Ask the developer a question!

[CraigStern]

Online marketing is tough and complicated. Three things your friend should consider doing:

1) Sell stuff through affiliates. This means listing his/her work on websites like Etsy, as well as seeking out real-world galleries and boutiques in the area to display and sell the stuff. They'll take a cut of sales, but this is worth it when you consider that affiliate sales are almost always to people who never would have found your friend's products otherwise.

2) Use social media. Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are good, easy-to-use tools to share news about what he/she is up to, but more importantly, to provide a focal point for fans to gather (and for curious newbies to learn more). A website forum is also a good idea, but involves more work.

3) Solicit reviews from blogs that deal with handicrafts. There are a ton of techniques involved in this sort of thing, but basically your friend should try to strike up a relationship with individuals writing prominent handicrafts blogs and try to get them interested in his/her work. He/she should then follow up with updates that they can use when they update their blogs. This part, especially, takes time to do and can be quite daunting at first, but it's a really powerful tool for getting attention.

[ArtDrake]

Griffin points out that he can take more hits, "even with [Mind Shield]." That suggests that Mind Shield could be used for personal shielding.

Set recounts an anecdote about kinetic shields and their personal use.

Despite these, only Big and Titan Shields can heal the user, along with the skill Recover, not seen in TRPG:SoG.

Would you be opposed to the idea of attacks for which one could select a range, possible with letters, + and -, or the arrows as hotkeys? I'll give my example in Flash in a little bit, for illustrative purposes.

[CraigStern]

Would you be opposed to the idea of attacks for which one could select a range, possible with letters, + and -, or the arrows as hotkeys? I'll give my example in Flash in a little bit, for illustrative purposes.

I would not be opposed to it. In fact, the Telepath Tactics engine already has this capability: check out the screenshot with the Bowman here: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14260.msg558225#msg558225.

Adding this to TSoG, however would entail major changes to the combat engine. Thus, that's something we're only going to see post-TSoG.

[ArtDrake]

Naturally, I don't expect you to change a perfectly good engine this late in the process.

Reading your posts at the linked site begs another question. Were a Spearman, Shadowling, or Greater Ghost with Impale, Dark Vortex, or Cyro Cross respectively to attack Griffin and Rahel, Rahel being behind Griffin, and Rahel had learned the Bow counter-attack, would Griffin's counter with Melee be followed by a Bow-counter from Rahel? What, precisely, does your engine do in these circumstances?

[CraigStern]

Were a Spearman, Shadowling, or Greater Ghost with Impale, Dark Vortex, or Cyro Cross respectively to attack Griffin and Rahel, Rahel being behind Griffin, and Rahel had learned the Bow counter-attack, would Griffin's counter with Melee be followed by a Bow-counter from Rahel?

That's exactly right: when multiple characters are hit with the same attack in Telepath Tactics, they'll each respond with their counterattacks (if they have any) in quick succession. I made a short video of it here so you can see it in action. It's pretty slick.

[Ertxiem]

I was reading the comments on one of the last posts you put on the main page, and one of those comments refered simultaneous turns games. The way I think about it, it would be divided in 2 phases: phase 1 for movement and phase 2 for attack.

I think that simultaneous turns give a bit more of realism and make hard for us to tell what the enemy will do. Another option would be a system that is based on a sort of action points, where the first unit to move will be the one with the most points available (and the leftover points would be transfered to the next turn).

So, finally, my question: have you considered any of these for your games?


By the way, great posts about the RPGs. I must say that I agree with your analysis about common problems in computer RPGs. I also agree that D&D rules sometimes end up complicating some parts of the game and extend fights for longer than what I find desirable. I liked the point about the ice-cream trucks and the Nash equilibrium (made in a comment by Duck).


Edited: The ice-cream trucks idea was posted by Duck.

[CraigStern]

Simultaneous turns are interesting, and seem to be the new trend in tactics games, but as of right now I'm not convinced that they are actually better. Notably, all of the games that are using simultaneous turns right now are games in which all characters have guns--there's a reason for that. Could you imagine how difficult it would be to arrange melee attacks in a simultaneous turn-based system? You'd constantly be sending out swordsmen and having them "miss" their intended targets. It would be more like a simulated missile defense system than a regular tactics game. The only alternative there is to have the AI move your units autonomously when they're in range of enemies, but that would necessarily entail a loss of player control. I'm not crazy about that either.

