Stone Kingdoms 0.2 (RTS)

[KayleMaster]

Version 0.2
An RTS game made with LÖVE based on Firefly Studios' Stronghold. Assets are property of Firefly Studios.

To spawn units:

• Right click to spawn 4 woodcutters
• Other workers will spawn automatically

To build buildings (left click):

• Q - Apple orchard
  2 Wood
• W - Stockpile, needs to be placed next to a stockpile (if there is one).
  4 Stone
• E - Granary
  10 Wood
• T - Stone quarry, needs 3 stonemasons to operate
  24 Wood
• Y - Iron mine, needs 1 iron miner to operate
  24 Wood 10 Stone

Controls:

• Zoom in/out with mouse scroll wheel
• Move around with arrow keys
• Press Escape to exit the game

Known bugs and issues:

• Sometimes woodcutter will continue woodcutting forever - this happens when they can't find a path or they're too far away
• Units will sometimes not free up the last place they've been at causing a pathfinding issue
• Units will go through buildings if they are placed after their path has been found
• The game doesn't take into account dt, which is why it's locked at 60 fps
• Woodcutters will only chop wood at the adjacent chunks of the stockpile. If there are no trees there, they will clump near the stockpile.

Changelog:

• Add new asset files
  Add a little effect for the Tree when chopped
  Fix crash when a quad doesn't have an offset
  Add height map (used for the stockpile currently)
  Make stockpile walkable
  Granary is now functional
  Shown chunks now depend on the zoom level
  Change chunk logic to include chunks in the whole screen
  Fix quarry and mine not working when outside viewport
  Add Campfire
  Add Farmer
  Add Apple Orchard

Screenshots 0.2:

[KayleMaster]

I posted this topic earlier than I wanted, but there's a reason for it.
It's the end of the semester and I need to start job hunting, and I want to put this project on my CV, so that's one of the major reasons.

That being said because it's the end of the semester, the finals are starting and I need to focus on studying instead of developing the game.
So pretty much for the next month, you won't see much progress being made.
After that, it depends if I get a job or not. I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to put if I do, but I'll post an update here.

So if I do get the time, what would I be working on?
Well, I'm working on extracting Stronghold's art and fitting it in a single 8k texture page. This is pretty much done.
Every sprite needs to be named so later they can be mapped as animations easier. This is currently being worked on:

There are about 18000 sprites so it takes some time.
Military units will need to be color masked which takes a little bit of time.
After that the animations will need to be made from the sprites' frames, this is easy but slightly tedious.

Oh, and you can find the source code here: https://gitlab.com/evgenit28/stone-kingdoms

[Tricky]

I'm afraid I never liked RTS games (I must be honest), but I cannot deny, this definitely looks promising to me, and if I did like RTS games I would definitely try this. Keep up the good work

[KayleMaster]

Thanks, gameplay elements are not yet implemented but there will be a focus on Grand Strategy as well.

[Pebsie]

Really happy to see that you're still working on this! It's looking real good.

[Nelvin]

Please don't tell me you do anything at a scale of 18000 files in an even remotely manual way?
Write small tools/scripts/batchfiles to convert/pack/generate textures, uvs, create animtables and save them as lua files you can directly require and use in your game etc. etc.

[KayleMaster]

Definitely.
I use TexturePacker to pack the files in an atlas, it seems the only one capable of packing them and not crash whilst doing it.
I used mogrify to batch crop every sprite and eventually to generate the color masks. And for the naming I just use windows' batch rename, works wonders once you get used to the hotkeys. The process itself would take less than a day, but because lack of time lately, I've been chipping away at 30 mins a day whenever I feel like it, which usually isn't often.
The files are more like 9000 because the extracting tool generates copies of each sprite, but I remove those with bash as well.
After that I'd need to write a tool to map the animations, that would be pretty straight forward.

[KayleMaster]

UPDATE: 4.7.2018
So I've hit a few roadblocks with the assets, one of them being some assets' frames are missing color or have improper one, mostly military units. To fix this I have to extract the assets via a very tedious method. So far I've extracted 1/12.
Another problem was figuring out how to color the sprites. Since they're in a spritebatch I can't color them with a shader (well, apparently I can, but I don't know how), so here's what I went with:

1. Use imagemagick to extract the colorized area

Code: Select all

convert *.png -fuzz 20% +opaque "#003399" -transparent white *.png

• Use imagemagick again to extract the grayscale of said mask (one could probably chain these)

Code: Select all

convert -intensity Rec601Luma *.png -grayscale Brightness *.png

• Crop with imagemagick only right and bottom side, so the offsets will be the same as original sprite, but still save up on some atlas space

• Draw on top of sprite and set the color using SpriteBatch:setColor

The result:

result.PNG (2.43 KiB) Viewed 8648 times

[Paz]

I absolutely love the aesthetics. That may sound like sarcasm but really they remind me of a lot of strategy games from my childhood.

[KayleMaster]

Updated to 0.2

New stuff:
- Add new asset files
- Add a little effect for the Tree when chopped
- Fix crash when a quad doesn't have an offset
- Add height map (used for the stockpile currently)
- Make stockpile walkable
- Granary is now functional
- Shown chunks now depend on the zoom level
- Change chunk logic to include chunks in the whole screen
- Fix quarry and mine not working when outside viewport
- Add Campfire
- Add Farmer
- Add Apple Orchard