Hi folks, currently developing this game called Gangster Tactics : Pile them In. This is intended to be an isometric tactics turn-based RPG game which is mostly set in the fictional city called "Casa City". I intend to release this game in Windows only for now, due to lack of required hardware for personal testing and not because of some elitist bullshit.






You suddenly received word that your elder brother had died, killed in a gang fight in Casa City, your hometown. While you have no love lost for your black sheep of a brother, your mother plead that you at least come back to attend his funeral, as a close family member. Angered being burdened once again by your worthless brother, you packed and set for home. And unknowingly walk into maelstrom of rivalries, hatred and violence that will soon engulf Casa City.

And you, along with the people whom you gathered together will decide out of that chaos, the future and fate of Casa City.



The gameplay is, as above mentioned, tactic turn-based. The mechanics for this game is largely inspired by the best of the tactics RPG genre, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together . As you will see, most of the game UI design is also inspired by its UI due to its simplicity yet robust style. As they say, learn from the best  ;D.





Without further ado, here are some of the intended battlefield mechanics:-

• HP, SP and AP - It's too obvious what HP and SP are (SP replace MP in this game). AP stands for Adrenaline Points which you only get as you attack,get attacked by others, being bloodied, or defeating someone outright. Many powerful moves require AP to be used. Please note that in this game, the enemies also can use those moves with the same requirements, so take that information in stride.
• Positioning system - Position is king in the battlefield. If your men are facing the back of the enemy, they can dealt up to twice the usual amount of damage. Once again, do note this also apply for the enemies and they WILL attempt these maneuvers, even if you want to fight "fair"  :.
• No random number generator in battle - While random number generator have their uses, this feature is brought over from tabletop gaming in which it is used to randomize players' chance of success in an attempt to bridge the skill gap between a tabletop veteran and a rookie. After all, who want to play tabletop with a veteran where his victory is guaranteed 100% of the time? In a single player game, I found the main opinions is that the feature largely served unintended to annoy and frustrate players. Also make everyone use the save button more often. It also diminished the importance of skill in tactics game if used heavily. So, in this game, it won't be used in the battlefield and only be used in the strategic layer to handle random events.

Let's talk about some mechanics that is shown on the image above.

• Equipments - Each character have four equipment slots which they can outfit with different stuff. Standard stuff. Let's move along.
• The smiley face at the bottom of the character showcase in front of a scale - This icon reflect the personality of the character in question. Based on the image, the smiley is smirking while giving us a finger salute. Therefore, the personality of the character is "a bit of d***". Personalities is crucial in assigning tasks in the strategic overlay to your gang members and when trying to reclass them so to speak, as some classes(stereotypes) require a certain personality to access it. Personalities can be changed through behaviors on the battlefield and for some, plot decisions.
• The number beside the character showcase - That is the number of lives the character have. If it falls to 0 in any way, the character automatically died. If your main character died, it's game over for good (At least, until you reload the last save). As with Tactics Ogre, the number is reduced primarily by getting unconscious in battlefield and not received any appropriate medical aid in less than 3 turns.
• Stats - Some of these are explained below:
  [list]
• Strength - Affects Physical Attack (Melee and Ranged). Used in some events and strategic activities.
• Constitution - Affects Physical Defense. Used in some events and strategic activities.
• Intelligence - Affects Special Attack. Used in some events and strategic activities.
• Willpower - Affects Special Defense. Used in some events and strategic activities.
• Agility - Affects Initiative. Used in some events and strategic activities.

This post has been edited by Sethmaster: Mar 26 2014, 12:28 AM

The image above show the characters that belong to the player's gang. As with tactics ogre, you can switch to class list view to see how many people of each class do you have in your gang.
If you look closely, you will find Xbox button icons is shown on the UI.This game is intended to be play either with a controller using XBox mapping or via keyboard. The mapping can be changed via controls UI. Mouse controls will not be supported at least until a while after the game is completed and only if requested then.






The picture shown above is the Class Change(Stereotype) UI. In this game, classes are referred to as "Stereotypes" which better reflect the tone of the game. In-game explanation is that most people change accordingly to what the society and largely what their friends expect from them. If they expect someone to constantly be strong and act like a idiot, the person will usually comply. Classes have their own stats, skill tree, requirements and effects. Also important is the fact that each class give different stat progression at each level-up.





The Battle Placement UI. Subject to change but I like the design so far.





