Uncategorized - YoboWargames

March 6, 2017October 13, 2017

Releasing to Alpha!

Finally I think “Kursk – Battle for Prochorovka” is ready primetime – or at least alpha time! Its time to get some feedback on the game as it is now while I work on the AI.

In the last week everything started to click into place. I fixed some bugs, got the game saving out and tweaked a few things and then suddenly it felt like it was ready for someone else to play with it and see what they think.

I spent most of today getting it uploaded to Steam with all the marketing and screenshots. Now I just need to wait 2 or 3 days for them to approve it and then I can publish it.

I decide to price it at $6.99 as the game is fully playable as is without the AI and I know for some people this will be enough. Full retail price will be $9.99 so I hope that people agree that a 30% reduction for not having AI in place is fair. I am sure there are a few bugs still to shake out but I need real people playing the game to find them when playing in a way I was not expecting.

One step closer to finding out if there is a market for this type of game. My expectations? I will happy if just a handful of people buy it.

February 27, 2017October 13, 2017

Preparing for Alpha Release

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get the game to the stage where it is ready for an Alpha release.

The game will be playable as a two player hot-swap (or solo by playing both sides) version. The only items missing as of now are AI (Yes I know thats a big feature missing !) , save game and some starting menu screens.

I have a placeholder webpage in place (http://kursk.yobowargames.com) and will start to populate it with more details. In addition I intend to put together some training videos to show the key concepts and gameplay.

My target is get this Alpha release out by Mid March. Time to put on my Marketing and Publisher hat!

February 13, 2017October 13, 2017

Steam to discontinue Greenlight

So this week Steam announced (Blog) they would be replacing Greenlight with a fee based submission program. The fee could be anywhere between $100 and $5000. I am naturally a little concerned that although my game is already Greenlit they may decide to charge the fee for all games that have not gone live by the time they institute this change. I consider my game to be in a fairly niche market and was never expecting large sales. So a possible fee of $5000 would certainly block me from releasing on steam. Time will tell on this.

In the meantime I have been continuing to work as much as possible on my game and just today finished implementing artillery bombardment which is a feature of combat. This took longer than expected and wasn’t helped by me being undecided about how to implement it in the UI.

So how complete is the game? I almost have a two player (sharing a PC or someone solo playing) working completely from end to end. I believe I can get this finished in the next two weeks with some rough menus in place. The next really big item after that is AI… Once I have that conquered it would be polishing and final bug fixing before releasing the game. My target for all this is May – June 2017.

Big question for me is do I release an alpha version once I have a two player game working? I am still undecided on this. On the one hand I want some feedback on how things look now and any bugs that are found. On the other I don’t want to face a disastrous release of the game too soon due to too many bugs.

February 6, 2017October 13, 2017

New Logo

This week’s focus has been around new UI graphics. My Graphics artist has done a great job and I spent most of yesterday cutting them up to put into the game. Also as you might notice I have a new Logo.

Why the name yobowargames? Well my wife is Korean and Yobo is a term of endearment (a bit like honey or dear) in Korea. So I wanted to incorporate that into the name. If you look at the new logo you will see a part of the Korean Flag mixed into it. I’m British by the way.

Below is a screenshot showing much of the new hud UI:

Top Middle – New Turn counter display. Since this battle reflects one day I wanted to show a clock type turn counter to reflect the count down in time remaining and putting some pressure on the player to get their objectives in time.
Bottom Middle – New combat factor display
Bottom Left & Right – New displays showing which units are involved in the combat
Middle – New target selections
New Unit counters throughout

January 30, 2017October 13, 2017

Pivotal Tracker, New Units and WIP

This week I realized I needed a better way to track my work. Lists on paper were no longer working.

Having a quick look around for a free online tracker I came across Pivotal Tracker (http://www.pivotaltracker.com). This was exactly what I needed with the free version allowing you to track 2 projects and have 3 collaborators. As you can see from the below screenshot I still have a worrying amount of work to finish!

I have also been working closely with my graphics artist this week. He has tidied up my units and is now working on UI elements. I hope to show some progress on this next week.

Here are some of the refreshed German Units with a common color scheme (I would also show the Russian units but I made a mistake with the shadow effect and need to re-spin them all again). Its been hard trying to balance the respective sizes of the vehicles with making the pictures looking good on the counters. I think my target audience will understand where I had to make compromises. I am undecided whether to also do Nato Symbols, I know some war gamers like them. For now I am not including them so I can remain focused on the core of the game.

