TinyWars Demo Update 7/22/16

There is not much to show off for this update because a majority of my work has been cleaning up bugs and fixing errors in the game!

New Enemy Type!

Introducing Sleepy babies! Sleepy, the name of the big yellow bug, when killed will spawn a hoard of babies! They are easy to kill of course, but just wait til you have to fight hoards of Sleepy bugs! Do not underestimate them!

In case you missed our facebook mini-update. We did add a few new enemies to the demo, they are all named above!

New Poster Artwork

A new artist has joined the TinyWars art team! Introducing Ayasal! Here is a WIP of a new poster for our candy character, Amy.

Deviant Art: http://ayasal.deviantart.com/

Here is a lineart WIP! Please enjoy! A lot of hard work has gone into the art of TinyWars, so please appreciate it all! 🙂

Fan Art

Speaking of this very same character, here’s a fan art!

We didn’t receive enough fan art this month to put together a full blown fan art list, but we are still very grateful whenever we receive fan art!

Thanks 0kvmc0 so much for this awesome art of Amy! This month is dedicated to this character I guess! (She won’t even be in the demo!!!)

Deviant Art: http://0kvmc0.deviantart.com/

Bug Sweeping

Oh man there was many bugs that were cleaned up! Of course, since the demo isn’t even released yet, this entire section may be irrelevant to you. Just know that some complicated features, such as resuming a wave, restarting and reloading the game (and all objects, characters, etc..) will require a lot of care and cleanup!

Thanks for keeping updated, when the demo released it will be filled with surprises, fun, and hopefully not that many bugs!

TinyWars 7/4/16 Update

Some of the TinyWars crew attended Anime Expo this year in LA, California! It was quite inspiring to see some other indie games and meeting some awesome game developers and companies. Really inspiring, someday I hope to be able to set up our own booth at conventions!

New Features Added To Demo

Prior to attending Anime Expo, I admit, we had stayed up longer than we should have trying to develop some key features. Specifically this feature has been something we had in our pause menu for a long time, but never actually functioned.

TinyWars Demo – Pause Menu

Can you guess which feature it is from our pause menu? It’s the “Retry Wave” feature.

Time To Get Technical

Some of our fans love to hear about this stuff, and others don’t, if this isn’t your cup of tea you are welcome to skip this section, I won’t be offended! :’)

In order to have a “Resume Wave” feature, there must be a save feature in the game! So what’s so difficult about that? You might be asking… Well not only to items need to be saved, but they also need to be loaded back into the game. And this pause option would load items back into the game in real time! Not from some home menu screen, but during actual gameplay.

These are the specific items that need to be saved:

• Units
  • Unit Types
  • Unit Locations
  • Unit “Upgrade Level”
• Summoning Circles
  • Summoning Circle locations and amount
• Stats: Money, Lives, and of course, Current Wave Number

The Exact Technique

We have opted to convert a DS Map to JSON for the sake of saving these variables. Basically, it’s a notepad document containing various values separated by commas, brackets, and colons.

The program can then read these values, and used these values to “recreate” the scene. Not only must it recreate the scene, but it must also delete all previous elements, otherwise it would create multiple witches within a single “summoning circle” slot.

Why Is This Feature Important?

Having played many Japanese and American tower defense games, I had noticed that not many TD games actually utilized this feature. The ones that did utilize such a feature were, in my opinion, the most enjoyable.

In a sense, having this feature gives players a “second chance.” If you fail on a certain wave, you don’t have to quit and start over from wave 1. I have found that to be especially frustrating, especially if you die on the boss wave that could be wave 10 or 20. At this point, replaying ALL the waves again might be more of a chore than fun.

When Can We Play The Demo?

There’s still a few features left that need to be implemented. This includes:

• Cut scenes *Has been built, needs to be implemented, more on that…
• Finalized Event System (There are two which we are still deciding on)
• The Actual Waves Themselves
• A few “Special” Things that happen during the demo, you’ll see!
• Game Over Screen
• Full Witch Animations and Enemy Animations

About Cutscenes

The cutscene system has already been developed, BUT it was developed in a sandbox project, separate from the demo.

Even this video (above) is outdated from our current build, but please enjoy!

It now needs to be implemented into the same engine. There are still a few things which need to be tested/decided upon, due to the complex system which operates all UI elements in this game! (We’ll talk about this in a future post, it is extremely proprietary, yet powerful!)

Special Things In The Demo

Sorry, that’s classified information! You’ll have to experience for yourself when the demo launches! 😀

Thank you for keeping up with our development! There’s a ton of hard work that goes into developing a game, but if we tackle each feature one at a time, the demo will launch by this year!

TinyWars Fan Art and Demo Update 6/24/16

We just hit 1000 Likes on our Facebook Page, so here’s another fan art update! You can see past fan art updates on our other blog.

Mary Fan Art

This is certainly a more mature rendition of our usually immature main character, Mary. This is one of the reasons we love seeing fan arts so much! It can give us a totally different perspective of our characters!

Artist: Tanaruu
Website: http://tananoma.weebly.com/

Hand Drawn Amy

This is another amazing render of one of our character in a new and unique perspective! Though it might not be so obvious, this character definitely looks a lot more mature and attractive in this fan art than she normally does in the game! I really love this! Perhaps by the end of the story, all the characters will be mature and grown up!