This is the Strategic Overview UI. Let's talk about some of the elements here:

• Money - Self- explanatory. Require to buy anything.
• Fame - how much people have heard of you. This may both be good and bad, depending on the situation and the plot
• Street Cred - How much respect you have earned from the underworld and other gangs. Higher value give you access to black markets with rare items and special missions.
• Date - The passing of time. Usually irrelevant until you receive/start a time critical mission. May be used to set chances of random events (Still unsure should or not)
• Strategic Icons - The color shows whenever you can go to the location and access the activities there safely or about to start a fight/mission. Blue for safe, red for danger.

Since the battlefield main activity is obvious, let's talk about the planned activities in the strategic map.
I planned for quite a lot of stuff but most of them can easily be defined as:

• Investment - Invest in business and real estates. Choose between renters and staffs. Also many of your investment allow for more investment to improve on or buy stuff. After every mission completion, you will receive the fruits of the investment, be it good or bad. Random events may happen. The investment rewards will not be based on time/date but rather on number of missions completed to player visiting it to claim the reward.
• Assignment - Assign your gang members to do other stuff such as loan sharking on idiotic young people with low financial discipline and high ego. Assigned gang members may not participate on the next mission. Each assignments end after mission completion. Random events may happen.
• Renovation - Renovate your gang hideout with new rooms, new equipment and new decorations. Gain some bonus and more importantly, open access to some game features and stereotypes. One of it is to allow any gang member to be assigned to the room and after a mission completion, level up to 2 levels below the highest level character in the gang. The feature is intended because since I am not japanese, there will be no grinding. Every battle is important.

The Settings UI. Not to be confused with the Controls UI which is another UI. I would be grateful for suggestions of further settings people would like to have in an isometric tactics game.




The Save UI. Currently planned to have only 16 save slots due small part to lack of programming skill and large part to unwillingness to commit further time on the feature.



This post has been edited by Sethmaster: Apr 18 2014, 02:28 AM

Some progress during the last week

• Sam L. Jones is joining on board to design the soundtrack for the game. :beer:
• Finish gamepad controls
• Finish keyboard controls. Can be customizable.
• Finish title screen.
• Finish all intro screens.
• Finish isometric movement and tiling.
• Screen transition effects are done. Ported over from my previous game.

Some gifs to show progress





Going to focus on finishing up scrollbar functions, options, and all other GUI functions before moving on to character creation.

Nice!! just love the 16 bit design!!!
Fully support malaysia developer!!!

thanks bro

This week current progress:

I just finish the Controls UI for the game. Holy shit, that was harder than I thought

It is not complicated, just hell lot of work and thinking that goes into what buttons should what. In the end, I just copied Tactics Ogre schematics and then move on, believing that in the future, when all my features are set, I will have a better understanding how to ensure the players can use all the buttons with high efficiency.

To show progress: here’s some gifs:

 
1/3


2/3


3/3

The current control schematics:

No "rape" button? This is not my gangster game. Dropped hard. - a 4chan anonymous


I may need a "Everybody Walk the Dinosaur" button in the future. Maybe not

Do tell what changes you wanted to the current control schematics. I will see what I can do  


The setting UI is also done.
Admittedly I went in doing it, thinking it would be easy but that is so wrong on so many level.
Finally finish it though and implemented all the settings features that is on the first post of this thread, including in-game screen resolution changes and a better(I think  ;D ) scan lines shaders effect.
I also changed the quick button to cancel out of menu from gamepad's Y to the default B as indicated by my control schematics.


To show progress here are some gifs:







While the gifs may only show the web deployment, desktop deployment also worked just as well.

what engine are you using? unity?

Construct 2.

bro! super salute u!!!!
I have play play the construct 2, know how it working and can do most thing i want
but u just make it happen! very very nice

habbo hotel?

Sorry, bro.
It's single player Tactics RPG.
With a lot of overlapping mechanics from Tactics Ogre - Let Us Cling Together (PSP version).
No multiplayer is intended, for now.

Today progress:
I just finish my Quit UI which is easy to do.
Actually, I also planned to finish my Save/Load UI today.
Only, half way through that, I realize I need to extract strings from the stat system to put in the save slots so the player can identify each slot easily.
So, the Save/Load UI workload is put after I finish the combat system.



With all the current UIs workload finish, I will concentrating on character creation.

Doing dialog box mock up today
Finish coding some of the dialog functions but still halfway there.



Not much progress today due to transferring all my sfx to a newly brought external drive and discussing about character creation methodology with other indie game devs and some other people.

