Category Archives: Auto Fire

Auto Fire, Build Update

Auto Fire v0.5 build posted!

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What’s that?  A work-in-progress build of Auto Fire is up on Itch.io?  Check out version 0.5 here!!

Don’t worry, you don’t have to donate to try it out.  It’s still got a lonnnnng way to go.

Recent improvements:

  • Camera now behind the vehicle in both overworld and combat.
  • Dynamic camera and VFX based on speed.
  • Map state is saved when when returned to.
  • Revised environment visuals for clarity.
  • More garages everywhere to install your loot.
  • UI improvements for better feedback on weapon state and skidding.
  • Updated sound and music.

In the future:

  • Improved progression arc.  No real balance as of yet.
  • More weapons, equipment and enemies.
  • Special maneuvers like bootleggers and charge rams.
  • Encounters on the overworld map.
  • Boss fights that clear out a hostile area when defeated.
  • Citadels as a destination for weapon and vehicle stores, cargo missions, arena duels, and a bar for rumors.
  • Fame and skill progression tracking, with media coverage of select combats.
  • Target painting, sustained fire, and other ways to increase or decrease the chances of.

As always, feedback is so, so, so very welcome.  Let me know what you think!

Auto Fire, Game Development, Video

Auto Fire Status Update – Oct 2018

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Over the past several months I’ve been working through some significant issues to get Auto Fire up to snuff…  Good ol’ Jim talked me into going to the Roguelike Celebration 2018 in San Francisco this weekend so I could start showing my game to people more widely.  Pretty exciting!  Also pretty nerve-wracking given all the other stuff going on this summer.

Unfortunately there were a ton of things about my game that still drove me crazy…  For example I wasn’t able to save the state of maps between visits… which meant that the overworld in particular would regenerate every time you left a location.  I had to finally take the plunge and deal with that particular issue.

Man I hate two-years-ago me.  I did some real hack jobs to get that 7DRL challenge done, and I guess I wasn’t done paying off that technical debt. 😛

Luckily I got all the proper stuff to function, save off map states and basically am ready for honest-to-god savegames (although I don’t do save/load just yet.)  I’ve also made a whole bunch of quality-of-life improvements based on early player feedback:

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  • The camera is now behind the vehicle at all times.  This way the WASD weapon keys are always consistent and understandable, and you don’t have to envision tank controls.  I had always suspected this would be a problem, but I think I was so used to camera-always-north that I didn’t have any trouble playing.  The added benefit is that the game has a fairly unique look as compared to other Roguelikes now.
  • Improved feedback for speed.  This is always a work in progress.  The player needs to know when they are speeding or skidding.  Putting the camera at a shallow angle and adding speed lines is my current strategy.  I also shake the camera a bit, but that may just be too much.  We will see where things go as feedback comes in.
  • Recolored environment.  A good friend did a paintover of a screenshot of my city environment a while back and it helped me gravitate towards dark ground surfaces, light obstructions, and bright colored gameplay elements.  This wasn’t the case with deserts (because, y’know, desert), but I’ve been darkening things quite a bit and trying to get the colors to pop.  Still a work in progress.
  • Revised balance and loot drops.  This isn’t really finely balanced, but I did make the early-play experience quite a bit easier so that people that wanted to try out the build could get a good idea of what the game was about quickly.  I also brought down the size of the average “loot pinata” that existed when I was testing loot out.  I really still need to do a huge push towards making content, maybe after the RogueCel.
  • Revised location names.  More on that next article!
  • New garages in the overworld and desert outposts.  I’m trying to make sure that the player has plenty of places to equip all the weapons and vehicle components I’m dropping.  That includes in hostile areas.  That will be a balancing act in the future.
  • UI improvements.  Again from feedback, I flash the weapon when you try to use it but can’t, and flash the grip meter if you are skidding and try to accelerate.
  • Music and sound improvements.  I got some new weapon sounds and hooked them up.  The quality is steadily improving there.  On the music front, I went back to Michael La Manna‘s excellent western apocalypse music… The quality is really high and fits the feel of the game really well.