Action point systems are great, but I've avoided them in part because I don't want to make it excessively hard to code good enemy AI. As it is, I'm a little intimidated at the prospect of having to write enemy AI from scratch for the Telepath Tactics engine. It's not something I'd completely rule out for the future, but for now I'm sticking with the simpler move-and-attack system.

[ArtDrake]

I know this may sound a big crazy, perhaps even insane, but what about vehicles?

The vehicle would be neutral, a few of your units (maybe an Engineer) are trained to use vehicles (within the realm of Mechanic technology), which they can perform the "Get In" move on. Then, they can move around faster, have more health, perhaps have added an attack or two pertaining to the vehicle (including, but not limited to, the "Get Out" move, a "Ram" move for a boat to be used against another boat...). One added possibility with this is limiting to terrain types. Boats could only travel in rivers and lakes, while steamcars go on land only.

In fact, I'm sure it sounds insane, but I'm willing to showcase the idea in the Game Development thread to show what I mean. However, it could take me a while.

Second question: is battlefield darkness something you might do, where the player can't see the opponent until he/she finds them, and the rest of the map, where players haven't moved, is dark?

EDIT: Oh, right. It's called fog of war.

[CraigStern]

I'm definitely planning on supporting fog of war. Vehicles hadn't really crossed my mind, to be honest.

[ArtDrake]

Do you know how to dynamically change the z-vanishing point in Flash, or better yet, how to use non-perspective 3D in Flash?

Never mind.

I had the following code for a parent object to move in such a way that it seems that a camera is panning to follow the child object, but whenever I use it, the child object appears to move ever so slightly towards whichever direction it's moving, meaning the "camera" isn't following the object correctly. (The document is 550x400)

Code Select Expand

public function cameraFocus(d:DisplayObject){
x += ((275 - d.x) - x);
y = (200 - d.y);
trace(x)
trace(275 - d.x);
}

[CraigStern]

Is this for a top-down game, or side view?

[ArtDrake]

Top-down airplane-flying game. I guess I could have put in a bit more detail.

The project is called "Airspace," and it's a game a bit like "N Ninja." The point is to get from point A to point B without being violently shot down by kamikaze enemy aircraft, drone patrol aircraft, tracer firing turrets, laser outposts, missile towers, and anti-aircraft burst-fire turrets, along with anything else I can think of.

Whenever I take relevant measurements, the trace results some out fine. I have an improvised solution where I speed up camera movement to a speed that should overtake the plane, but matches it just fine. Something's fishy.

[CraigStern]

The easiest way to handle that sort of camera movement is to have two objects: the plane, which remains in the dead center of the screen at all times, and a second object which contains everything else: background, enemies, etc. Never move the plane object--only move the "everything else" object in the opposite direction the plane ought to be "moving."

[ArtDrake]

That's a surprisingly good idea.

And if I wanted to show speed of the plane by moving the plane around onscreen a bit, like in StarfighterDG, then I could just calculate the position of the plane as derived from the velocity information; without cumulative error of the sort one gets from repeated measurements, it would be nearly inerrant. And sure, without changing the movement of the game-holding object, that might change movement a bit, but then again, I've noticed that the Hero in TRPG:SoG moves approximately 1.415 times faster when moving diagonally... (but that's not really an action game, so it's probably okay)

Oh, and another question: where do you get your awesomesauce sound effects? Vocalizing the sounds and working from there is getting me laughed at.

[Ertxiem]

I have a general idea that might help regarding the movement part.

The position of the plane on the screen could be something like:
x = xc + r*v/vmax*cos(w);
y = yc + r*v/vmax*sin(w);

Where xc and yc are the coordinates of the centre of the screen,
r is the maximum displacement from the centre of the screen that you want the plane to have,
v it's its velocity and vmax it's maximum possible velocity,
w the angle that indicates the direction that the plane is heading to.

I'm assuming that when you turn left or right the plane the w will increase or decrease by some small amount (0.1 radians is about 6 degrees).

You may need to change the sign of one of the other equation or switch sin with cos, depending on how the angle w and the coordinates behave.

Notice that if you use the angle and sin and cos, the velocity is only given by v and you don't move faster when you move diagonally.