Just finish the dialog features for my game.
With this done, I can fully concentrate on my Character Creation using a variant of this feature.
Also here's a gif to show progress.



Trigger Warning: Contain Rape.



Ignore the slight jam after the choices. I already fixed those and are just too lazy to make another gif.I also have finish inputting all the required sprite fonts for my game.

Finish Character Creation.
While I still unsure how the stats bonus going to affect difficulty (i want to give the pc character a boost, not turn him/her/it into a demigod of rage.) , I can adjust it later if the values are too much.

A bit tamer than my last game character creation.
No gif this time though, because I like to keep most of questions hidden as a pleasant surprise.

Now, focusing on porting over my stats engine to this game and configuring it to fit.

This post has been edited by Sethmaster: Mar 31 2014, 09:49 PM

Alright, progress report time.

Finish designing my isometric tiling and other associated functions to work together.
Also prepared some notes on importance of origin points in isometric projections.
Most of my dev time today is to design a isometric battlefield template so i can easily dump tiles from Photoshop to my Construct 2 arrays very quickly.
This allow me to design the battlefield in Photoshop instead of in Construct 2 layout, which is less convenient



The picture shown is a in-game view of my tutorial battlefield. There are no characters yet. Which will be remedied soon enough.

Some progress from the past few days.

Finish creating the female model to represent the females of Casa City.
Can't have the game turn into a sausage party, can't we ?


The image above is totally not before and after Hanks have a sexual change operations. And those lumps are totally not oranges.

Finish creating the first animation in the game, the walking animation.
This take me a lot of time to get it done and look good in a few frames but I think I succeed in it. Have a look and judge for yourself.


Not enough ass-shaking but hey this is fighting game, not a modeling one.


I have also finished the chess placement functions for the game, allowing me to place the sprites I have created into the game and onto a battlefield.


Roger, my man. Why in the world do we keep walking in the same spot over and over again?

All in all, that's quite some progress but I still have a lot to do.
Some of my immediate future tasks to complete:

• Finish the stats system and link it to the characters in the battlefield
• Create the battlefield UI so everything's description can be read ala Tactics Ogre style.
• Port over my previous AIs to this game so the enemies can fight back.

Progress report for the past week!

For the past weekend, I replay Tactics Ogre and have found several key gameplay issues that irked me. This, of course, helps to improve my gameplay design for this game to ensure those issues, such as the overpowerness of the archer class do not happen.

Also, I have finished the stat system for the game.
I have also finished the level up algorithm, the damage calculation for the game, the skills and abilities system.
All of them are done in excel for easier updating and maintenance since there is a Construct 2 plugin that helps to transfer excel tables in .csv format into arrays quickly and easily.
All there is left is to create the class variables for the characters in the battlefield and it's most of the engine work is pretty much done, at least for the planned demo.

So basically no visual progress..... Sorry for that.

In exchange, let me tell you how I designed the classes (called stereotypes in-game).
If you are familiar with the MMORPG scene or with tabletop gaming, you know in a good party, there would be a tank, a glass cannon, a healer/buffer and a controller. Those are called archetypes and it help the player/group to determine how to better use a specific class in the battle or how to redesign his tactical plan to suit the available classes or lack of, in his current party.

For my game, there are several archetypes, each classes usually have a huge part in one while dipping in another one or several. Here are them as they currently are in my spreadsheet:

Tank
Description: Basically stereotypes with high defenses/hp. Most of them have unique mechanics to keep enemies attention to them despite their plans. An example would be Brutes project Intimidating Aura that turn all surrounding tiles around them into difficult terrain which cost more to move into. The size of this aura can be enlarged via appropriate skills.
Stereotype (Major): Brute, Luchador, Firebrand
Stereotype (Minor): Drunk

Glass Cannon
Description: Weaklings with usually low HP/Defenses but possess strong attack abilities. Many have extra mechanics to improve their damage capabilities even further provided appropriate situation. Punks can dealt extra damage to an enemy if the enemy have a prior negative condition on him regardless of how it got there. As usual, this mechanic can be enhanced via skills.
Stereotype (Major): Punk, Provocateur, Smarty Pant, Drunk, Wiseguy
Stereotype (Minor): Brute

Healer
Description: Capable of healing hp damage and removing status effects. They have a unique individual mechanics to improve their healing abilities. Social activist got a point blank level-dependent boost to all their healing abilities.
Stereotype (Major): Social Activist, Dealer
Stereotype (Minor): Rapper, Firebrand, GRO (Guest Relations Officer), Merchant, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

