A noble-born commander is taking charge of a far-flung garrison, when their patrols fall silent. They discover that the villages of the region have been slaughtered…and raised as an army. However, it’s all more complex than that…
Saleria: Zombies vs. Knights is a rewrite of my 2011 strategy game, Zombies vs. Knights…only, done better this time. I’ve taken the critiques from the original game, and am making a small-scale, real-time strategy game based around the simple premise of destroying the enemy base. Capture resources, recruit the right warriors for the situation and reclaim your kingdom…or your freedom.
The game will be released for PC, for the low cost of $Absolutely Nothing.
Images
As always, feedback is not only appreciated, but needed! Feel free to give it a play and tell me what I can do to make it the best possible game!
Known Missing Features:
CPU AI - Kind of useful for a strategy game
Sound/Music
More units - In Progress!
Commander customization
Skirmish mode - In this mode you choose a map, choose a side, then fight it out.
Mod tools - This game is built to be fully moddable.
General Polish - This game is in development. When the game is fun, it will be polished and released for your enjoyment!
I like all of the structure you have done for the game with the placeholder/WIP screens.
Honestly, for me there is just not enough feedback to really know what I am doing or should be doing.
All I do is click on a building (and it doesn’t matter which building) and click to create a knight or ghoul. It comes out heads automatically to the other building and attacks it then disappears. Well I should clarify, they always come out of the same building but it doesn’t matter which building I have selected.
I see a coin and sometimes when my mouse is over it a little curvy arrow appears. I click thinking I should interact with it and nothing happens. I click on the knight or ghoul and nothing happens. Then I try clicking on it and clicking on the ground a ways away to see if I can command it to move there and and nothing happens.
I see Victory at some point and think well I guess I did what I was supposed to be doing.
Good critiques. Working on making the game give better feedback. I may wind up sending you some private messages at some point to see how I’ve done, when I’ve done more on this angle.
Its not much of a game, there is no combat mechanics or strategy at all, just click a button till a victory screen pops up. That said I did like the main menu, though the animation time between scenes took ages.
I think it has potential, it just needs alot more work.
I’ll speed up the fades even more. I think including some AI will help the game be more of a game, but per @GarBenjamin I think I should make the controls more intuitive. He’s right that the game isn’t giving enough feedback.
As far as the main menu, I’m not entirely sure about it. I got to play with fire…but I’m not sure that it fits my vision as well as it could. Of course, it’s simple and to the point…I just think I could do the title better. Skyrim was sorf of my UI inspiration.
I’ve updated my build with “Targeting Whooshes” inspired by Final Fantasy XII. Does this help what’s going on to be more understandable?
I’ve updated the build with a “invalid option” cursor that appears when terrain is moused over. Does this help make the game more understandable? (Note: I need to refine the cursor change behaviors more, as there are some awkward bugs that can occur as a result of how these changes are currently done.)
I also colored in the cursors to make them more impactful. Does that help? Would different coloring work better on them?
@AndrewGrayGames Hmm… well this time I clicked each button Campaign, Skirmish, Commander and they take me to a blank screen. The Back button is visible but there is nothing else.
@GarBenjamin The fixes are up. The problems were a NullReference exception out of left field, and a flaw in the New GUI ScrollViews that required setting the ‘right’ value of the content object to -0.5 in order to get it to show up…for some reason. New GUI can be very strange sometimes.
Anyways, it should now work properly (I tested it in IE).
@AndrewGrayGames Definitely better now. The “no click here” symbol when hovering over the ground is good. The red sword icon when hovering over the enemy building is very good. The targeting whoosh thingy is good.
I still don’t quite understand what the deal with the coin is. I think I am collecting it maybe but it seems to do nothing unless it gives me just 1 bonus coin. If that is the case I think it would be cool to make it spin maybe 5 times slower and give 10 coins when clicked on so it is obvious.
The idea with the coin is that it’s a sort of mini-objective. You can select a unit, then right-click the coin to order the unit to move to the coin, to pick it up. The unit can then sit on the point to keep collecting coins as they spawn, or do other things as the player directs the unit to. When a unit picks up a coin, it grants 10 resources to that unit’s faction.
Since this is something else that’s come up before, what can I do with the coin to make it more obvious, or is my design what’s truly at fault here? Would it be more fun for coins to behave sort of like Sun does in Plants vs. Zombies? Bear in mind, everything in this work is targeted towards this game being a strategic experience, not a twitch game.
Ah it may well just be my bad. For some reason I never even tried to click with the right mouse button at all. I just assumed (and we know what happens then) it was all left mouse click. lol
Not sure. I guess I didn’t see any reason why the other mouse button would be needed.
I think that is just because I didn’t know how much was actually in the demo. Generally, the first thing I do with any game is start pressing keys or clicking the mouse left, right, both together, click & hold etc just to figure out what all I can do and how to do it. So basically I think you just have a bit more in there than I realized.
One thing I briefly experimented with was modifying certain of the mouse cursors to have an “R” in them somewhere. I couldn’t make it work; it always made the cursor less effective (and, usually ugly to boot.) So, the brute-force approach is out for that.
I guess next on my agenda, is to address the rather critical point from @RavenOfCode that Saleria: Zombies vs. Knights is at this point pretty much not a game. That means, adding some opposing AI…which might mean the player losing!
