Pillagers! 7dRTS Game Development Journal

22 July 2013 - 29 July 2013

I have decided to participate in the 7-Day Real Time Strategy Challenge, July 2013 edition.

I am working with Broken Sounds who will create sound effects, music, and be in charge of the "atmosphere" of the game.

Day 1

I am using chem, a canvas-based game engine I made for rapid development occasions such as this. It has been working out quite well and I think it has been playing a large role in my productivity today.

The game is codenamed "pillagers". The idea is to mix space physics with real time strategy and see what comes out. Instead of creating a carefully planned out base, you will be campaigning through levels, pillaging for resources.

That's the idea, anyway. We'll see how it pans out.

Here's a list of the things that work right now:

• Selecting squads and telling them to move around.
• Ships shoot enemy ships, destroying them when their health reaches 0.
• Scrolling around the map.
• Auto generated parallax background with stars and a planet.

The code is open source, hosted on GitHub. It's 941 lines of JavaScript:

   46 src/bullet.js
   33 src/explosion.js
  432 src/main.js
   19 src/militia_ship.js
  241 src/ship_ai.js
  165 src/ship.js
    5 src/uuid.js
  941 total

Screenshot of a squad of ships under attack:

Short video of me playing around with some elements of the game

It was a fun challenge to write the AI to get the ships to stop at the intended destinations. As is it's not optimal, but I think that's okay. Maybe later classes of ships will have better AI.

You can actually play this game right now. Since it's web based, you don't even have to download anything.

Here's what the TODO list looks like currently:

• Edit the main militia ship to have short range.
• Auto targeting enemies should only work when close enough.
• Ability to right click an enemy ship to tell squad to target it.
• Add enemy turrets and ships to level 1.
• Add enemy flag which grants victory when destroyed.
• Add 2nd class of ship which you get some of at beginning of level 1.
• Instead of giving the player ships at the beginning, give them cash and buildings which they can use to create the ships they want. The user will thus be able to choose how many of class 1 and class 2 ships they want.
• Put instruction label text in level 1 to explain the controls.
• Start planning level 2.

Well, I'm off to bed to get some rest. Looking forward to Day 2!