Buffer
Description: Capable of giving positive status effects to friendlies. Their mechanics is designed to help out their mates. The presence of a rapper in the party give "Encouraged" effect to any friendlies who have just took down an enemy for a turn. Needless to said, there are skills to improve on that mechanic.
Stereotype (Major): Rapper, GRO, Merchant
Stereotype (Minor): Provocateur, Firebrand, Social Activist, Dealer, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

Debuffer
Description: Capable of giving negative status effects to enemies. Also push and pull enemies into positions that are always bad for them. There are certain skills that improve debuffing abilities but no mechanics of yet.
Stereotype (Major): Rapper, GRO, Merchant
Stereotype (Minor): Luchador, Brute, Drunk, Smarty Pants, Provocateur, Wiseguy, Dealer, Anyone with an Item Usage skill

And that pretty much what I planned for now.
Only six of these classes will be available in the demo.
Five of those will be available in the player's gang for the demo.

Also, TO-inspired skills points are out for this game as of now. Skills will be obtained through leveling and are given out on the start and at every third level. Also all passive small bonuses skills are out. There are also no must-have skills which is also known in the tabletop gaming as "feat tax".
This is to stop players to only use their battle-hardened skill points heavy characters and make others, especially new characters, also viable for battle usage.
Don't worry, there will be a hideout feature that can change unwanted skills   , provided the character is assigned there until the next mission is over.
I am a tactics gamer first and foremost, after all  


TL,DR : Engine progress for the past week. No visuals, sorry.

Solid work OP Looking forward to your progress. Interesting choice in removing RNG from the game. I have mixed opinions about this because I subscribe to the belief that swings in luck are healthy for gameplay (although this is more suited towards the multiplayer train of thought where lucky streaks can create comeback opportunities). Still, its cool as a player to know that 5 damage will always be 5 damage.

This is great inspiration to work harder on my own project in Unity o/

This post has been edited by ZeratoS: Apr 12 2014, 07:01 PM

No problem, bro. Good luck on your own project too .

Finished the movement range tiles and animation.
Also linked them up into the game and setup the function to call them up when necessary.


Look, Roger, there are green lights projecting over where I can go! Technology!

What's your opinions of the movement tiles?
I try to be a bit unique while trying to make sure it still convene the range of the characters' movement and also looking good.
Does it work?

FYI, before I continue on to create the battlefield UI, I need to finish the Mission UI and the battle preparation UI firstly.
Totally forgot about the mission UI where the players learn a bit about the turf and its denizens that they are about to fight.
There are more details about the Mission UI and I will explain those when I finish some of its functions and assets.

I like the UI btw. Very retro

I assume you'll be replacing most of the (placeholder?) character/NPC sprites in the future?

Less opaque. Check this game's movement range indicator.

This post has been edited by ZeratoS: Apr 13 2014, 05:25 PM

Thanks, bro for your compliment

Some yes with slight changes, but my game art style had pretty much been decided. Also, mostly because my art skill not as terer as those AAA people lah .

Looks nice. Thanks

Ok, after a lot of feedbacks, I decided to go with this tiles to show movement range, mostly because they look tidy, good and also unique enough.


Cleaner! Tidier! That is the Green Spotlights 1000. Get yours today!


Also finish my mockup for the Mission UI.
It supposed to keep track of the progress of the mission and how many battles you have fought and how many still remains in that particular mission.
I haven't finish the second battlefield layout so I am using the first one as placeholder in lieu of the second one temporarily.
After some thoughts, I decided to cut out some planned extra features from it as it is just clutter/ busywork and does not add to the gameplay in a good sense.


In another dimension, Andrew is the one who going to bust Harry's favorite bar

Will now code this portion of the game soon.

Finish coding my mission UI screen.
On the way, I also finish the buttons features and the bottom GUI functionality.
With most of the stuff I have done are using functions, I can call and change each elements easily.




Oh shit! Better go back to my post before Harry noticed I am missing.


Now I will be focusing on the gang screen and the codes to store the player's gang's members.

This post has been edited by Sethmaster: Apr 15 2014, 08:51 PM

Yet another progress report (Seriously though, I have no idea how else to start my progress report)

I finish up the player's gang array.
It take helluva lot of time to finish the functions require to populate the array because the array contains 54 columns aside from the first indexing column.
The columns hold vital information from the stats to the current alignment of the character inside the gang.

