Developer Diary 16 – Scenarios

We’ve now been able to play full length scenarios for some time. The first batch we’ve created includes Husky, Dragoon, and a tiny Colmar Pocket scenario. The amphibious landings are not yet modeled, but otherwise these battles play well enough. Today I also received an initial version of 1st Monte Cassino from Daniel. Interesting times 🙂

We’re still deep within a break it – fix it cycle, though. Editor tools are there, all the visual game elements are there, and the core loop of the game does work. But every time we add say, a new mechanic, one thing or the other breaks. The shakedown of gameplay code continues, so to speak.

Visuals

Intel markers are a new element: they show units within Fog of War that are not completely visible, yet you know they’re there. For these partially visible units, you get to know their nationality and whether they’re infantry or armor. Crucially, you can tell if they’re weak or not: this warns you about their Zone of Control, and is a way in which good intel helps you develop attack plans.

We’ve already shown stragglers in a previous post, but now they have a new icon. This is a part of our ongoing struggle to reduce visual clutter. Current focus is on improving readability via unit design, without making the underlying map unnecessarily bland. If that won’t be enough, some of this lovely contrast you can see in the map will have to go on the chopping block.

You can see German and British HQs in the screenshot. The big HQ boards are visible only when there’s no unit in the hex, else only the smaller sign is visible. The same logic applies to the barrel models used for supply hubs.

Core Loop

We’ve added the ability to show distant combat odds (visible in the screenshot below). If you hover over a distant enemy unit, you can now see what the combat odds would be if you moved next to it and attacked.

This has become necessary since the addition of FoW. Most moves into enemy territory will uncover at least some FoW, which means you can’t undo any such move. That makes the usual move – check odds – undo loop unusable, and we had to come up with this.

Another non-obvious, but really useful new shortcut is CTRL-N, which rotates the map back into its default northerly direction. We got really carried away with rotating the map earlier during development, but in practice it turns out most scenarios are best played north-facing.

(click image for full size)

Amusing Edge Case #314

Suppose you want to move a unit into a hex that’s visible, but right next to FoW. Unknown to you, right inside the FoW sits an enemy unit, cheerfully exerting a Zone of Control exactly where your unit wants to go.

Now, if your units has enough movement points, things are easy enough: you just got caught in a ZOC! Good luck there. However, if your unit needs to enter using extended move, that’s not possible because you can’t enter a ZOC with extended move.

So what happens is: your unit gets stopped short. An intel marker appears in place of the enemy unit: that way you know that something is there, and it’s stopping your movement. Finally, undo gets disabled, because you’ve gained some knowledge about what’s hidden behind FoW.

If this gets your head spinning, I don’t blame you. Don’t turn to drink!

Technical Developments

We’ve enabled in-game asset reloading – this is very useful for our art guys, and now that they also run the game from Steam, production-wise things have been going much smoother.

We added combat messages (PRISONERS!, RETREAT!) which we somehow forgot to do before. Picking up prisoners is really satisfying, the tiny bing sound and all, though we’re yet to implement getting you any intel from them.

UI now handles key focus correctly. If you don’t know and/or care what key focus is, good for you.

The work continues! 🙂