My next step is to get the game out onto itch.io so that more people can play.  That will be sooner than you think!

Auto Fire, Game Design, Game Development

Scooping the Loot

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One bit of feedback I got when showing the game to a friend recently was that it was fun to drive, but picking up loot was beyond terrible.  That’s because you have to manage traction, speed and direction even when you’re just trying to hoover up whatever you found in a weapons cache you just blew up.  It’s just a whole bunch of stunt driving to scoop of some stuff that might only be worth a few bucks.

“Got it covered,” I boasted…  I’d already planned to add in a “radar pulse” that would do the triple duty of revealing hidden things on the field, “painting” targets for improved accuracy, and acquiring items in a small radius around the player’s car.  Super-convenient when you are in between fights, but when you’re in the thick of it you do have to deal with its cooldown.  There’s also the precious action that you have to use to activate it, rather than using it to shoot or turn.

Feeling smug about my clever solution, I recalled how long ago I decided on my solution.  It was………..  over a…. year ago.  For something like 15 months I’d been picking up loot in the worst way possible.  Errr… awesome.   Guess I should get that damn thing in.

It took an embarrassingly short amount of time given the sheer weight of procrastination behind it.

Auto Fire, Game Design, Game Development, Other Games

Deluge of Definitions

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Some days you take pleasure in the smallest of victories.

More and more of my time is spent messing with data rather than code.  A procedurally-generated game like Auto Fire has a lot of data to shuffle around, defining a nearly endless list of things.  These titles generally rely on complex rules to assemble what might be one-off creations in other games.  These rules are for things as varied as:

  • Map sectors, layout generation data, name generation data
  • Map Locations, loot tables, shops
  • Tiles, obstacles, decals
  • Enemies, squads, encounters
  • Cars, chassis types
  • Tires, engines, armor upgrades
  • Weapons, equipment, ram plates
  • Abilities, projectiles
  • etc etc

Luckily I was able to use a bit of code given me by a good friend as a framework for defining these.  Since I hooked the system in, the definitions have spread across 15 directories and 70 files, and that’s with not a lot of content defined as of yet.  By comparison, Dungeonmans has nearly 600 data files just for content definitions (nothing to do with actual art or audio content), plus god knows how many other little files squirreled away.

Creating the content itself is daunting, but nearly as tough is managing all this.  It can be hard to organize and keep straight.  A small victory this morning was when I improved comment support in my definitions, but more importantly I added inheritance.  This allows me to define a base definition and then overlay changes with another definition.   It cuts down on a lot of extra text and correction as I add new features to the game, and makes creating a whole line of related objects a quadrillion times easier.

For example, a vehicle’s chassis defines a lot of the weapons and equipment you can mount on it, as well as the model that is used for your vehicle on the battlefield.  You will ultimately be able to buy a new vehicle at a car dealer, and pick out the chassis that will serve your needs the best.

The Stallion is a line of muscle cars, each of which is beefier and sports a larger engine than the last.  With inheritance I can create a set of upgrades much more easily:

defThing chassis_stallion_L1
{
class adChassisData

prefab Vehicles/Stallion_body_L1

name "Econo Stallion"
manufacturer GrandMotors
logo UI/Logos/logo_tri
chassistype Coupe

level 1
value 2000

defense_base 0
health_base 100
handling_base 100
armor_base "100 100 100 100"
cargo_slots 2

Engine "None default engine_rank_1"
Tires "None default tires_base"
Armor "None default armor_base"
WeaponRam "None default wpn_ram_base"
WeaponFront Standard
WeaponRight Standard
WeaponBack Standard
WeaponLeft Standard
WeaponTurret None
Support1 Standard
Support2 Standard

flavor "The doors rattle a bit if you slam them, but you'll feel like a thousand bucks behind the wheel of any Stallion."
}

defThing chassis_stallion_L2
{
inherit chassis_stallion_L1

prefab Vehicles/Stallion_body_L2
name "Grand Stallion"
level 2
value 5000
cargo_slots 3

Engine "None default engine_rank_2"
Support3 Standard

flavor "Listen to the throaty purr of the Thundercat engine. Revel at the enhanced electronics package, and even stash more cargo! Welcome to the Grand Stallion."
}

It only took like 20 minutes to implement, I can’t believe I put it off so long. I guess my data was so in flux that I haven’t been creating a lot of content, just a lot of systems… Now I gotta go clean up my data.

