WarPath: Waypoints

Hey again,

Sorry for the lack of updates recently.  I have been fairly busy fixing bugs, adding features, tweaking others.  From now on I will be making weekly updates on the progress of the game, likely concentrating on a particular part of the game every week.  I thought I should give you an update on whats been happening and a few sneak peaks of the game.

Since the last post, the company is now registered.  It is just my trading name at the moment – will make the move to becoming a Ltd. company when we get a bit bigger.  It has been registered with its starting date of 10/10/10. Start as you mean to go on.  We mean to be a fun and entertaining company so we started that way.

Today I will be discussing the way-point system, this is the main control for our game WarPath.  The control style for our game has evolved over the last few months after various sessions of testing and feedback.

Originally our design was a simple path drawing game like Flight Control or Draw Race.  In these games, the player touches where the vehicle is and drags their finger across the screen which draws a path that the vehicle will then follow.  This is a nice simple way to control movement and it generally worked quite well for us.  After a bit of play-testing we realized there was a problem, and this problem was mainly around how the tanks engaged the enemy.

With that design, the player’s tank would follow the path, and if any enemies were encountered within a certain range of the tank they would automatically turn to face the enemy and start fighting.  This was a nice and easy mechanic to understand, however from feedback it was a little too easy, it meant that the game didn’t really have much tactics and was basically a hide and seek sort of game.

To combat this problem, we added a limited scope that the tanks could “see” enemies based on which way the turret was facing.  This worked well and allowed for a more tactical element, however with this design we wanted the ability to control where the tank would be facing.  After a bit of thinking, Paul came up with a concept that would use way-points.  In this system, for each viewpoint you can decide which direction the turret should be facing by default. This allows for great user control and can allow for a number of tactics and styles to be played.

To make the tanks behave in a realistic manner we added the feature that when a tank is hit by a missile, or an enemy collides with the tank, that tank then turns the turret to check if there is any enemies within range.  Also whenever an enemy tank is spotted, the tank will lock-on to it and keep attacking it until it goes out of range or is killed.

Since this is a simultaneous-turn-based game, you may be unsure of where the enemies are likely to be, but you have a strong feeling they will be nearby.  During these times you can use the wait functionality, what this does is stops the tank at the way-point and the turret does a 360 degree spin.  This means that if there is an enemy within range, it should spot it and engage with it.

You can see here in the screen-shot the basic way-point functionality. The large circle with the cone is the currently selected way-point. To move the way-point you touch and drag the large circle. To change the direction you simply touch and drag the cone.  The small white arrow on top of the tank is showing the turret direction of the unselected way-point.

Next to the selected way-point are two buttons for “wait” and “mine”. Pressing “wait” will make the tank pause and do the turret sweep, while pressing “mine” will make the tank pause and drop a land mine at the way-point.

That is the basics of our control system.  If you have any feedback please leave it in the comments.