After playing Jagged Alliance 2, Silent Storm and similar turn-based tactics games, I got the idea of making my own such game. For whatever reason, I decided to try doing it from a first-person perspective, i.e. from the point-of-view of the units on the ground. I’ve posted this before in the Feedback Friday threads, and got some decent feedback.
Where to find it
You can find the WebGL prototype here. I’ve primarily tested this on Firefox, but Chromium seems to work okay as well.
Current state
There are two factions, the player and “Turrets”. The player’s goal is to reach an extraction point marked by a yellow rectangle and smoke, and the Turrets faction will attempt to stop them. The player has a maximum number of turns available to do this.
Player units can select a free-form path that may climb ladders or vault obstacles. They may also sidestep and crouch at a higher cost than simply moving. Looking around is a completely free action.
Humanoid enemies will attempt to take cover (not always successfully).
Turrets will attempt to suppress targets by simply dumping ammo into their surroundings.
Next steps
Better character models (as in, anything but a blue/red capsule!)
A larger level with more enemies
An extraction ROFLcopter helicopter that will wait for a certain number of turns before leaving. Or perhaps another vehicle.
I now have some initial character models. These are shared between player-controlled and some NPC characters; the main difference is that NPCs wear a helmet.
They’re based off something like this this, albeit with rayguns instead of WW1-era guns. I may add different skins later.
Their animations are adapted from the PistolTPPController from Kubold’s PistolAnimsetPro asset. However, I’m not particularly good at rigging and animating, so they’re a bit glitchy:
They’re supposed to point their guns at the ground when moving, but the camera controls override that. NPC models do seem to obey this.
The camera is shakier than I’d like it to be. Especially when shooting or reloading.
When climbing, they clip through the scenery.
Player characters don’t wear a helmet because the camera clipped through it when crouching.
The next step is to try fixing those, and add some better models for robotic enemies (that floating wasp that’s currently there, and a turret that I accidentally removed from the scene).
The turrets and the gun used by the hovercraft are based off WW1-era water-cooled machineguns, but converted into a raygun. One minor issue is that turrets partially rotate up when turning to face an opponent, but I’m not in any hurry to fix that.
The next step will be to expand that level, adding some more scenery objects.
