Preview of a TDN T2D Strategy Article

Well figured I'd post some shots of the TDN Strategy demo game I'm going to build the Strategy tutorial set off of, tomorrow I start with the doc part of it, there are some fairly advance parts of it that I'm debating whether to include or not, but the base of it will definately become the TDN Strategy tutorial articles :) This is one of the things I've been working on while interning at Garage Games.

NOTE: be warned there are 18 images in this post so it migh take a sec... figured I'd at least give a disclaimer lol

This pic is of the basic world tile set with the game gui... I crammed as much functionality in the gui as possible. The selection box takes up most of the gui since you can select up to 20 units at once, then you can select a single unit from that point... To the right is the object properties, with a description of the object and actions. Also theres a part on the right that says "Selection = None" which will list the object selected. The camera movement is something I worked a bit on to get it as close to perfect in my standards... there are three levels of sensitivity towards the edge of the game window, so the closer you get to the edge the camera moves from slow - medium - to fast. There is also an easing system that softly slows the camera to a halt when you stop panning it. I'm very pleased with how the camera system worked out.

This pic is of the base, the gold mine and the selection box. The selection box can be set up two ways, the one thats set up now allows a static sprite to represent each line and is automatically resized to fit the selection area box... I also have script in there to load an image map that automatically resizes to that, so if you want some sort of tint to your selection box it is very easy.... (again all this will be instructed in a step by step tutorial :)

Here you can see the base's gui pop up in the action box as well as some description text. Your gold, soldier and worker counts are displayed (samples of information you can set up). The functioning button from here is the "Create" menu.

Here is the create menu... a button for a worker and soldier with the costs next to them... theres text to show what you are creating as well as a progress bar

Here is the creation in action, the progress bar animates and the text lists the Worker thats being created

When you click to create something when you are already creating a unit it will then queue the object (I created a whole queue script class to easily manage as many queue's as you may need)... if the queue is active then the "Look at Queue" button is visible

Here a unit is already created with a text label and its own little life bar... you can also see the queue in the actionbox... there are four slots for queue'd objects that are listed like this

"circlesWorker +2"

You can then click the button to decrement the value queued, the buttons are updated real time with the proper counts

Here you can see the result after I click it to remove the queued works

You can now see from the base's main menu that the gold has lessened and it keeps a count of how many workers we have

In this pic we have four workers, all of them selected. The selection boxes are on all of them, in fact I created a whole "borderBox" system that allows you to specify a max units selectable and it deals with assigned an appropriate selection box static sprite object.

In the bottom left selection box gui area you can see buttons for each object. Now one thing that you can't tell is the code behind this automatically fits the ammount of selection buttons needed to the gui control. To demonstrate look at the next pic

Here is the same ammount of units selections in a different size box, I simply hit F10 to go to the GUI editor, resized the selection box, then went back into the game and selected the objects... it figures out how many rows and columns it can fit. Nothing too amazing, but shows how you can dynamically generate Torque GUI elements, and yes just the traditional Torque GUI elements :) Also note that since the objects are of the same type the action gui for that type is still activated

The worker's gold mining is a hard thing to display in a static picture, though in this picture you can see some mining, while some are heading back to the base to deposit the gold or back to the mine to mine more

Heres a group of enemies that I'm sending over to cause trouble... for testing purposes I allow myself to select and move enemies, though their action boxes don't come up. Note the different color name tags too :)

Here is the life bar lowering on one object thats being attacked... now that theres some soldiers on each side its time to have some box on box fighting lol

The rest of these pics are various ones of the battle going on, you can see the small life bars updating

Ok well if you've read and seen all these pics and you don't have T2D then you ought to go pick it up... the TDN article will be coming up soon so be watching for it if there was something mentioned here that you'd care to learn to do and expand upon yourself... this is meant to be a TDN Article steping you through developing the initial steps of a T2D Strategy game