Battle Snooker (Working Title)

Community Showcases
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Hello friends!

I’m aiming to make a turn-based tactics game a bit like Advance Wars, or X-Com, but maybe easier to get into, and with shorter more fast-paced matches.

If you can bounce your team-mate into an enemy instead of hitting them directly, they actually do almost double damage- but instead of damaging the other team to death, maybe you should capture the base in the middle like I did in this video!

I just this week put in the artwork and some sound effects, so I hope this video is self-explanatory enough. I also have a cool air-strike that hits all units finished and working, and a special ball that freezes the opponent’s timer, a ball that converts all opponents around him to the other team, a ball that sits still and electrocutes anyone who comes near, etc etc. Check out my youtube channel if you’re really interested.

The game is very in-development, and a lot of it can change. I’m only working on it after work, or on weekends.

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Actually what the heck I’ll just post the older stuff here too:

In this video, you can see a giant donut that whacks all units within it’s radius every few seconds. Maybe you want to knock the enemy into there- but can you do it without landing there yourself?

You can also see the electric pins that each team has stuck in the ground, and the red and purple teams’ defense zones. If your ball is in it’s defense zone, it’ll take only half damage- so try to roll back there as much as you can!

This video was recorded a while ago, and so doesn’t have any special art or sound.

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Here’s the new freezing ball, just because I haven’t updated in a while:

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Here’s an update: It’s the very scary Thief unit!!!

Yes, he’ll steal your red team!! I just finally got the AI working on this guy, after a long time, he finally rolls just within the perfect radius to steal you. Very scary. Over-powered? In the hands of a perfect computer, maybe so!

You also see here the level select screen I implemented yesterday. I was so happy with the idea of spinning a globe around, and unlocking levels around a fictional, exciting world map-- but now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it, maybe it should just be a normal menu instead :I

Oh- and many UI changes, all the time, here’s an example: The balls used to turn black when they were about to blow up. That meant that you actually couldn’t see which team colour was dieing. Very stupid, in hindsight. Now their “face” actually gets smaller before they blow up instead, so you can definitely see which team colour they are.

Today, I’m moving all of my levels from a disorganized pile of ifs and buts to a directory of xml files.
Very technical update, but what it means is that I can more intelligently store stuff like names, locations, your high-score, whether or not this level is available, unlocked and optional… lots of stuff. It also means I can start saving and uploading levels as a player. Possibly to the Steam Workshop? Who knows!!!
Maybe later I can save and upload my own designed UNITS to the Steam Workshop, wouldn’t that be pretty cool?

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Gameplay from first video is great! It could be nice and fun game. Keep it up!

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I don’t know if anyone’s interested in this, so I’m sorry if I’m just spamming, but here’s my design process on the level select screen that I worked on today.

I closed Unity and opened Flash. This is my preferred drawing software, I’ve used it since I was 14.
I set the aspect ratio to my monitor, and try to only use different shades to denote focus, not get distracted colouring it in.

My first idea looks like a snowboarding game, haha! I skewed the menu options up and to the right, because I worked on SpeedRunners for 3 years and old habits die hard. One problem with this layout might be that the list is finite, so what if I have 60 levels? I didn’t fit enough game information on this screen, but it is very neatly divided between MENU on the left, and INFO on the right… so that came out well.
The character is a person with their arms folded, with a circle made of circles for hair. I do wanna just go with the flow and put a lot of circles in the UI to keep the game’s existing identity growing.

I went back to making the globe a part of the navigation. Also now we’ve got characters yelling flavour text, which is something I definitely want. I made the level preview bigger and closer to the navigation, because thumbnails are easier to recognize than flicking through strings of text.
Here’s what’s bad about this layout: Is it a menu? Where’s level 1, 2 and 3? Do I go right to advance to the next option, or down? It’s nice that the QUIT icon is in the top-right to better reflect the customs of software design, but how do I get there?

The globe takes a back seat in this iteration, and I’ve added a score counter to the level name. I definitely want to track your score on each level and daily challenge. The name pins to the globe-point very well, and brings those to concepts snugly together.
We’re dividing the screen now between LEVEL INFO on the left, and FLAVOUR TEXT on the right. Even though the characters will give you a good impression of which units your about to face, it’s quite loose and really they’re just for personality and fun… so are they too big in this iteration? and is that text in the bottom-right supposed to be the charactrer talking, or the designer talking?