Auto Fire, Game Design, Game Development, Video

Auto Fire Status Update – July 2018

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Over the July 4 holiday I managed to get a good, solid, 5-day weekend, which in turn gave me great blocks of time to work on Auto Fire.  It felt great to get some really nagging things out of the way.  There’s a bunch of stuff here that is new since last time I blogged about it:

  • Site System.  I created a new structure for holding what I call “sites”, which is any point of interest on the map.  This can include cities found in the overworld, highway entrances and exits, garages, and even regular landmarks and points of interest.  The sites are what I use to guide road plotting, so roads can connect exits, cities, garages and even just weird old non-functional shacks out in the desert, which I constructed from groups of tiles.  It gave me a system for sprinkling them into a map from a table, which adds more life to most maps.
  • Encounter System.  The encounter system is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, to allow the player to deal with random stuff that they meet along the way.  Call it FTL-style, although I associate the concept with pen and paper games as well as wayyyy back to ancient games like Odyssey on the Apple II.  This allows players to consider some simple risk-reward propositions, or to choose between acts worthy of fame or notoriety.

  • Stylized Visual Effects.  I took some of the realistic visual effects for weaponry, explosions and smoke and returned them to the stylized versions I had used a year ago.  I found that these stylized VFX had extra punch and grabbed the player’s attention among a lot of noise, but more importantly, fit the oddball scale of the world in Auto Fire.  With buildings and cars and chests all coming in at unrealistic sizes when compared to each other, I found that realistic visuals just made that mismatch even more pronounced.  Somehow having unrealistic smoke and fire just helped with the suspension of disbelief, and I think it can look just as compelling.
  • Western Music.  I took a break from the (really fantastic) western/post-apocalyptic soundtrack by Michael La Manna to try something different, namely an Ennio Morricone-flavored Western soundtrack I found.  I really do love La Manna’s cool-as-ice Badlands music, but those stingers and jaw harps just got me in the feels.  I’ll be playing around with various configurations as time goes on, not sure which way to go.
  • Walled Outpost Generator.  One of the biggest things I got done over the holiday was to finally prepare enough ramshackle walls, dirt roads, windmills and metal-roofed buildings to create a special generator for badlands outposts.  This is a heightmapped terrain map that sets aside a center section as the “core”, where buildings and certain visual points of interest will lie.  Around the perimeter is a wall made of scrap, cars, wood, and anything else…  I had to make a version of my patch generator that would stretch and rotate this wall in any direction with repeating motifs.  Dirt roads are then stretched to the various sites around the map. I’m really happy with how it came out.

  • Smoother Driving Feel.  One thing I did fix in recent months came from feedback I got from right after the 7DRL that spawned Auto Fire…  For some players the movement felt stuttery and halting.  Part of that is unavoidable with a turn-based game, but some of it was fixable.  There is no longer a single-frame stop between various units executing their turn, and if the player cues up multiple moves, it executes smoothly if possible.  The movement from square to square in slightly slower than it was as well, creating an subtle improvement that I feel when running the new build versus an old one.
  • Wall Deflection.  This last one feels intangible as well, but I implemented it because the more I played, the more I felt cheated that the mechanic did not exist.  If the player is heading diagonally towards a wall at high speed, he or she can get deflected off the wall and into a new movement path parallel to the wall.  This is a fairly common occurrence in the city maps in particular, and even lets players use it to their advantage if they wanted to keep shooting rather than steer (this is an option in Auto Fire!)

Okay, so there’s a lot more work to do.  I feel that I’ve hit some fine polish points, but I mainly need to assemble content together into something more playable, to have more of a reason and tension in the overworld.  All that will hopefully come next.