Also this week I have been battling with how to add Air and Artillery support to battles. I looked around for some inspiration from other games and have settled on the way they implement it in the mobile game Wars and Battles (http://warsandbattles.com/). This game has some great UI ideas for a computer based war game.

Finally here is work in progress for an image I hope to use to start marketing the game. I will also probably include it somewhere in the introduction within the game.

January 23, 2017October 13, 2017

Terrain and Line of Sight

This week has been a slow one on the development side. I spent a fair amount of time working with my graphic artist on some changes I wanted. He is based in Russia and its a slow process with my instructions not always being that clear. I am learning that I need to be very precise on what I want.

When I did find time to do some actual coding I tidied up some backend code that was getting a little unmanageable and improved some of the combat routines. In addition I also started work on line of sight which will be needed for the AT units and spotting for artillery.

Below are the terrain tiles and description that I will put into the help.

January 15, 2017October 13, 2017

Steam Greenlight

Today started off with the good news that Kursk 1943 has been Greenlit on Steam!

So first action of the day was to sign into Steam and complete the online paperwork associated with a Greenlit project. This includes things like your bank and tax details. Next was to download the steamworks sdk. Not sure yet how I am meant to use this and a quick glance at the documentation scared me with the amount of things it looks like i need to do.

I think a ‘sit down with a nice cup of tea and read it all through once’ session is coming up…

January 8, 2017October 13, 2017

Tools of the trade

I had always wanted to write a game and get it published but it always seemed so hard. You need to not only be able to code. You have to be good at graphics, music, story writing, publishing, marketing, project management and so the list goes on.

However in the last few years there has been an explosion in the tools available to Indie Developers to make the whole writing a game and publishing easier. Of course there has also been a huge market shift with the likes of Apple, Google and Steam offering a venue for your games.

So what tools am I using and why?

LibGDX – http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/

One of the first problems I needed to tackle is that I wanted to write a game I could publish on Desktop or mobile. The problem with this is that each platform has its own recommended coding language and its own platform specific issues. To solve this there are tools like LibGDX, Unity and Game Maker that allow you to write once and publish to many platforms.

I chose LibGDX. I took a couple of online courses (with Udacity and Coursera) one which used Unity and the other LibGDX. I preferred LibGDX because I could use Android Studio to develop with and because it seemed to offer me more control over my game. Also I guessed at the time I would only need to use a small fraction of its power and Unity seemed to be overkill for what I wanted.

There is a great community that supports it and I have always found an answer to problems when using it.

Tiled – http://www.mapeditor.org/

My games are Hex based maps. Tiled is perfect for that. Its simple to use, easy to edit the .tmx files it produces and works well with LibGDX.

TexturePacker – https://www.codeandweb.com/texturepacker

For making my sprite sheets I use TexturePacker. Very simple to use and fits my needs perfectly.

Photoshop

I am going to recommend here that if you are not a graphics artist then find someone that is. I started off doing all my own graphics and they were crap. I watched hours of ‘How to do it’ videos just to do the most simple task. It has taken a lot of time away from my actually working on games.

However I have learnt a lot. It gave me a better understanding of why I need a graphics artist. I understood better what it was I actually needed from a graphic artist and I can knock up a prototype of how I want my game to look.

To do all this I use Photoshop. I had used it before for simple photo touch ups and realized that using anything else would mean learning the controls for that particular app. I experimented with Blend for 3D graphics. It just made me appreciate the skill of good graphics designers even more!

At the moment I am still designing my own unit counters because its something I enjoy but really I should hand all creative activities over to my graphics artist.

Android Studio

I have used Microsoft Visual Studio and tinkered with xcode and Android Studio before getting serious with writing games. LibGDX works with Android Studio so it became the natural development tool for me to use.

OneDrive

I am paranoid about losing my work – whether it be a laptop malfunction or a fire that destroys my home. So I back up everything I do to Microsofts OneDrive. I also back my code up using Android Studios built in code Repository which uploads your code to Google servers.

I really like OneDrive and actually extended my subscription to include Microsoft office for my family.

Computer/Monitor

I am using a Mac for development with the main reason being I can build my apps for Android, iOS and Desktop on it. If you are focusing on PC or Android games you can go with a Windows PC.

My one recommendation here is get the most powerful one you can afford. You will find it painful trying to develop a game on a five year old 13″ screen laptop. And get the largest monitor you can afford. The more you can get on screen at the same time the more pleasurable your development time will be.