I also finish up the random name arrays necessary to give names to the characters (aside from the player character, boss and special NPCs)
This is important as player's hired goons need names as do the enemies' mooks.
This also take a fair amount of time as I need to separate the names according to gender and race.
After all, an Irish male named Lakasha is not going to help much in trying to engage the player, isn't it ?
All in all, there are over 1000 plus names in those arrays so that will ensure very rarely any members of yours or the enemies will ever have the same name.
(P.S. Thank you popular baby naming sites that I won't named. You guys are a great help in this!)

To populate the gang screen, i finish creating a portion of the characters that will be in the demo. Basically the Latinos since I have just be only showing off the Irish and the Africans previously.
To show that, I present to you:

From the left to right; Civilian, Brute, Punk, Social Activist, Smarty Pants, Provocateurs

This is definitely not the main cast for a latino pixel version of Glee, I swear

And of course, the female editions, because of equal opportunity

And these are not their love interests, seriously not.


Will finish up the gang screen in the near future.
Also I will be deleting the current progress on the opening post since it is tiring for me to keep updating it.

Progress report for yesterday work.

I finish slicing parts of the character sprites to make it easier to animate and to transfer animations to each different character after just one is done.
This is pretty much based on the techniques used by expert animators for square enix to lessen their workload.
What works for the goose, works for the gander.

Moreover, after some consideration, I decided to changed the way I design characters in the game.
At first, I want the each races in my game to look differently in term of color,clothing and hairstyle despite mostly sharing the same stereotypes.
However, after spending quite some time just animating different characters, I decided that is way too much workload for me to handle.
I am the only developer for this game, with Sam Jones providing the soundtracks.
If I continue with this methodology, I can only finish this game after around 5 years of just animating pixels.

So, I come out with new method, I will try to make each stereotype look different from each other in term of hairstyle and clothing.
However, the difference for each race for the same stereotype is just skin and hair color instead of overall color haul also in clothing and different hairstyles.
With just this and the earlier slicing , I reduce my workload by a huge margin with a dip in variety, which I hope you guys will forgive me.
After all, if possible, I plan to finish this game within a year time frame with the demo coming out hopefully in another two months or so, give or take a few weeks.



The Latino Squad practicing their moves for the dance off


Do not worry, special NPCs and bosses will still have their own character animation and design, separated from mooks (both yours and theirs).
Moreover racial stereotype unique to each race is still in.

Yesterday progress report.

Finish the walking animations for the all the classes available for the player in the demo based on the new methodology.
What I am showing is based on the latinos, however based on the answers you give in the character creation section of the demo, you will get different racial versions.

From the left to right; Brute, Social Activist, Smarty Pants, Punk, Provocateur

FINALLY their gang leader decide to splurge on clothing and haircuts. Now they don't need the nametags to tell who is who.


Now progressing on finishing the gang screen.

nice

Thanks for your compliment.


Progress from yesterday.
Changed the gang screen button to something better. Also created a lot of buttons for the gang screen.



Finish drawing the stereotype (class) icons for the characters in the player's gang.

From the left to right: Brute, Social Activist, Smarty Pants, Punk, Provocateur

Also their favorite graffiti to paint over walls

Suggestions are welcomed.

Progress for today and yesterday.

I finish creating the bottom part of the Battle UI. While this may seen to be a small part, it actually involve a lot of code and assets.
Also need to insert another new font I have forgotten into my game to represent lives.
The good thing is that I had created in a way that allow me to call on this UI with a single function and with only a single parameter (Unit ID).
Hard work today for easy work in the future.

The UI in question. I changed it to be shorter so I can put another one on the right side with room to spare for a very obvious reason if you played any FFT or TO games before.

Henry is such a showoff sometimes

I also have fix some assets to look better. Also have finish most of the gang screen assets.

Will focus on coding the remaining of the gang screen.

This post has been edited by Sethmaster: Apr 22 2014, 05:10 PM

Progress for today.

Finish coding 50% of the functions for Gang Screen. Quite a lot of code of the backend to compute what to show and how to show.
I am beginning to have a healthy dose of admiration and respect for the programmers of TO.
Teach me not to underestimate to work needed in the backend.

