I wanted to improve the graphic quality for Merc Tactics by adding a SSAO shader and I looked into several techniques. The best quality implementation of this is GTAO. There is also ASSAO, which is used in the Godot engine. Unfortunately, GTAO is a bit too heavy weight and I want Merc Tactics …

My game Merc Tactics uses a simple shadow map to create shadows, but I had a lot of trouble getting it to work without artifacts. In particular peter panning and acne were a big problems. 

the shader code looks like this:

		uniform sampler2DShadow sShadow; 
		uniform sampler2D sampler2d;
		in me…

I remember reading a blog post about a game developer who forget to include a sound file for his game update and that caused the game to close down at certain time. This caused havoc because no one could play the game anymore and had to release an emergency update to fix the problem

Well, we are all…

I thought I'd share some of the tips and tricks I learned using the Bullet Physics SDK in my game.

(This is a work in progress. There might be some things in this blog that are incorrect ?. If you spot anything let me know. I will be updating.)

In the game loop you have to call btDynamicsWorld::stepS…

I released version 1.3 this week, finally adding grenades, a feature that I have being promising for some time.  Grenades helps making the types of attack more varied. You can lob them over objects, hitting enemy that can't be reached by direct fire. Also, I made sure that they are widel…

This week we've released version 1.2 of Merc Tactics. Scopes and silencer attachments are the major new feature for this version, but we also made many more improvements. For full details see here: https://ed-welch.itch.io/merc-tactics/devlog/223122/version-12-released

In a previous blog I talked about the “dynamic difficulty” feature of Merc Tactics (https://www.gamedev.net/blogs/entry/2265699-dynamic-difficulty/)​ 

Basically, this feature automatically chooses the difficulty of the game based on how the player plays. This was to solve a problem common with …

This release mainly improves graphics. I realised that I needed to do this looking the ugly default graphic that Google shows when you search for "Merc Tactics". 

Firstly, I've changed the main strategy map. Previously it was a generated image, which didn't look great. So, now I have c…

A new demo version of Merc Tactics has being released on Itch: https://ed-welch.itch.io/merc-tactics

This version fixes a bug which prevented the game from running on Nvidia GPUs.

Also, some features have being improved:

• The interrupt mechanism has been made less complicated and eas…

Typically, at the start of a game you are presented with the game difficulty menu, as above. Players should choose the level according to their experience. The problem with this is that the player really has no idea how easy the "Novice" level really is. I know some games where the easy leve…

Today we are releasing the 3rd game demo. You can download the Windows installer here: http://www.astronautz.com/MercTactics/MercTacticsSetup0.6.exe

MercTactics is a squad-based tactical strategy, similar to games such as Jagged Alliance, or XCOM.

The main reason for rele…

I just finished the new poster artwork for MercTactics. I hope you like it.

Watch this space, there are a lot of new improvements and I will be posting the new game trailer and beta demo soon!

Most squad based games have an interrupt feature that works as follows:

• During your turn you can arrange it that some of your soldiers don't use up all their action points - leaving enough APs for a "reflex shot" and  facing them in the direction of the expected enemy assault.
• Then du…

I had really an awful time trying to put together a decent trailer video for the demo that I just released.

Apart from all the trouble I had trying to figure out how to use various video editing tools, the quality of the uploaded video on youtube seemed very bad compared to what it should be, so I d…

Hello All,

Today I have prepared a special version of Merc Tactics for game play testing. You can download the installation program here: http://astronautz.com/MercTactics/MercTacticsSetup0.5.exe

Recapping, Merc tactics is a turn-based squad tactical combat game, similar to games such as Jagged Allia…

All scene's in MercTactics are generated randomly.
Previously, I've just "sprinkled" stuff into a scene randomly, but this doesn't look very good. Stuff tends to be clumped together in the natural world.
So, I used a Perlin noise map to control the placement of plants and rocks.
In fact, for …

During the last few weeks I was working on the terrain for my game. All scenes in the game are generated randomly, so the ground texture needs to be randomly generated as well.
I do this by building up several layers. First, an opaque tilable texture is repeated to establish the base. Then on top of…

I had to put the game on hold for the last 6 months, because I've been too busy working, but now I'm back on the game full time.
Last week I started on the 2D artwork. These are some dialogs for the game's story line.