest thing about developin with java was the ease of use of the Java2D API. Everything else was like marching through sludge.

Also, I'm going to have to do some readin on multiplayer design patterns, because I screwed myself over royaly with my framework!

Anyway, you'll need Java to play, but please do and leave some comments! I'm not sure if I should take this concept further, move it over to a more familiar language and keep developing.

Try Enjoy!

http://i494.photobucket.com/albums/rr303/xcal55/tactionage.jpg
http://i494.photobucket.com/albums/rr303/xcal55/tactionage2.jpg

UPDATE:
The game earned me 100% for my Final Project... Not bad considering the networking needs so much power...

Graal
01-11-2009, 09:43 AM
I'll be keeping my eye on this. It looks like fun. I love the art direction you're taking.

xcal
01-11-2009, 12:16 PM
It's got a while to go before it's fun, it can be mind blowingly hard though. Dam random seeds. I'm marking out the seeds of doom so I know which are IMPOSSIBLE... which is very possible at this moment... having three enemies spawn RIGH by you is just a blast... gonn have to fix that!

xcal
06-11-2009, 01:40 PM
I updated the first post with the download details! Get playing already!

Gazza_N
06-11-2009, 02:03 PM
This is quite fun! The "avoid the sight cone" mechanic kinda reminds me of Metal Gear Solid, or the Commandos games.

It runs really smoothly, plays well, and I didn't come across any bugs. I didn't feel like the AI was cheating at any time either. About the only hassle I had was with the world geometry, where gaps between "walls" were just a leeeeeeetle too small for me to get through, turning a perceived escape route into certain doom. Also, a proper "Game Over" dialog with the option to retry or quit would work wonders, instead of just dumping the player back at the main menu. That's a minor polish thing, though, not a game-breaker. ;)

Game's pretty fun as it is, but you might want to consider powerups to mix things up a little, like a Stealth powerup, or a decoy that distracts enemies. Environmental hazards might be quite fun too, as it gives you a little something extra to worry about other than avoiding enemies' view cones (and could be used to lure enemies to certain (if temporary) doom for extra points. MWAHAHAHAHAHA!).

herman.tulleken
06-11-2009, 02:32 PM
This is really cool!

I agree with Gazza_N about the narrow gaps. In addition, I often get stuck on a corner. Perhaps you can put in a little logic to make you slide around corners.

Once I got stuck between two enemies, and none of us three could move; obviously (and, a bit unfairly, I think), I died.

It would be nice to see some progression (more enemies, more walls as you go from one level to the next). Power-ups also sound cool, perhaps also some things like warping, gravity, spinners, enemies with other types of damage fields (just a few random ideas).

Did you hand-code all the animation? It is really smooth (to be honest, when I saw Java, I thought that might be a problem, but it's not).

The style is also quite nice. When you start polishing up, perhaps look at the in-game layout and fonts a bit.

Nice work!

xcal
06-11-2009, 03:14 PM
Oh! I should have mentioned that everything is radomly generated, but yes! There are lots of things I still want to do to the game to just make it more fun...

I need to figure out some better way to handle the teenie weenie gaps and also more precisely control the player movement to "STOP" in a certain grid square. There are actually a LOAD of bugs, especially in the multiplayer, but I don't think you should even TRY that yet...

Progression: I want to make a campaign mode for it. The game is based on seeds, and the seed it uses now is the system time. But For the campaign mode I want to use a certain progression of seeds AND like you mentioned, up the number of enemies, their speed and maybe the size of the site cone... Also add a variety of enemies AND a way to destroy them.

IF, and how I feel right now it's a BIG IF, I port it over to XNA or C++ I'll be re-doing the whole network structure and object structure to make it MUCH easier to debug. God dam Java sockets are impossible to debug...

Thanks for your comments!

One last thing. What I really want to implement are some particle/small object effects somewhere, going to generously borrow from Eufloria (http://www.dyson-game.com/) for that. I really love the idea of all the graphics being determined by numbers. Makes is SO much easier to randomly or procedurely generate content!

xcal
06-11-2009, 03:18 PM
Did you hand-code all the animation? It is really smooth (to be honest, when I saw Java, I thought that might be a problem, but it's not).
Nice work!

Sorry didn't see your question. Was to busy being glad that people liked the concept! :P
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by hand code, but all the animations, and EVERYTHING actually is determined by number manipulation. The little pickup circles and the exploding circles are actually the same thing, just with a different algorithm to generate.

And to top it all off everything runs from the game clock to make sure growth is uniform. The dam network blocks throw EVERYTHING to the wind though. So multiplayer is only recommended if you have a multi-core processor right now. I have to rework the network structure to ensure that the wait times for network transfer won't influence drawing and algorithms...

God dammit... I'm way to excited about this... Look at my two huge posts, one for each reply!!!!

herman.tulleken
06-11-2009, 03:38 PM
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by hand code, but all the animations, and EVERYTHING actually is determined by number manipulation. The little pickup circles and the exploding circles are actually the same thing, just with a different algorithm to generate.


Yup, that's what I mean. Just wondered whether you used the 2D API raw, or some snazzy animation lib.

Nandrew
06-11-2009, 09:32 PM
Oh hell, wow, this is cool. :) Proof's in the pudding, you've made a simple enough concept into something that plays out as something really fun.

And now that I finally have a platform to offer meaningful feedback ... well, er, actually, I'm pretty much going to go with what the others have already said. Particularly WRT collision. Actually, you should do that first no matter what other ideas are knocking around in yer head.

dammit
07-11-2009, 12:26 PM
Grats on your results :D Looks pretty cool!

Graal
13-11-2009, 05:36 PM
Just played it. It looks really cool. The only problems I've been having is, as mentioned before, getting stuck around corners, walls that aren't far enough apart and the tank-like controls. But, for an early release, this is great. Can't wait to see the next release, if there's going to be one.

xcal
14-11-2009, 12:52 PM
Doubt it... Took what I learnt and started working on something in the same art direction, but completely different. Thanks for all the comments though... Can't wait to see what Comp 24 is...