Gorilla Tactics Development Blog

So this took a ridiculously long time to post, though I won’t concede that it matters, hah.
Kung Fu Kingdom is on hold right now. I miss-scoped the AI for KFK (It took longer and was more complicated than estimated) for various reasons. As a result, we ran out of cash before we finished a good, playable demo. So at this point I’m a lone-developer, and unfortunately do not have the experience necessary to develop KFK on my own.
What I am doing now is working on very small games that will get increasingly larger as I build up more experience in programming until I can work on KFK by myself. This may not be for a year or more. It stinks, but I have to do what I have to do, yes?

This is the current game I’m working on, which will reuse assets from KFK so I can release it very quickly. It will be available on PC, XBox360, Hopefully Silverlight, and eventually WP7 phones.

Well, Wednesday was supposed to be the release of Alpha for Kung Fu Kingdom, but circumstances have conspired against me. As usual with programming, things are taking a lot longer to do than expected.

Also, I’m working on the project alone now. I’ve used the angel funding I received to get the project to this point and I’m reasonably happy with the results so far. I’ll be continuing to work on the project from this point out, but it will take longer due to me being only a moderately skilled programmer, as opposed to some of the skilled, and very skilled guys that were working on the project before. But that’s ok! A lot of the work that is remaining is adding content and gameplay, which is easier than some of the engine work (hah, or so I say). Character and Faction AI is probably still outside my expertise for at least a few months, but I have a few plans to deal with that which It think will please everyone.

In the meantime, after the jump are a few images I linked to on twitter (yet another reason to follow on Twitter and not just the blog!). Continue reading →

Ok, I AM doing daily updates, just not on vacations. Even game developers need to take time off to treat their mothers right on Mothers day.

In other news, sometimes you spend 5 hours debugging a problem, only to realize its an issue with the engine and not your own code. >_<  I guess that is a compliment on the stability of the engine that it took five hours to consider it was an engine issue.

I was working on the main menu today, which really just needs a few more tweaks to make the buttons look good before I can show it off you to you guys, and I added the KFK Theme song. WOW, what a difference. The main menu was pretty good looking before, but now its just got that extra edge to it. I know it may seem a bit silly to get excited about a main menu, but when things start coming together to the point where you can say “That looks FINISHED”, it doesn’t really matter where or what it is, it’s exciting.

I’ll post a video of the main menu in action tomorrow at some point.

I’ll admit a certain amount of trepidation toward committing to this, but that’s never stopped me before.

Starting today I will be updating this blog at least once every day with development news concerning Kung Fu Kingdom and/or a small side project I’ve been working on called Negative Mass.

I’m doing this because we are fast approaching an alpha release (which we will distribute for free), and would like to start forming some bonds with the strategy gamer community while drumming up some interest in the game.

So uh… WOOO! If you catch me not posting in a day, I’ll give you a free embarrassed look to your face and a costly menacing look to your back.

Territories in Kung Fu Kingdom are the game maps you play on. Since what kind of terrain on each map is determined by its own Primary Biome, and the Primary Biome of the territories which are adjacent to it, we needed to ensure that each map was both unique, while also maintaining logical placement of those tiles based on which adjacent Territory they were influenced by.

This screenshot is from our World Generation screen, and each one of these hexagons represents a single territory the player can play on. The selected tile is a Continue reading →

So last time I posted some music on our IndieDB.com page user Anni expressed interest in how music was applied in games. I gave a small technical explanation on the post itself, but wanted to explain how, design wise, we were going to implement music in KFK.

Basically we are going with a Ambient vs Combat approach. Whenever there is no combat current happening, the player will hear ambient music, such as this new piece created by Cleveland Bledsoe Jr.

This music needs to be interesting and made according to our overall KFK theme, but also needs to be able to fade into the background and not feel overly repetitious, so if you hear it over and over again, it doesn’t bother you so much. You can always turn it off if you want.

When the players units engage in combat, the ambient music is faded out and paused, and the combat music is started and faded in! Here is a good example of our combat music.

As soon as combat is over, the combat music fades out and stops, and the ambient music unpauses and fades back in.

What we DID NOT WANT to do with music in the game, is have the music change based on where the camera was looking. Some games do this (like Sid Meier’s Railroads!) which gets seriously annoying when the player is moving their camera around a lot, as we are all apt to do when playing a strategy game.
So, that’s all for today folks!

Cleveland Beldsoe Jr. just sent in a contender for KFK’s Title Theme. I think it’s great – what do you think? That’s a rhetorical question, comments are disabled.