Ground control and bullet heaven 👾

TL;DR

This iteration was still about searching for different game's design. It's frustrating but I feel we should stay in "pre-production" era until I found something that is fun and scalable.

What most important I decided to bring back ground control mechanic and move droid mechanics more into "bullet heaven vibe" to show different perspective on the game.

In shorten:

• Bringing back mechanic of controlling ground

  • I did step back and bring back mechanic I implemented before. It should support building mechanic and strategy point of the game

• Droid control mechanic moved into bullet heaven vibe

  • I did implement mechanic of auto-turret and auto-mining to take that bargain from the player. It's all about show droids as "moving turrets" with possibility to achieve strategy advantage with MICRO skills (moving droids among enemies)

• Planet's grid map improvements

• Flow improvements

  • Instead of using computers as mandatory you can now switch to droid customization from mission selection screen, just getting rid of complexity in the game's flow

• Optimized build size from ~300BM to ~70MB

Bringing back concept of controlling ground

Bringing back? It wasn't there, was there? Yes! It was in very first idea of the game. I did implementation of feature but just withdraw it before publishing. I thought it's not really necessary and maybe I could do the game without it.

Now I see I need something to explain mechanic of building inside the game. It's not city builder but with "ground control" I can give a little experience like that.

Second thing is strategy, the mechanic of "biomass" it's just simple indication that you control this ground. Extending it make you feel how you move forward with your domination.

The concept is similar to biomass from Starcraft's Zerg race. You must expand your territory and protect it to remain control. I always liked this concept from Warcraft III (undead) to Starcraft (Zerg). I would love to bring it back and try again to expand this mechanic.

To expand you must put "root". This is artificial root that expands your control. It's similar to tumor in Starcraft.

Finally it make sense to game name "rootwarden", so you just protecting your roots :D

Auto-turret and Auto-mining, "bullet heaven" vibe

That's something significant. I decided to move game's design more in direction of "bullet heaven" games.

Now you can just move droid without need of controlling his abilities directly.

• Auto-turret will shoot automatically when enemy is in range

• Auto-mining will mine automatically when droid is in front of mineral

The idea is to give player two ways of strategy

• Move droid to position to contain it or protect it

• Build up roots and turrets behind it

Finally we keep action element of the game. You can manipulate your droid and jump into action to shoot down all enemies swinging among them (like typical bullet heaven games)

For now I still keep "laser gun" as module that allow you directly shoot by droid. I am not sure if I want to keep it but it seems like option for "pro" players who wants to quickly switch between building, moving and fighting.

What important this idea is pretty interesting when you start using few droids at once. You can use one of them to move forward and keep position when second one can directly run into fight with backup.

Improved planet's grid map

I did some improvements on plant's grid map. It's a mechanic to allow scale game by giving player as many matches as possible. It's still pretty simple implementation but I plan to expand it to the whole planet. The challange is to generate unique or different challenges for each time so player ill feel progress with mastering the mechanics. It should go along with upgrading and building your droid army.

Link to droid's customization from mission selection screen

To just simplify design I decided to allow skip walking on the ship to manage your droids. You can still do that but it's not necessary when you playing the game.

My goal was to make player's flow much more fluid. You can just press button between missions to upgrade your army.

As long I doing this project I have conclusion we should make gameplay first and fiction as background. You can make player life easier just do it.

UX: Show upon building previews how to put/cancel

When you start building, game will show upon preview building small tip about controls:

• Left click to put

• Right click to cancel

Small thing but I like it, but there is still problem it's not really well visible. I will look for solution. Nevertheless I should add this kind of tips anywhere so player is not confuse how to use the game.

Shorten shoot sound

Small thing but I edited shoot sound to be shorten without any echo thing. It was annoying when there is a huge shooting moment. That long sound of shooting was not necessary when there is a lot of shootings.

Improving usage of building system

Now you can just click on building to select it. I got feedback that it should work like that and that was pretty good point. It's all about consequences in controls, you should be able to use all UI with mouse, that's it.

Improving UI Theme

It was mostly experimental but I was moving UI to look more cohesive with the game theme in dark/red colors.What is important I am using Godot's Theme system:

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/ui/gui_using_theme_editor.html

It's pretty good feature, what surprising it wasn't used in tutorials I was doing when I started my journey. Pretty shame because I feel it's something that you should learn as fast as possible so you will avoid headaches when building more UI

It doesn't mean making UI is easy.. still is pretty hard but you just helping your project to be easier to maintain.

Build size optimization

Build was pretty oversized by just too much textures. What's worse most of them was not that useful, so be warned to not use them until I must to do this, cleaning them up was pretty messy for me.

I still need to find better why to automate communication between blender and Godot. I couldn't really imagine working that with much bigger project like some AAA title.

Anyway, I reduced size of assets from ~300MB to ~70MB, let's keep it simple until I really got good idea how to make it better

Architecture - Use concept of "component" instead of "view"

It's not really a big thing but I decide to rename "view" catalog to "components" 😅, sounds pretty no point but in my case I want to be clear it's not only "view" elements. Previously I thought it could work but in a "real life" I see it's not really possible to create pure view in Godot. There is always some kind of script attached.

What important it's not changing anything about passing dependencies with logic to components so we keep it clear.