Red Brick Games

Here’s the final (?) layout of Orcs vs. Martians‘ in-game gui:

The gui elements at the bottom of the screen are what I mean to highlight here.

The above screenshot shows Selection mode. The below screenshot shows Players mode. Players mode shows everyone’s name, race, and most importantly, upgrades.

Being the author of the game, I could describe design decisions that went into the latest changes, but I realize that would bore most people

However, I’ll point out that the player’s own upgrades are now visible in both Selection mode and Player mode. That way, the player doesn’t have to flip back and forth to check on his techs.

There are now also race-specific skins for Orcs and Martians (uber-yay). Orcs gets a coarse-looking wood background, and Martians get a metallic background:

Textures need more work, but I think it’s looking splendid.

I’d also like to add some eye candy to the skins. Like animated lights on the Martians’ gui controls. And maybe an occasional bug scurrying across the Orcs’ controls…in the spirit of the old Unix program, xroach! That’d be pretty funny.

I’m really liking these latest changes in my playtesting. However, I’m not sure if they achieved my original goal of simplifying the hud. Is there still too much detail there for the semi-casual player?

Here’s the latest end-of-game gui:

Mainly I centered the tabs, the title, and put the players’ names down the middle of the gui.

Also, the multi-colored progress bars now sport a specularly-highlighted bitmap, which I think looks nice. A close-up:

It grows from left to right with animation and sound, when the gui first opens. With the intent to give a more satisfying end-of-game experience.

Implementing those crazy progress bars was a chore.

For those curious, I did successfully get my development environment off my dead laptop, and onto my desktop. Which I’m glad to get done. Though now, my *desktop* is exhibiting instability issues. :-/ Computers.

Here’s the new incarnation of the game setup gui.

There are now borders around the “Rules” and “Map” sections, and the Map section is larger.

Also, in the Map section, you might notice that the complex terrain-generation parameters are gone. Instead, there’s a more user-friendly “Terrain” pop-up control:

that lets the player choose from several preconfigured terrain types. (my personal favorite being “Random”)

And if the player selects “Custom”, it brings back the old-style terrain-generation parameters:

for the power users out there.

…but I still like this piece. More artwork from my favorite 5-year-old:

Edit:
didn’t understand the reference to “The Louvre” in the blog title? The Louvre is Paris’s most famous art museum. Sigh. Game developers — no culture at all. (shakes head)

P.S. Ok, I admit it, I had to look it up too.

Jolly poor show, Best Buy and Frys.

So, I removed my recently-deceased laptop’s hard drive, right? Now I want to copy it over to my desktop system. But laptop and desktop hard drives use different IDE connectors. So I need an adaptor, right? You can get such an adaptor for as little as $3.

So I head on over to Best Buy. Tell a salesman what I’m looking for. This “helpful” salesman tells me what I really need, what I really have to have, is a complete hard drive enclosure. Which, of course, I don’t. And which, coincidentally, starts at $50. Not $3.

Now, if I was unknowledgeable about computer hardware, this guy could have easily hoodwinked me into buying one of those $50 jobs. However once he realized I knew hardware, he stopped trying to push those things.

Would it really be such a crime if customer service people helped customers, rather than trying to get out of them as much money as possible?

So I head over to Fry’s. Still looking for a cheap adapter. Another salesman. This guy shows me an IDE-to-USB converter, allowing me to plug my laptop’s hard drive into a USB port. And at a better price this time: $15.

But it’s bulky, is more than I need, and I know I can get cheaper, so I ask: you got just a direct 44-pin to 40-pin adapter, that’s cheaper? I get a cool reaction to asking for something cheaper (!! look, I don’t care about your store and your profits, but you’d better work with me if you want me back as a customer), and he says, No, “This is the least expensive thing you’ll find here.”

Ok, fine. I can live with the $15 deal. But I spend 5 more minutes browsing the adapters and cables they have in that section -

and what do I find right there?

“44-pin to 40-pin hard drive adaptor.”

For $6.

Good grief. Best Buy and Frys, your customer service really has room for improvement.

My development laptop no longer boots up. It loads a few dozen Windows drivers, then hangs.

What a nuisance. Moving a software development environment to a new machine is such a hassle. I’ll need to re-install at minimum

Visual Studio
Perforce
Winmerge
VirtuaDub
Audacity
Fraps
Ogg codecs
Ogg command line tools
Blender
Paint.NET
Gimp
UnxUtils
Open Office
Torque SDKs and tools

and I’m sure there are others I’m not remembering at the moment.

Oh well. I guess it’s a chance to get the latest versions of everything.

At least, they do in my case.

Particle effects have worked out well. Here’s a particle-heavy animation of a worker building a road:

I’ve been wanting to implement those effects for a long time. The intial shovel-scrape kicks up dust, dirt flies off to the side, and when the dirt lands, it kicks up more dust. All done with particles.

All that is courtesy of a powerful “action” system that Orcs vs. Martians has. Every action, such as shoveling, can trigger a sequence of so-called micro actions. Each micro action can play an animation, play a sound, change the mounted tool, and now, trigger particle effects. Put together, actions can now consist of an elaborate sequence of audio-visual effects, as the shoveling action does in the video. The sequences are declared in Torque script for easy editing. It’s a nice, flexible system for unit animations and effects.

It all plays client-side, so all that mounting, animation, and sound happens without consuming any network bandwidth.

I’m now working on re-laying out the game setup gui, portions of the in-game gui, and portions of the results gui. It’s going well so far - things are fitting where I want them, and the in-game gui should emerge from this re-layout somewhat simpler. Some of this work is about applying some really good feedback I got from the last beta test.

Also, much of this layout work will probably be final! That’s not to say I have all the final 2-D artwork in place; I don’t. But as far as the arrangement of gui controls, their resizing behavior, etc., this will probably be a final pass for a lot of gui work. w00t.