This is the final iteration I’ll make for today. You can progress through these levels by flicking left and right, we can see your progress through them, which ones are optional and which ones are new, the level name, thumbnail, score and flavour text are all neatly tied together… You can see that the most important asset is in the middle of the screen, and pieces get less important as they radiate outward.
I think displaying your friends’ score and world record in a news-ticker along the bottom helps it feel like it’s being updated live. This is something I noticed in iterating on the awesome STREAMING NOW widget on the title screen on SpeedRunners. I hope it’s not to distracting- but just distracting enough :wink:
I could even use this screen for generating a random match, daily challenge and maybe previewing online games in a lobby if I just remove the timeline!

We’re not navigating a globe any more, or moving around a giant Mario World map, or running around a castle jumping into paintings… but it’s very functional, and I can be proud of that.
Can this expand to flick through 50+ levels? If I added an expanded level set a month later, would people find it? These are questions I’ll tackle next time I have a free afternoon.

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This week I worked on the level select:

…Yeah I’m using Advance Wars assets, they’re placeholder. The other stuff is fairly close to real, though.

Today I took a crack at actually implementing Score:

Why is there a high-score and a grade on each level?
A scary thing about making a linear single-player game is that people are gonna stop playing when they get to the end. This might not work out, because typically you’ll design a single-player campaign to be as long as it is fresh. When you’ve stopped introducing game elements, most people want to start wrapping things up.
HOWEVER: Tough nuts like X-Com, Street Fighter, Devil May Cry or Bayonetta have deep systems with more to explore than the sum of their parts. Having an imperfect GRADE lets players know that there’s more to find, without letting them know exactly what. It’s a call to play more creatively and explore the mechanics or work up the skill ladder.

The SCORE determines your grade, but it’s much more granular. Which means it’s more fit to be compared to other scores. I’m hoping it’ll be a nice way to incite competition between friends and strangers without ever engaging in a multiplayer game… Although I hope they do that too! We can also see the world-record tick up point-by-point over time, so we can all get a sense of how the hive-mind community is doing, and where we sit on the grand scale of what’s ABSOLUTELY possible in the game.

How do I determine SCORE?
I’m actually not very experienced with this, but here goes:
Points are not rewarded for doing specific tricks in a match, like teammate ricochets or bank shots. That would just encourage skilled players to play in a convoluted way that lines up with my vision for what’s cool- and that’s a finite, shallow goal. That doesn’t encourage creative, exploratory play at all.
Instead, I set a WAGER at the start of a match: 10,000 points + (Number of enemy balls x 1,000).
Then your SCORE, if you beat the level, is that wager minus Number of Turns You Took x 700.
Plus the amount of health you ended the match with x 10 (Maximum health for each ball being 100).
Plus the amount of health in your deck, which you decided to keep in your deck, x 12.

Choosing only to weight your score based on the beginning and end of a match -HOPEFULLY- means that people will do whatever they can come up with to deal heavy damage in few turns, retaining all health.

Your GRADE is basically your final score divided by that original wager. If you kept it at 100% or higher, that’s an S rank. 90% is an A. 80% is a B, then C, and anything below 60% is a D.
A lot of games rank your skill by giving you 1, 2 or 3 stars at the end of a level; like Angry Birds or Kingdom Rush. The only difference I can come up with between a grade and a number of stars is how people think about them instinctively from experience:
Stars are collectibles, and can be stored up and cashed in. Maybe you’ll need to spend them later- so it’ll be less trouble to scoop them all up while you’re here, than to hit a locked door later.
A grade is a certificate that you’re given. You don’t take the test again immediately, you just accept that you passed with a C and move on. Maybe later you’ll take another look just to acknowledge that you’re improving.
I guess what I’m saying is that a grade feels more like a reflection of your intrinsic progress, instead of hoovering up extrinsic trinkets.

I’m still not sure if this is good! It seems to work in the early levels.
I’d like if an S-rank were achievable on every level in the final game. We’ll see.

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As with every E3: I am completely intimidated by all the amazing indie games and feel like throwing in the towel!

Well, heres an update for this week:

This new unit is a mobile factory. He/she spits out a small support ball instead of taking a turn.
This unit started off as the SPLITTER. They’d split into two smaller units when they hit an enemy. That gets complicated, though; at what angle do they split? What if they do it while moving really slowly and end up occupying the same space? What does that idea ACTUALLY ADD to my strategic decisions?
When I came up with the idea of firing a dummy, I felt a lot better about it. The role of this enemy is to multiply and overwhelm you over time, so now they can achieve that in a way that’s much less complicated.
For a long time, you would fire a dummy and then fire yourself. I thought this was great, it was so powerful to take 2 moves at once. The enemy was very challenging, which I enjoyed! I had to remove the 2nd shot though, because it was such a massive sum of damage all at once, it just aint funny when somebody really cracks how to use it. Instead, I turned up the frequency that it would fire a new unit, strengthening it’s role as a source of overwhelming numbers. As an added bonus, it’s one of the only units that can’t actually fire itself, which is an interesting vulnerability.