Gif to show progress as usual

Please don't judge James sexual identify. He had a hard life

Next on my list of things to bash about until they work are the buttons interactions in the Gang Screen, specifically to arrange the characters in there and the cycle stats mechanism.
If you are familiar with Tactics Ogre : Let's Us Cling Together, there are four sorting options, namely : Manual Sort, Sort Criteria, Change ID No. and Reassign ID No.
I don't know about you guys, but I have not and have never heard of anyone using the last two options.
Usually only the first is being used to put all the heavy hitters that you want to use for the upcoming battles to the front and kick all the rejects to the back.

Therefore, I intended to implement only first two sorting features.
There are already a lot of features I still need to do without adding the ones that no players will ever touch.

Just a quick visual update.

Change the bars(hp,sp and ap) from the previous



to this one



The new ones should resolve most of the complaints that the previous ones look tacky, r-right?

Back to focusing on the coding until my brains melt.

Nearly finish the Gang Screen features with exception of the sorting feature.
Those need to wait until after Ludum Dare is over.
I will be participating in the event during the weekend so this is pretty much the final progress report for this week.
The controls for Gang Screen are online, the cycle stats works and some fixes for some of the arrangement.


As usual, gif to show demonstrate results

Don't ask why two "girls" and one guy share the same name. Please don't



I also decide to cap units at 30 for the overworld balance purpose as I realize too many units in the player gang makes assignments seem trivial and not strategic as I hoped since the player can spare so many units if I stick with 100 as the unit cap.
With the highest amount of unit the player can field into a battle is 12 (only at the last chapters and on special battles), 30 seems to be a nice number to ensure strategic planning is required in the overworld instead of mindless clicking.
I also probably need to set a reasonable price for new recruits to avoid padding but still allow the players to recruit fresh troops to supplement their tactics.
One of the idea is to go with exponential pricing where the more you recruit, the more each new member cost you.

Tell me what you think. I will be back around next week.

Alright new week, new progress
Too bad, ludum dare didn't turn out well for me as I have personal problems that occur during that time that forced me to drop out to handle the situation.
Oh well, there always will be the next ludum dare, after all.

Today progress is that I finally finish all of the gang screen features. All the sorting mechanism from manual to criteria sorting works.
Also the class list features that is in TO:LUCT is delegated into DJ Avery News section as that feature is more about class info and less about how many of each class that you have, at least from the experience of people that I known of.
Also, I finished linking all the stats tables together to create function that is capable of churning out random gangsters for the player based on stereotype, race and gender.
Make everything going forward easier as I no longer have to depend on cheap templates to serves as test subjects for my coding.


As usual, gif to show progress

Roger don't understand why an evil entity called "~Developer-kun~" ask him to check and sort an enemy gang that going to kick his arse into orbit in a short while


Moving on to the Battlefield Placement UI, the UI where you arrange your troops for the battlefield.

Small progress today
I blame it on catching up on Jojo's Bizarre Adventures instead of doing game development properly.
Nonetheless, I finish half of the Battlefield Preparation UI, specifically the Unit Selection portion
Probably finish the UI by the tomorrow or the day after.

As usual, gif to show progress

Progress report for the last two day
I finish the battlefield placement/deployment UI.
The features are pretty much highly inspired from Tactics Ogre: Let's Us Cling Together version.
After all, I don't think you can improve much on the perfection for their version.
Well, at least, I can't.

As usual, gifs to show progress
The first one show how characters are deploy using the UI

Knowing ~Developer-kun~ , Juan David don't know if he should feel sad or happy that he is left out of the battle party


The second show what the buttons on the left side do



Going to take some time to do some small cosmetic change and re-factoring before moving on to the meat of my game, the tactical battles, which I am specialized at.

You are FuriousGamer87? If correct then will follow/fav your workshop in Steam later. Thumbs up on the work so far!

*Will be awesome if you do a DLC add-on/pack for Mafia classes (muscles/soldiers, capo/lieutenant, bookkeeper, don, etc) too.

Ya, that's my steam and twitter nick.
But I don't have anything on my steam workshop, bro
About the DLC stuff, I am putting off any future plans (mouse/touch support, consoles port, mobile port etc.) regarding this game until I finish it first.
Also, there is a planned stereotype that is already a mafia-like stereotype.

After I finish it, feel free to shoot your ideas about what will be nice addition you would like to see in the game.

Totally forgotten about the part that I need to make enemies and differentiate them from the players. I use uniform colors to do so. Not showing the secret enemy stereotype until the demo is ready though

Also working on the turn and status manager for the battlefield. There's are lot of inter-connected arrays that need to be properly arrange to work at optimal result.

