A Fork In The Road

I was at dinner last night and I had a realization: making a 4x strategy game is really hard. OK, maybe hard is the wrong word. Nothing is truly hard. Things are only ever easy or impossible.

But it’s really difficult to tell if what I’m adding to the game is actually doing anything. I’m adding tons of stuff to the game but it feels like nothing is really changing.

And I realized it was because I’m making a 4X strategy game. These games almost by definition take forever. It takes like 10 turns before anything meaningful even happens. I don’t have time for that.

I’ve also realized I’m still playing the same games on my phone and mobile games are really fun when I’m out of the house and just have some time to burn. I should make a mobile game.

So I’ve decided to make a new game. Now, it’s going to still use everything I’ve already built for Conquisition. In fact, I plan to return to Conquisition after I’ve finished on this game. I’m planning for this game to be a spin-off of Conquisition.

I’m calling it Conquisition: Escalation. It will basically be a copy of Advance Wars and it will use a freemium model. I already know the major plot points I’m going to hit for the Campaign. The antagonist is going to use a Magnetic Reconnection attack to create a world-wide EMP blast, something that I just made up that could (although it probably won’t) be possible.

It’ll have secrets, conspiracies, maybe betrayals, upgrading units, daily missions, optional missions, survival missions. I can’t wait, it’s going to be so great. And it’s all going to be playable on your phone.

I already have almost everything ready. All I need is to switch the camera to orthographic and change the map.

So what’s going to happen to Conquisition proper? Well, not much. I am going to come back to it eventually. Conquisition was always my vision for what a 4X strategy game should be.

It’s going to stay here. And this will probably be my last update for a while. Well, I’ll probably merge changes from Escalation back into Conquisition.

So here’s my last major changelog:

Changelog:

• Pressing Escape now quits the game in the native version of the game
• Tech tree now defaults to the right most tech
• Now we have an indicator for what age each player is in
• Reverted scrolling on zoom feature
• Updated tile indicator
• Selection shader has been tweaked
• Undoing has been disabled because there was a bug with it. It never did work properly once fog of war was introduced.
• Units now autocapture cities if they have not moved that turn.
• [Not working for some reason] On the web version there is an intro screen. This means if you’re on a supported browser with poor specs the page will still be responsive.
• Added a loading screen. But you can’t see it on the native version probably because it’s too fast. It’s actually regenerating the entire world and randomly assigning terrain every time you start the game so it’s a miracle it can do it that fast. Although, my code is very efficiently written if I do say so myself.
• Right clicking now dismisses attack preview. I should probably make it disable more stuff as well. Maybe even make left and right click functionally equivalent in most situations. Hmm…
• Tutorial is now minimizable by clicking anywhere not just on it.
• Notification positions now update properly when there are multiple of them loaded. Also it has a bit of an animation based on which one you’re mousing over similar to Mac OS’s enlarging of dock icons.
• We now have a ranged attack indicator for ranged units that can move and attack on the same turn.
• Now we use mouse up rather than mousedown. This enables us to click and drag to activate options.
• Added food and fuel movement mods. These aren’t enabled yet but when they are your units will have a fixed number of tiles they can move to before resupplying.

Bugfix:

• Fixed an issue where clicking multiple buttons would result in all the clicked buttons being highlighted
• Fixed bug where +1 food would appear over hidden tiles
• Fixed bug where units off the map were still visible
• Fixed an issue with tooltip sizes.
• Fixed a bug where the camera changing positions could cause your cursor to move which would change the path preview line.
• Damage indicator no longer can go off the screen.
• Fixed bug where path preview was briefly displaying incorrect information.
• Found the bug that allowed multiple dropdown menus to be opened at once and fixed it.