I came up with an interesting solution for effects in the game, by the way:


This is a 256x256 PNG. Shades of gray, from black to white, act like an animation timeline from 0 to 1 second… or 0 to 30 seconds, or whatever you feel like stretching it to.
Let’s say it makes black pixels visible at 1 second, grey pixels visible at 5 seconds, and very light pixels visible at 10 seconds.
Working on SpeedRunners, I would hand in these massive sprite sheets with sprite sprite sprite sprite sprite of animation frames for daft things like a big circle, or a little splash, or a puff of smoke. I’m quite happy to have come up with something so small and neat.
Here’s another bonus: If you look at particle and trail effects in Street Fighter, you’ll notice that they animate at a very choppy and staggered framerate when the game goes slow-motion, but these little effects can be played at ANY speed no problem!
I also use this colour ramp to tell the effect how to animate colours, which is also a very small PNG:

With this method, I can make effects animations that might otherwise be 50 or 60 frames of hand-drawn work!
This one is the splash you can see when two balls collide:

I also used this method on my explosion:

I can’t wait to see what else it could be useful for, but I’m quite busy actually working on the game.

Speaking of which- this has been kind of a grace period where I’ve not been too busy at work, but I’m really about to plunge my gross uneducated hands into porting and certification. I’ll actually be directly responsible for game code again on small projects at tinyBuild, so I’ll be much too busy cleaning up after myself and apologizing to make solid progress on BAT SNOOK.

Oh well!

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Man I’m glad I’m making this as a hobby and not my job, cos if people were this disinterested while a whole company was on the line I’d be really stressed out!

The linear progression of levels is cool, I’m happy with where it’s at. I’m almost feature-complete here, it’s just about time to start making all those characters and artwork!
Feels very weird though, I’ve been holding back on it for so long that I have some anxiety on biting the bullet and working on style. My goal with this project was to push style and flair BACK, behind more structured design work and code… so is it really time to polish things up, or am I jumping the gun?

Speaking of design, there are two more unit types I’d consider creating, but I’m just not 100% sure. So I’m doing some on-paper design here; I was telling my girlfriend about why I don’t want a vampire unit, and she came up with the idea of a Jesus-ball who would save everyone else at the cost of his own life-points. I was very happy about the concept, but thinking it through I’m a bit hesitant:

…Really not sure if it’s worth working on. Here’s another one I came up with myself:

…So I’m not sure if I should add more content or start colouring in, and this is paralyzing me for a sec.

Anyway here’s a playable build!

The game’s chugging along with plenty of levels and placeholder Advance Wars characters, so I might as well put it out there for people to try.

Please give it a download, and let me know if you found it too boring, too confusing, slow, weird, or bad! I would love to go in and change things.

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Not much BS work at all these days, there are some real deadlines comin up at work-work. Here’s a quick mockup I managed to sneak in today though:

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These sprites are from Mario Hoops 3-on-3 for the Nintendo DS.
The idea is that my current match screen shows your upcoming enemy character… but it’s not clear that that’s who it is. It might better communicate that a match was starting if it looked more like a versus screen.
I also had a problem where I was telling you that you unlocked a new unit in your inventory… but what the heck is your inventory, right? With this new design, I get to show your current ball choice and also your enemy’s. This really ties the enemy characters to their signature units, which I wasn’t doing before, and gives an even better preview of the upcoming match.
One more thing: All of this info is even more helpful when I re-use this on the Multiplayer lobby screen!

One downside to organizing things into these two compact widgets is that I was looking forward to drawing my big proud character art for each character. I imagined them being tall and stylish, not squat and bulky :confused:
Well… it’s a good thing I’m doing all this paper design before diving into the artwork, cos at least I don’t have to throw my own characters in the bin.

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And you guys are actually one post behind, so here’s the next update from my devlog:
It’s been very busy at work, we’re porting games to consoles and there are some very important deadlines.

Coding update: I have re-vamped the “Daily Challenge”. It now generates 7 levels with increasing complexity, and unlocks one each day of the week. If you’re playing on Wednesday, you should beat Monday, beat Tuesday, beat today, and then wait for Thursday’s level to be delivered. The leaderboard will be the total of all your scores up til Sunday. So if you’re 600 points behind a friend on Thursday, you still have a chance to beat them!!