Auto Fire, Game Development

Filling in the Desert

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It’s funny how I spent all this time to create a prop distribution system, created tiles and various features to randomize and space out various tiles but never have the time to really find good models to populate the map with…   so sometimes I play on a fairly empty map.

I spent the morning digging up some reasonably non-terrible assets to build tiles out of, and the results are luckily pretty good:

The problem is that whenever I’m doing visual stuff I’m both happy because things look better, but I feel guilty that I’m not working on function…  Back to work!

Auto Fire, Game Development

Fog of Overworld

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Auto Fire is continuing to look better these days.   I got rid of the object-based fogging and returned to the old-school concept of putting a 2D plane between the camera and the world.  You’d think it would look obvious but with a little fancy math I can scale and position the plane so that users are (more or less) none the wiser.  I was able to add some perlin noise and give the fog two colors (defined per map) that makes everything smoother and more pro.

I put more effort into the overworld as you can see above.  Those roads are generated now, as well, followed by a smoothing step that places the correct road tiles in the correct locations. There are still a few specific intersections that I neglected to create tiles for (mostly diagonals to other diagonals) but the overworld is now guaranteed passable and locations have roads between them.   The roads make the overworld far more simple to navigate and find out-of-the-way locations.

I still have to finish off some of the world connections and then optimize the hell out of the world generation (currently coming in at 15 seconds) but it should be pretty quick and easy to trim all the low-hanging fruit (I don’t cache the passibility of each tile yet when calculating paths for example).  Always more to do…

 

 

 

Auto Fire, Game Development

Garages and Fog Nerdery

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Dang, I guess it’s been a few weeks and mostly I’ve been working on more of the inventory system.  I managed to get the Garage working fully and now they appear on the map as places you can load out your gear, repair and refuel.  

Working on infrastructure for this long gets a bit taxing, so I wanted to switch over to something more visual for a palette cleanser…  so I chose to noodle around with Fog of War (not the most fun thing, but better than weeks of UI noodling).

Nerd Alert inbound!

Image result for hazard tape

My Fog of War (that is, how I represent areas of the map you haven’t explored and/or can’t see) is currently implemented tile-by-tile.  I implemented it by creating a custom shader that fades out the individual tile models based on a fade value I feed each one.  This has a few drawbacks:

  • The edges are hard and look a bit amateur as a result.
  • The fade currently goes to black, which is fine for dungeons but not appropriate for all my above-ground venues.
    • (Large areas of black also look a bit “cheap” on 3D games, although that’s my own personal bias.  2D Roguelikes somehow look just fine with the very same thing, however!)
  • I can only fade per-mesh, so in order to support height-mapped terrain meshes, I’d have to write some wacky shader to handle it.
  • I have to put a custom material on every model, and write a shader for any weirdo material tricks that a specific mesh wants to use.

I did some experiments with non-black fade colors, which didn’t add a ton of complexity to the shader but still emphasized hard edges.  Also, I had to turn off screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) to make it fade to the pure color, which is something I use for my terrain features to “pop” a bit more.  Not a huge loss, but it only reminds me about how my technique is impacting my rendering and asset management.

In the end, I’d like a fairly “soft” (and in my opinion, more pro-tier) representation of Fog of War.  For most 2D Roguelikes, the common technique is to place a huge planar texture between the camera and the world and draw areas of black and transparency over it to obscure undiscovered areas.  I had steered clear of this technique because my terrain is 3D and my camera is a perspective projection with a viewing angle of about 35 degrees…  this causes the Fog plane to parallax (obscure different areas based on the viewing angle)…

However, this can be solved with math…  I can scale and offset the fog of war plane to match a fairly flat map, so I’m going to try it out. Granted, using a plane will fail if the player ever drives up a hill (which is something I support, but only use in a few locations), but I think this technique should do well for all my current combat areas (not the adventure ones) for the short term.  Will see if I can get it rigged up tomorrow morning before work. Wish me luck!