Orcs vs. Martians

It's been a while since I've posted about Orcs vs. Martians, and I've got something exciting nearly working, so I figure it's time for an update.

The past six months I've worked on a little of almost everything in this game - useability, gameplay, replays, the hud, graphics, sound effects, animations, networking, out-of-game guis and dialogs, you name it. Probably, the areas I've put the most effort into are the hud and the guis / menus. Although, sometimes it all seems like a blur :) so I'm not really sure.

In contrast to the other stuff, I've only spent a little time on the AI. I'm really looking forward to getting to that in a bigger way, one of the main reasons I wanted to write an RTS was to try some crazy ideas with the AI.

Some current screenshots.






The thing I'm excited about is, I'm close to allowing selection of different tile sets in the game. I think it's cool to see how different the game looks with different terrain textures; it's a pretty dramatic visual effect. And, I've already tried a few different ones -

here's a tile set consisting mostly of textures that came with the Torque 1.3 SDK. I'm not too crazy about this particular set - it's a bit dark, making it hard to see the units, but still it makes for an interesting variant.






Here's a 3rd tile set, consisting mostly of textures from the RTS environment pack. I thought this one came out looking really good. I need to do a little tweaking though like maybe smoothing out the transition from sand to grass.









So much for tile sets. Another new feature is, you can now order a worker to build multiple buildings. Just hold down SHIFT while placing a building, and you can queue up several of them. Very convenient for building a line of towers, since it lets you divert your attention elsewhere while the things are getthing built.

The queued buildings plans show up in the 3-D view as white, translucent buildings. (the green one is the building "cursor")




Another area I've been putting a lot of effort and thought into is the end-of-game gui. I feel it's important that the player have a satisfying end-of-game experience in an RTS, more so than other types of games. OVM's end-game gui now has quite a few stats and graphs (possibly, too many at this point):




The player can even watch a replay of the game right in this gui, while he's still connected to the server. Since players are still connected, they can watch the replay together and use the chat window while watching it. The replay is is sort of a poor-man's version; it's not a full-blown Torque replay, it just shows an enlarged version of the minimap and dots moving around on it.

Back to Torque-ing around. Charge!!