The Return of the... ehm... King??

So, last post we made this promise of showing you a fancy and shiny logo, right? It hurts me to tell you that we can't really keep to that promise. We had some trouble with team members randomly disappearing, and since Rotterdam apparently has no internet connection (We haven't skyped with our Rotterdammish team member in weeks) we're falling behind more and more. Work on programming goes in a great pace, we're making progress every single day, all the other work is stacking up more than we'd hoped. We had no music until two days ago, and the game is still full of placeholder sprites. The game contains enemies, but they aren't animated (they're not properly drawn at all), and the guy who should have made the fancy logo is soooo busy, he has no time for it. Conclusion: A lot of work that has to be done before release!

On the bright side, having placeholders doesn't really affect gameplay, so a play-test should be perfectly possible! We have planned to test our game next week, and from that point, start balancing. See! The programming is near completion, the rest is not. We will publish play-test results, since we're expecting funny situations here and there, and we wouldn't dare not sharing that with you. In the meantime, why don't you just take a look at this awesome screenshot?

The gameplay screen as is. You can see there still are a lot of placeholders.

As you can see we've completed the mechanism to be able to send units to other players. By clicking a spawn point that is linked to an enemy base you can select which, and how many units you'd like to send. Right now there's only one type of unit though, we really need to add some more before the release. A spawnpoint is a big rock, at the end (or beginning, whatever) of a path. Clicking one pulls out the menu on the right, with a drop-down box of available units (has BASIC currently selected), a slider that indicates the amount of units (ranging from 1 - 100), and a send button. The 0,16071 next to the slider is the amount of units that will be sent. (Before communicating with the server it is multiplied by 100 and rounded, but the indicator doesn't properly do that yet). Those faces marching the path are enemies (I know, they don't appeal very threatening). When they reach the small rock (The one surrounded by B blocks) the base will lose health. The B blocks are obviously to be replaced, they indicate the texture-sheet indices reserved for base decoration. And, as you might have guessed, the base will not be a rock... You can't see it in this shot, but there's another base with paths more to the right. A player can move their mouse to the edge of the screen and the entire scene will move to the right (or, technically, to the left). Now the top bar: There's an all-caps WAVES label. It indicates the phase the game is currently in, so right now the player is (who could have guessed...) trying to clear the wave of enemies. Next to that is a label that says: "G: 300". This label indicates the gold the player has. And then there's also a timer. The waves-phase doesn't require a timer, but the building phase does. Every player has limited time to build and send troops, since we really don't want a match to take forever.

So, more info after our play-test, you'll hear from us!