RageEffect Dev Blog

Time

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:15:00 +0200

( Who the hell am I kidding, that chart is way underestimating my success. )

Been fixing some few bugs I’ve made recently because of the whole materials refactoring, but unfortunately I couldn’t spend too much time. Time is now becoming more and more important for me since I’m no longer a student and I no longer have the power to work on the game whenever I want. Ten months ago, before I started to work, I thought that an IT job would be pretty much equal to a school, much to my surprise, I was wrong. Somehow, I didn’t realize that I wasn’t doing much at school, which in consequence granted me all this energy to spend on coding in the evening, but now at work I actually have to use my energy all the time leaving me so little to spend on the game. Not to forget the infinite amount of distractions available to me after work that just suck away my time.

Luckily there’s an advantage to this whole shitty situations, the more away I am from making my game, the more motivated I become.

Oh look, a new episode of Game of Thrones is out today !

Simplicity is another key

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:57:43 +0200

What characterized the old RTS titles such as C&C series was the simplicity of the gameplay. If we check all the modern RTS games, we notice that multitasking plays a bigger and bigger role everyday, and that could be considered as the current rising problem in the latest strategy games. They tend to become so complicated that just learning how to play the game starts taking hours ( Achron ) or units become so dull that normal strategies require a huge armies in order to succeed ( SupCom ).

We notice that recently a lot of old games have fully succesfully risen back from their graves with a new title and new enhancements. Starcraft II, Mortal Kombat 9, Diablo III, TorchLight, and many other games - instead of trying new random crazy experiments that have great chances of failing, decided to go back to old days and take the old gameplay back to the future. You might think that old gameplay flows were unpolished and bad, you may be right in some cases but generally all those old games were made simple enough so that people could easily understand the concept and get into them without a problem. I’m not talking about making games mainstream, mainstreaming is making a game easy to all audience, what we want is for people to be able easily adapt to our game and the best way to do that would be creating a gameplay that’s simple and yet can become really complicated and challenging. Once again, Chess would be the perfect example for this.

The first time I played a C&C game was a random skirmish, I hadn’t even started the campaign mode. The game started with one MCV and the only thing you could do is deploy it, then after deploy the only next thing was building a Powerplant, then Refinery, Barracks, Units, and slowly like that I understood the whole flow of the game. The gameplay was some sort of step-by-step tutorial itself, the flow was so easy that even a kid could grasp it.

The problem now is that when a game becomes too simple, it looses it’s aspect of strategy. We have to find the right balance between the complexity of the gameflow and simplicity of the gameplay, so that people can easily adapt and still have many possible strategies at their disposal.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Supreme Commander series ( except SupCom2 ), but every time I play I feel that almost every single unit in that game is worse than a simple chess pawn.

Fun gameplay

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:53:00 +0200

Fun is the one of the most important elements in any game.

Games have to be fun, otherways people wouldn’t play them? True, but unfortunately, the problem is that the word fun varies from genres and slowly through time it evolves and changes. We found Pac-Man fun in the beginning, but what if the game was released today ? It would’ve been considered as a one boring, replayability-lacking and unimaginative game. The reason why it would turn out like that,is because that genre ( which can be put into action games ) has a strong evolving definition of ‘fun’, because it’s a game that can be played only in one way and doesn’t have much to offer in terms of strategy choices. How about if we choose to go with Chess? Did chess become boring? No, Chess has kept its title of being a good game thanks to all the possible strategies you’re able to use. RTS games are like that, but even better. They do not only offer good reliable strategy choices, but they also rely on your speed of execution of those strategies.

You might think that a realistic RTS game might be fun, it’s not. Fun gameplay and a realistic world don’t mix well, reality involves one of the most strategy-defying elements called “randomness”. Having randomness kills most strategy and ruins the gameplay in a worst way possible. Imagine if Chess games were realistic and your every piece had a certain percentage of defeating the opposing piece, that would render most known strategies useless and the outcome of the whole battle will be fully depend on a lucky roll of dice.

A good RTS bases on reliable strategies and speed, just like Chess but without turns.

The advantages and disadvantages of making an engine. Before...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:50:00 +0200

The advantages and disadvantages of making an engine.