Continuing on with the coding until it works or I make a hole in the wall by head bashing it.

Yet another progress report
Finish the round and status manager for the battlefield.
Meanwhile, I also re-factor some of the code for smoother handling.
In addition, I have finish the enemy and player battlefield spawning code.
The enemy is the easy one, the player is the hard one which took me quite a while to do because I mispelt a variable, causing me to spend two hours on debugging why it doesn't work .

As usual, gif to show progress


The Death Cross gang once again marvel at their teleportation tech that they possess, yet wonder why they are not equipped with laser guns.

And again, the usual progress report

Finish attaching the dialog features with no issue while implementing another much wanted features, the skip conversation button.
While it is annoying to me as a writer to allow people to skip over my writing, especially when I am making a RPG , there are a lot of people out there who enjoy gameplay over story. Besides, it allow for a quicker run if anyone wanted to replay my game (hopefully so).

Also finished the battle start screen. Will focus now on creating the initiative UI at the bottom of the screen and initialize all the rest of the battle UIs that I have previously finished.

As usual, the gifs

Not using the skip conversations version

For one single moment, Patryk thought somebody remember that today is his birthday

The skip conversations version

~Developer-kun~ log 2014 : When I see this feature being used, something inside me die a little

Time for a serving of your usual progress report!

Finish the initiative bar. Bugger take me quite a while to finish because of both the assets and coding required.
But the good news is that I finished it and as usual, can call it with just a function.
Also finish the battlefield selection and scrolling.
Coding the scrolling is easy like hell while the selection require a bit more work since I never done it before.
In addition, I also tune the battlefield placement/deployment screen with some extras to improve the UI's user friendliness.
(Totally not because I forgotten about it in TO the first time around)

As usual, gifs to show progress:
The improvement to the battlefield placement/deployment screen

A new and faster way to send your men and women to their doom!

Initiative bar

Everyone in the battlefield try not to know how ~Developer-kun~ got the heads for the bottom bar

Scrolling and Selection

Although they are curious about why a hovering golden arrow keep popping up in the battlefield

This post has been edited by Sethmaster: May 11 2014, 01:19 AM

Finish all the basic battlefield controls.
The B button to go back to the character whose have the current turn, the Start button to open up the options and the the A button to open up choices regarding the selected character.

With just all that done, I will now concentrate on the save and load features.
Will trying to attempt to have unlimited saves despite what I have stated in the past because I have a good idea on how to implement that without screwing myself over with a lot of workload or causing bugs.

As usual, gifs to show progress


Hopefully the quit button is not the first button people pressed when they see my game

Finish the save and load features!
Took way more time than I thought because I am an idiot who key in the wrong set of properties and didn't know it until much later.
Yes, the save feature in this game in Unlimited saves . Moreover, a new save slot is set on the every top of the Save UI so the player have not need to scroll down to get to the empty save slot ala XCOM : EU.
The load work as well as expected.

The next task is to setup all the other features for the options buttons bar and to setup the save and load on much earlier layouts. As usual, these features are designed to be easily called via just a function. Make every features I have connect to each other easily with minimal fuss.
Probably will think of some way to make the save slots look even better.

As usual, gif to show progress


Unlimited saves! Now, you can send your ret.... gangsters to die in hilarious ways with no remorse (like you have any before)

Finish the options bar for mission UI and nearly finish it for the battlefield UI, with the exception of the Gangsters List, which gives details about all the people in the fight.

Will finish the Gangsters List UI after this.

As usual, gifs to show progress:
Mission UI Options Bar


Battlefield Options Bar

Your game is fantastic man. Love the way its look like. What i can say about it is lively . I also a game developer, but i really have a hard time to make it lively. Maybe we can both share opinion for our games.

Thank you.
But I am just a beginner in this so I don't think I can help you a lot.
If you think otherwise, post a gif/video of which part of your game you are worried about and I will give my feedback on what could be improved.

Believe me, the way you show the game doesn't look a beginner. Please check my game on facebook below
Facebook

Or download to test it on itunes
Itunes : Survivor 3D

I love my games, but it always end up bad i know something is missing.

Can i try your game, its look great to me.

This post has been edited by zsuperxtreme: May 14 2014, 06:16 PM

Sorry, but I don't have the time to play through a game.
You need to simply show me where you believe you got it wrong and then I will give my advise based on that.
Preferably through a short video/gif.
Please understand I don't have much free time.
About the testing, sure, once I finish the demo, I will put a link here in this thread .

