Hi guys and gals! :3

Here's my third blog entry for Forest Strike. This week I was designing the AI, which give me more struggles than expected. So, there's not much graphical stuff to show this time. That's why I am going a little bit more into detail and explain the game a bit.

Project Idea

Forest strike is a 2D round-based strategy game in pixel-art style featuring animals as characters. Each round is divided into multiple phases, such as:

• Pre Phase
• Dice Phase
• Move Phase
• Action Phase
• Post Phase

Pre phase is resetting and initializing needed variables each round.

After the pre phase (which is handled within a single step), the dice phase randomly picks the number of steps you can move.

Now, after we got the number, we finally will be able to move the characters. Moving the characters is limited to an amount of steps (dice phase). During the Move Phase, you can move your characters and use items, such as the simple bomb.

Items are split into two groups: "active" and "passive". Active items will be shown in the inventory and can be used during the Move Phase, while passive ones will influence different values of the game.

The active items are not handled instantly, they get a sequence number and will be handled in the next phase, the Action Phase. If there are items placed (like a bomb), the action phase handles every item sequentially (by their sequence number). This way, the game provides a great variety regarding building your own strategy.

Lastly, the Post Phase checks some stuff and jumps to the Pre Phase.

So, what is planned:

• a bunch of items, characters and maps
• different game modes
• local multiplayer
• local singleplayer (with AI opponents)

Optional features:

• online multiplayer
• story mode
• boss battles

Technology

The game is running in Game Maker 2 in order to deploy the game to multiple platforms. Additionally, I really love working with Game Maker, because of its simple, yet powerful, UI and features. The software I use to draw the resources is Aesprite. Also, I am learning how to use Pyxel Edit to create awesome tilesets.

Regarding platforms, I want to cover at least Windows, Linux and Mac. Eventually, a mobile export will be done as well with slight modifications.

Currently, no music or sound is included in the game. In future, I will compose a few tracks in Cubase with a few external VSTs (depending on the genre). I'll keep you up to date as soon as I have a few tracks.

Creating sounds has never been one of my strengths, so I’ll have to buy a bundle or hire a composer. Eventually, I’ll try creating a few sounds on my own.

Key Features

New explosion animation

I changed the explosion quite a bit. Instead of blowing up the things in one way, I added a small delay to the single explosion.

Random starting player

If you start a game, the starting player is now randomly chosen. Should be a general thing... and this week I implemented it.

New character

Here we go with another character. I was thinking about a mouse, which reminded me a little bit of forests. Currently, I only did the "idle"-animation.

Thank you for reading!

If you have questions or any kind of feedback feel free to post a comment or contact me directly.