Before starting to work on this game, I decided that if I go with an engine everything would go much faster and smoother but unfortunately even though using an existing engine helped much, for me it seemed way too “magical”. It reminded me way too much of those days when I would open Blitz3D and write

(not exactly B3D, just some pseudo code)
loadModel model, “crap.b3d”
PositionModel model, 12,0,32

in order to get everything done. It was just way too easy, and it lacked real challenge. The idea I always have in my mind is “If my project fails, at least I learned something” but that was just not possible when most of the fancy functions were hidden away from me.

The biggest advantage of making your own engine, is like I said : challenge. Making a good engine can be one hell of a challenge, and optimizing it can be endless but that’s what keeps most programmers motivated.
A project that offers no challenge is boring and it is bound to die.

The second advantage is that you’ll be coding it, and you know what you need and you work the way you want to. You’ll have an engine following your personal workflow, you’ll be more efficient when working with it, and that’s more fun than browsing through APIs and tutorials for hours just to get the idea on how their engine handles everything.

The real disadvantage is the fact that it takes away too much time, reducing the amount of progress committed to the actual game to 0%. Getting stuck on difficult parts is another time-eater, putting everything on-hold until that darn thing is done can lead you to days of working like hell. There are also traps when working on engines, and those would be the endless amount of optimizations and refactoring you can do to the whole structure of the engine itself.

Anyhow, the context of that picture above : my result of my new material system which I’m completely happy with. I spent weeks thinking how I would code it, because not only materials were involved but the whole rendering order, sorting and batch handling needed to be adapted as well in order to preserve the performance. What I had previously was one texture and shader per model, now I’m able to apply different shaders to different parts of a single model =)

Imagine having a building with fancy eye-candy crystals on them, wouldn’t that be awe?

Once again, another half-arsed update ! The reason why it...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 16:34:40 +0200

Once again, another half-arsed update !

The reason why it took me so long to put something up is because I went through something any programmer goes through at some point in their project :

The Motivational Downfall.
*Dramatic music*

Most beginners would just abandon and start on something new, because honestly said starting on a new project is one of the most fun things to do. Unfortunately, following those feelings will only trap you inside of this circle of never-ending projects, and in the end you’ll never get anything done.

The key to avoiding these kind of disasters is understanding your emotions, and preparing for these kind of moments.

I’m no good writer, so I’ll just link you to some nice article that I just found explaining everything in details.

Anyhow, this small 2-week of “doing absolutely nothing at all” is now over and I’m back.

Enjoy the pointless video where I was trying to fix some rendering issues with the crystals =)

In the beginning, I was actually making some sort of HTML-like user interface for my game where it...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:05:00 +0100

In the beginning, I was actually making some sort of HTML-like user interface for my game where it would basically support all kind of HTML features and allow users to easily edit and mod the UI themselves without a sweat. But even though my UI engine had a lot of basic stuff done, it wasn’t fully finished nor was it any near the power of the mighty HTML. I made a promise to myself that I would work more on the game than the engine or some other dumb pointless features that can be added or improved later, so I needed to get it done fast. It was either finishing my UI engine which would’ve taken at least a month or two, or find something that might work as a replacement.

At some point thanks to the Wolfire Blog and their ingenious idea of implementing webkit, I said to myself : “Hey, why not?”

An RTS game doesn’t use the GUI much, nor does it require any fancy effects since those might distract or just simply annoy the player while he’s ingame, having html+js for the UI was the perfect choice. Using chromium engine ( through Awesomium ) to do all the rendering, logic, the solution ended up being really handy ! Thanks to it, not only did I save a hell lot of time but I’ve implemented something really powerful and flexible.

( Picture shows the half-arsed alpha-beta-gamma lobby screen, re implemented into webkit )

I guess I’m perfectly fine when it comes to posting one...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 02:02:49 +0100

I guess I’m perfectly fine when it comes to posting one update every month, but things are indeed speeding up !

Have a screenshot of my pink army kicking the shit out of some green units, mwhahaha

This was my first successful 4-player test, and I’m pretty happy with it even though we did encounter few crashes because of some unexpected actions =)

Happy 2012 ! It may sound lame, I’ve only worked on a...

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:35:00 +0100

Happy 2012 !