Alright! Finish the Gangsters List UI.
It's pretty simple since it's basically Gang Screen code and assets with small changes.
Also, finish drawing the demo's enemy gang small icon.
And now, you get to know the enemy gang for the demo.
Onward to movement coding so everyone can walk up and beat up each other.

As usual, gif to show progrees

Finally, The Death Cross Gang know the gang that they are facing. Meanwhile, Charles and Rhys finally remember their gang's name

I believe everyone is bz doing something. If u come to casual connect at singapore next week, please spend sometime with us.

Sorry, but I don't have plans to go there.
Hope you enjoy it

Finally finish the movement feature.
Take longer than I thought due to the complexities of Tactics Ogre movement system of which I am inspired by and at least will try to be as robust as theirs.
It isn't hard, just very very tedious as most of the coding is pretty much bashing with a brick of code until the feature relent and do as it is told.
Also finish the end turn feature.

Its time to to give actions and items to these gangsters.
So for my next task, I am going to finish up the items and attacks stats and also finish the individual Stats Screen which is accessible via Gang Screen, Gangsters List and the Stats button

As usual, gifs to show progress


Everyone showing off their new green flashlights


Much to her friends aghast, Irene is a M


After thirty minutes of this, the battle objective switch to "Beat the crap out of Rafaela"

Recently, this game development is featured in RockPaperShotgun
I always happy to be noticed.
Now, if you read the comments, they are less than favorable though, which is of course, an understatement.
In fact, one person ask me if I going to change anything about my game based on the comments.

My response to him is this:


And now that's out of the way, let's talk about progress.
I just finished the items and equipment tables.
Once again, I underestimated the amount of work required to at least have the same level of complexity in these features with Tactics Ogre.
Add balancing to that, which Tactics Ogre apparently did not do at all, the time that it took me is quite a lot.
What I set out to accomplish with balance is to ensure that all equipment and items are functional and viable.
This ensure no broken builds or that one perfect but boring tactic that you use again and again and again.
Time like this, I am happy for my long experience in tabletop gaming.

There is no gif for today, just a more recent mock-up for the stats screen. Going to code it soon.


Cheers

Alright, been quite a while since my last progress report.
Finally finish my stats screen, though just the main. All other supporting features; condition, equipment, inventory, etc. coding is still not completed due development exhaustion.
Of course, will do those as soon as I got my dev mojo back.
I have to admit that working through UI code logic is extremely tedious and there's only so much I can slog through each day without puking.
Which is why development at this part was slow and will continue to be slow until I can wrap it up.

Nevertheless, here some gifs as usual to show progress:







No smart aleck remarks this time around due to dev exhaustion.

Looks nice bruh.. Looking forward to this game!

Will there be like class systems? Or individual specialties? So each gang members have varied benefits when used in combat or other objectives, if any..

Thanks bro. Glad you like it

Yes. As stated in the first post, character classes in this game is called "stereotypes" to represent how people try to change their behaviors to fit the stereotype their friends and people around them place on them.

Special NPCs have unique abilities that are different from the stereotypes-granted abilities. Different NPCs will give you different options to you in different part of the game.
In the game overworld, the strategic portion of the game, the stereotype of the gang member you assign to different tasks will have an affect on the results of that assignment, other than their stats and alignment.

No progress report for this week except for some work for the abilities table and coding (not done yet) for both equipment and item screens.
This is due to taking about a week of break to enjoy a game that in my steam backlog that I strangely urged to play after involved in a heated discussion about it (Fallout New Vegas: Ultimate Edition). The DLCs are really fun, in term of story

Also, this game development will probably be suspended for a while that I am involved in this contest, http://contest.rpgmakerweb.com/.
As a developer who just started, I admitted that the prizes that they are offering are just too tempting so I am joining it for a chance to grab them.

After a month on Super Nuclear Riders, I took a few days of rest to recover from the fatigue. And those days are over.

So right now, I commencing back on the development of my main game project, Gangster Tactics. And the right back into the previous task when I suspended it, Equipment UI and associated coding.

.........
......
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And another victim for my archives of dead-before-completed set of projects
I am stopping development for Gangster Tactics to work on another new TBS project that seem vastly superior in concept.
Will reveal what it is once I finish a playable prototype of its combat system.

This comic by theMeatly is somehow very relevant to my current situation so enjoy.