Artist: Moriartea-Chan
Website: http://moriartea-chan.deviantart.com/

Dancing Fire Witch

I am a huge fan of hand drawn fan art, it really amazes me that such beautiful art can be made by hand! (I have gotten so used to color curves, blending modes, and ctrl+Z!) I titled this one “dancing” but that’s only because when I see this one, I see her dancing back and forth, shaking her want like a maraca.

Artist: LaDollBlanche
Website: http://ladollblanche.deviantart.com/

Demo Updates

We have been working on a playable demo to present to the general public. It is not ready yet, but we’re adding new features every day to make it the best demo it could possibly be!

We’ve seen some comments on social media with statements like, “Tower defense is a dead genre,” and we’ll make sure this demo blows all those worries out the window! With cuteness and with fun gameplay!

Updates – 6/24/16

• Added randomized blinking when enemies are out of range.
• Added Melee Unit test animation frames
• Added Castle Breaking sequence when castle is attacked
• The size of the demo level has been increased by 50%
• Added shadows to objects in the level

What’s Left?

There are a few key features I want to have in this demo before it’s ready to be released! Here’s a list of things that haven’t been done yet!

• Need to implement the actual waves. The wave mechanic has already been created, but the actual waves themselves have not been put in place. I have planned out the waves already, but when testing the features, the last thing I need is to have to sit through all the waves. (Will also need to develop a cheat mechanic so I can easily skip through waves and sequences)
• Need directional animations for the units.
• Need to implement unit upgrade system.
• Need to impediment an in-game cutscene mechanic. There is just a small amount of dialogue I want Mary to use in the beginning and at the end of the demo. Greet the players, have a chat, and get into the waves. At the end, congratulate players and give some kind of motivational call to action! Also when certain events trigger, Mary should respond or tell the payer what’s happening!
• Need to create a game over screen, some sort of score mechanic, and results screen.

Optional 

• I’d like to have an OP and ED for this demo. And opening animation, almost like anime should play at the beginning, and an ED credits segment at the end. We have the songs already prepared, it’s just a matter of can we handle the animation at this point or will it delay the demo too much? (It would be great to market the demo with!)

And that’s about all we need before the demo is released! It seems like a short list, but there are some events that happen at certain waves, I have a feeling those events will take a while to program perfectly.

Thank you for following our development, and I really appreciate receiving fan art of our characters! It’s really amazing to see this project progressing and people have received it well, thank you so much!

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Working On TinyWars

Hey everyone! Been developing this project for almost 6 months now, it’s been a fun ride! This is the first time posting to a wordpress.com blog! So I’ll make an update about where we’re at right now! (We normally update on TinyWarsGame.com)

Gameplay Demo – In Progress 25% Complete

25% is just a random number I decided on! So we’re working on a playable gameplay demo for everyone to enjoy! Mainly, the big thing that we need with this is refining the animations so it’s “presentable” to the public.

This involves not only character animations, but also animations involving effects and other subtle things that really make a game shine! It’s these small details that really make a big difference. Unfortunately, designing 2D animations and frames does take some time so please be patient!

The planning for this demo, 1 level with a variety of waves and enemy unit types has already been completed! This demo should be quite the spectacle and have a variety of fun surprises for you to enjoy!

Regarding gameplay,  we have added some really cool and unique twists on the tower defense genre, but nothing I would really consider ground breaking or worthy of being a “gimmick” to attract players. We’re here to make an overall good game with a great story!

Music

During the time since we began development, we have acquired a huge variety of music both for use in the gameplay as well as cutscenes!

We hope the soundtrack will be memorable, fun, cute, and sad when it needs to be! One of the things that really gets me interested in certain games has been the soundtrack. I think having a memorable soundtrack is important to getting people interested in the project!

Artwork

All the main characters have been designed! We have experimented with various poster designs and advertising artwork as well!

The characters, the enemies, and the levels have artwork completed for them! In regards to planning, I have a lot of confidence that most of the key places and designs have been completed!

Marketing

This one is tricky, it’s always the toughest part of any indie game! So far we have 900 LIKES on our facebook page, 555 Twitter followers, and about 100 YouTube subscribers. We have really done a great deal with social media marketing, especially on facebook!

Though the LIKES number does not reflect it, our posts have gotten quite a lot of exposure, and I have a lot of confidence that if we continue down this path we could create a significant following within a year!

Certainly, the release of the playable demo has to also be tied in a little bit with the exposure level of the game! Release too early and it won’t be as exciting, release too late and we loose some valuable chance to ride on the demo hype train!

Story

The story for TinyWars is pretty much worked out. Each character has their own interesting backstory, and the folklore and concepts have been well documented!

Knowing the interesting backstory, twists, and things is great, in regards to the actual execution of the story, it has been worked out roughly, though the exact dialogue and some specific scenes still need some work!

However, most of that has nothing to do with the demo, so we can leave that off for now! And when we release more builds in the future, we will probably release bits of the story in chronological order. In regards to early chapters in the story, most of that has been planned out, maybe 90% if I had to put a generic percentage to it.

Where Are We Headed Now?

Not that I have covered most of what we have been doing for the past 6 months, I want to talk about where we are headed. Completing the gameplay demo is the immediate goal for TinyWars.

As of now, most of what we have been releasing has been in regards to our designs, the story, and general anime community postings.

Releasing some gameplay and a playable demo will give us a lot more relevancy in the gaming communities that we interact with. People ask us, “What is TinyWars?” Of course it’s a game, but it’s a little tricky to explain a game that doesn’t really exist yet or even have a playable demo.

We’ll try our hardest to get this demo out soon!

Thanks for following our development so far!