It may sound lame, I’ve only worked on a new model importer lately because our modelers were having trouble importing FBX format ( which I wrote pretty badly ) into our game. As you can see on that fancy gif, I decided to go and use Valve’s very own 3D model format because apparently it’s way simpler and more game-oriented than the complex FBX one.

As for the rest, I mostly enjoyed my relaxing days where I provided 0% of progress to the whole project, other team members did the same thing or just went into the full-panic mode in order to prepare for their exams =P

( Antlion model is owned by Valve, but I made that crappy animation )

Maps will look less ugly now that we have floating rocks with...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:32:29 +0100

Maps will look less ugly now that we have floating rocks with trees on them everywhere !

Because emm.. why not?!

Been rewriting the rendering algorithm during this week. I couldn’t exactly go without optimizing anything since our game features the extreme zoom out ( aka strategic zoom ), and once everything is zoomed out you’ll be supposed to see all these small units and bases. Without those optimizations, you can say bye-bye to your mid-range PC or the strategic zoom =]

101th post ! woooooohoo !

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:05:14 +0100

101th post ! woooooohoo !

The first networking test has worked successfully ! Enjoy...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:31:59 +0200

The first networking test has worked successfully !

Enjoy our non-phallic ingame screenshot for this week =D

Networking is an enormous step for the game because.. what’s a strategy game without multiplayer? =P

Some real advanced shit is going on at this current...

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 21:49:00 +0200

Some real advanced shit is going on at this current moment !
Not much to show though…

We’re getting there, no worries.

DON'T PANIC !

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:52:36 +0200

A friendly reminder that it’s just the lazy ( and sometimes very busy ) holidays =)

Enjoy this nice screenshot showing off some sweet debug...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 23:26:57 +0200

Enjoy this nice screenshot showing off some sweet debug stuff that most of you people probably wouldn’t even comprehend =)

( Since the mailing-list is still quite empty, I’m still keeping the more fancy stuff in my super secret locker.)

Enjoy the fine breeze.Added foliage support to our game =)

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 04:13:34 +0200

Enjoy the fine breeze.
Added foliage support to our game =)

Aaaand we're back !

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:27:00 +0200

I FEEL THAT YOU HAVEN’T SEEN MY FANCY BUILDING ANIMATION ENOUGH !

Anyways, progress speed is back to normal

Still on a break

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 13:19:00 +0200

Eating KitKat.

Although I’m studying hard to succeed my exams, I do work on the game from time to time when I’m bored. So like I previously mentioned the progress isn’t exactly on hold, it’s just sloooowed doooown.

Things are going well, we also found another great team member !

Few days left before we’re back to real progress !

Not sure if people know this but there’s also an indieDB / modDB page for our RTS...

Sun, 29 May 2011 04:10:00 +0200

Not sure if people know this but there’s also an indieDB / modDB page for our RTS game.

http://www.indiedb.com/games/faction-command

I’ve just posted there 2 new screenshots, because the last update there dated back to December heh

I think I’ll put soon some screens on the homepage as well =)

Newsletters !

Fri, 20 May 2011 02:31:00 +0200

Sometimes there are small updates that most people don’t even care about,
sometimes there are big ones.

Allow me to tell you that you can now subscribe to our yet-to-come big updates !

Just head to http://www.factioncommand.com, enter your mail and wait until the end of times !

I already have some plans of what I’ll be showing off =)
Hint: It’s some exclusive fancy stuff.

Take a break, have a KitKat

Sat, 14 May 2011 19:35:00 +0200

It’s the time of the year where all progress gets slowed down to a point where you begin to think “Holyshit did the devs die or something?”, when that happens you have to know that we didn’t really die but instead, we’re in a deep deep coma suffering endless pain over and over again until the end of our days. You probably want to know how it feels like, so here’s a little description :

Imagine millions of bull ants crawling through your nose and ears and mouth, carrying away small pieces of your body and stinging you with their painful venom. ALL.THE.TIME.

Luckily ! That’s not our case, the real reason is because I currently have to study so hard like the world was gonna end… This also brings to the fact that being a sole programmer can sometimes be bad =(

With some luck, one of my lazy members of our lazy team might someday, during my absence, post something interesting ( or something completely retarded ) :D