Devlog #1 - Better controls and redoing ALL the art V 0.1.1

Controls

As announced in the last devlog I mostly worked on the controls in this update. And I am quite happy with the result. The ability to select multiple units at once makes the gameplay much smoother. I also changed the way selection and movement of units is displayed to the player. With these changes it’ way easier to see if a unit is selected and where it is going.

Additionally to the features mentioned above, I added a bunch of small quality of life functions to enhance the experience. They are all listed below. I also had more ideas for the controls, but I decided to keep them for a later update. One of these “advanced controls” features would be chain commands like movement together to more precisely control the units. If you like this feature or have other suggestions, please leave them in the comments :)

Art

As you have already seen in the picture above, I also redid all the artwork for the game. Instead of using vector art I choose to go for pixel art. Making the art for my games is always very challenging for me as I am more of a programmer than an artist, but I think it’s definitely an upgrade (using an actual colour palette helped a lot :P). What do you think of the change? 

All Changes

• Added: Outline to indicate selection
• Added: the ability to select all units in an area
• Added: Minimum and maximum speed
• Changed: Movement indicator from a point to a line
• Changed: Art for almost everything
• Added: Automatically merge risen units and old units, if they were selected together
• Added: Move Split and Risen units to the mouse cursor
• Changed: Merge units at mouse cursor and not in the centre anymore
• Changed: While merging units move closer together if they are already close together
• Fixed: Name of the project was wrong in some places
• Fixed: wrong lines in the fog of war (black lines or revealed line, where they shouldn’t be)

What’s next?

For the next update I want to rework some of the basic gameplay and balancing. Currently having one big army is a way too strong strategy. Some of this definitely came from the old controls. But gameplay wise there isn’t much of an incentive to use multiple weaker units. I want to fix this by adding flanking to the game and adding more time pressure. Currently, all enemy buildings “grow” with time, but that isn’t enough and also not communicated to the player. In the next update I hope to fix this.

I’m also thinking about other features to enrich the gameplay experience. If you are curious about the new features, you can follow me to be notified, when the update arrives. As always, feedback and suggestions are very much appreciated and would mean a lot to me.

 Thanks for reading this far and I hope you have a great day :D

Malgios