Artwork update??? I’ve officially started thinking about artwork. I said from the beginning I wouldn’t get distracted by art, but now I think it’s about time to wrap things up.
For this concept art, I’m only thinking about rendering style. Concept art should help you answer some questions before you enter production. Like so:

  • Should the characters have black outlines?
    No, it’s difficult to keep uniform scale with line art in games and I don’t want to worry about that.
  • How many different colours is too many?
    I want to aim for a maximum of 4 colours in a character portrait, so they can double as printed promotional artwork later.
  • How much is too much fidelity of detail?
    The game has a very clean UI, and could potentially be on small screens, so I want large basic shapes that read well, and shouldn’t put more detail into a square inch than the rest of the game would.
  • What is too little detail? Should there be shadows, hard shadows or gradual shading? Should these characters be tall and lean, have big heads, big eyes, Charlie Brown dots for eyes?
    I dunno, let’s find out!

Remember: We are concepting RENDERING here, NOT CHARACTERS.
So I rounded up some reference art for a few minutes to give me an idea of what to try:

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And just splashing around, here’s my first test:

I like the colours and the shapes, but it’s TOO clean. This makes me think of a facebook game or mobile game from a few years ago, and I don’t like how inoffensive it is. The game lacks character right now, and I don’t think this adds much to be interested in. I don’t think I could show a very wide range of personalities when things are this clean either.
These are my first characters who I DON’T plan to animate, so I do have the liberty to spend more time on a portrait than I did in SpeedRunners. I should stretch out a bit more.

After a few other attempts, here’s something completely different:

Wow okay. So one thing I got a bit better at was defining a character that looks like they’ve got things to talk about. This guy looks a bit more potentially dangerous or funny or interesting, so that’s good.
I don’t like how ill-defined everything is, I think it’s too smudgy. Pretty weak lines, and I think it’s too dark. Most of the contrast is happening low down and the face is a blur- which is the opposite of what I should do to communicate personality and identity. Proportionally, his head is about 15% of the image, while if you look at my Super Mario Hoops 3-on-3 Basketball placeholder art: they put great focus on heads and faces. So I definitely need to try again.
By the way, this pose is stolen from a photo of The Fonz, from Happy Days.

I tried again:

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This is one that I liked. I like the colour balance, it really draws you up to the face. I used one-colour hard shadows, and then did one layer of more ambient light and shade. The skin turns a bit more yellow when it gets light, and a bit more red when it gets dark, which helps the game stay colourful.
I think proportions could still be tweaked a bit, this is still a bit too tall to squish into a game interface… maybe I should draw from the stomach upwards. I love this character pose, it makes me laugh, and I actually really like the outline on the eyes which was a complete fluke.
Oh and I decided to include a highlight down one side to help strengthen the character silhouette. I felt like I was missing some definition from the line art.

I started to think about what kind of characters I want to show, and I should aim to tell a story from a photo, because there’s not going to be a lot of explicit narrative here. Sometimes you strike a connection just from seeing a person, or they just have evidence painted on their face that they’ve been through the same trials you have. Sometimes people are funny without jokes. I think each of the characters in Seinfeld tell a story at first sight, and in this next piece of concept art I decided to use Tuco from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as a base for someone with powerful identity in a face:

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This is very similar to the last one, it’s rendered almost exactly the same way. The proportions of the character are now almost 40% head, and MOST of that head is a face. My girlfriend just told me that looks weird, but I’m not sure yet, I think I like it. It feels like South Park to me, which I don’t mind.
I think there’s a lot of harmony in the colours and I like it.
I’m a bit nervous as to whether or not the shadows make it feel too high-fidelity, or if I should blanket him in more broad light. If you look at my Advance Wars 2 placeholder art, they do use a bit of shading, but very sparingly, and almost none on the face. I think I like the shadows on my previous test more.
I think the prop works, and I like how snugly he fits in the circle. That just means he fills a box really well, and will make for an easy UI element for me to use and play around with.

So this was my journey through some potentialities of how characters could look, and I’m still not finished!
It’s been painfully slow working on this, because I’ve been opening the game in 3 or 4 hour blocks on Sundays and that’s all D:
After this it’ll be actual character concepting, then making the assets, maybe funnin’ up the game board and in-game elements, then the game’s ddddooooooooone?
Music too, I’ll need to figure out music.