Forum ‹ Showroom ‹ BattleCraft

[fox1980]

The game i've been working on, BattleCraft, has entered public beta stage. It's a variation of the AngryBots Unity demo powered by PlayerIO. At the moment it's a basic capture the flag game, get the other team flag and bring it to your own.
If you would like to checkit out or help me find bugs you can play it online here:

http://www.battlecraftgame.com/

or if you have an Android powered phone(ARM7 highly recommended) you can download it from the Android Market

https://market.android.com/details?id=c ... ecraftbeta

If you find any bugs or have any suggestions you may post it here or reach me at (fox19800 at gmail.com)

[jsheppard]

This game looks and feels amazing! It's really amazing what Unity can do.

My suggestions:

-Get a lobby system going
-Make a mini-map
-Make more maps
-Health bars
-No friendly fire
-Power-ups/Side objectives
-Chat
-Get more people to play it!

Good luck with it!

[fox1980]

Thank you for your feedback.

-Get a lobby system going

There won't be a need for a lobby system until there are more maps to play. When someone logs in the client automatically looks for an open game and joins it. If there is no open game it creates one.

-Make a mini-map

Mini-maps are on the roadmap

-Make more maps

These are also on the roadmap along with other types of maps beside capture the flag. Like resource control and free-for-all deathmatch.

-Health bars

There is a visual control at the moment. That yellow "bottle" on the back of the characters is an health indicator. It will begin to turn red as you take damage, and if you're near death it will start to blink.

-No friendly fire

There never was friendly fire. If you shoot a team mate it will show blood but will do no damage.

-Power-ups/Side objectives

Some power-ups like speed boost, increased damage, or increased armor will be implemented. What do you mean by side objectives ? Care to give an example ?

-Chat

I know i'll implement some kind of team only chat somewhere in the future. But i will have to figure out how to make it readable on phones with a small display. The game runs well even on a Galaxy Mini with a 320x240 display. There's just not much space left to display chat.

[jsheppard]

Very good explanations on each suggestion. I can tell you really care about the development of your game.

There won't be a need for a lobby system until there are more maps to play. When someone logs in the client automatically looks for an open game and joins it. If there is no open game it creates one.

I'd actually would argue against this. Yes, a lobby system's sole purpose are to get people grouped up for games, but I feel that their secondary objective is to create a community (of course once you implement a chat ). Communities are a key part of multiplayer games. Friends can group up on multiple occasions. They can socialize, brag, show-off, etc.

Even with this said, you've already said you plan to make more maps, therefore I'd assume you'll eventually plan to make a lobby. I guess it's just a question of time.

There is a visual control at the moment. That yellow "bottle" on the back of the characters is an health indicator. It will begin to turn red as you take damage, and if you're near death it will start to blink.

I sorta suspected this after playing more. Is this feature already implemented? If so, my "bottle" never deviated from full.

Some power-ups like speed boost, increased damage, or increased armor will be implemented. What do you mean by side objectives ? Care to give an example ?

I was imagining this as a power-up that would should up on the map at time intervals. The entire team would have to go to the power-up to get it.

Again, best of luck!

[fox1980]

I'm very commited to this project and i feel it has huge potential, much thanks to Unity since it allows you to use their assets in a Unity project/game. I couldn't afford at this time to pay for an artist to make such a huge library of consistent models, and my modelling skills ain't that great (tough i did design the arena in 3D Max).

The lobby system is down on the road map right now since it would only create player fragmentation. I can hardly get 4 or 5 people online simultaneously at the moment. But i do think your point is quite valid and it's something essential further down the road. I'm also planning on creating a buddy list, and maybe even clans so people can create their own private games and play with their friends.

The visual health indicator is already implemented but it may not be totally accurate. The bottle will change color when the client thinks you were hit, but your health will only go down when the server says so. Since i'm not syncing health, your client may think you weren't hit when you actually were or the other way around, but from my tests it seemed fairly accurate. This is why player feedback is very important to me. I don't have access to a wide variety of hardware, so in different hardware/network conditions there may be issues i haven't detected yet.

I think i understand now your secondary objectives suggestion, and you just gave me lots of ideas. Some battlegrounds in World of Warcraft actually had several ways to be won, in one map you could win by either killing many of the opposing faction players, or by killing the other team "king" or by controlling more resource nodes than the adversary. On another map if you could get 5 or more players to perform a ritual, they would summon an elemental that would fight for their team, altough risky to accomplish it would give a huge advantage. Of course i need to implement chat first since it's crucial for that kind of coordination between players.

[jsheppard]

I've played a bit more today. There is definitively some type of bug involving shooting and killing someone. I was shooting at an enemy player for a good minute, and didn't kill him. None of my hits were registering. Meanwhile he shot and killed me. I did notice the health "bottle" working though.

[fox1980]

I've played a bit more today. There is definitively some type of bug involving shooting and killing someone. I was shooting at an enemy player for a good minute, and didn't kill him. None of my hits were registering. Meanwhile he shot and killed me. I did notice the health "bottle" working though.

When i released the game a week ago on the Android Market i tought i had tested pretty much everything. Soon after i realized how mistaken i was, there were some pretty bad bugs. Under certain conditions after capturing a flag, it wouldn't respawn back, making the game impossible to finish. I had to manually disconnect everyone and close the room.
I have fixed many bugs since then, but the one you described is known to me tough i'm still not sure how to solve it.
Thing is some people connect with very lousy internet connections, mostly people on phones using 2G, and 3G instead of Wi-Fi. Some people have an average 500ms ping, and i've logged cases of 2s delays and upwards. What happened is that due to client side interpolation you weren't shooting at his real position, so you weren't actually hitting him though it looked like it in your client. If i disable interpolation characters seem to be jumping around instead of moving smoothly. It just seems impossible to have high latency and fast paced action. Even tough i don't like the idea i'm considering disconnecting players with high latency and kindly invite them to use Wi-fi instead or use the web-browser version.

[jsheppard]

The simple addition of the mini-map makes the game feel much better! The chat looks nice too, but using it is a bit clunky, after the first message. The "Press Enter to chat" message remains in the chat, and I have to delete that out before I can chat. But, people don't seem to use it anyways! Keep at it!

[fox1980]

Thanks for letting me know about the chat problem, it seems to be happening only on some browsers. I'll fix it in the next update. Many players are connecting from Android phones so i think that's the reason most people don't chat, it takes longer to write on the phones and they may be killed meanwhile.I've been able to fix most of the bugs now and will start adding new features soon.

[jsheppard]

Thanks for letting me know about the chat problem, it seems to be happening only on some browsers. I'll fix it in the next update. Many players are connecting from Android phones so i think that's the reason most people don't chat, it takes longer to write on the phones and they may be killed meanwhile.I've been able to fix most of the bugs now and will start adding new features soon.

Just for reference, I was using Chrome.

Also, possible suggestions for chatting with Android phones:

Perhaps, when uses start chatting they go into a mode where they can't be killed & can't kill others.

OR

Make specific pre-made command messages like: "Defend at Base," "Capture Enemy Flag," "Find/Kill Flagholder." So instead of having to type a whole message out, they just press one key to display the message in chat.