You're one of the many scattered generals of the late Earth's forces. It seems that since the fall of a united government, diplomacy is a too dangerous chance to take, so what used to be a united army now turned into an interplanetary battle royal.
Everyone's fighting for their share of the remaining fossil fuels, capable of powering space travel. To survive, you have to gather what's left of it on the remaining planets in this solar system. Rally your troops, fight your way through their forces and grasp for the only thing you still care for in this doomed place.






rosareven put in quite well-understandable terms what's going on and what you have to do here:












You're looking at a strategy game that attempts things known to be quite difficult in game design: A casually approachable and at the same time very challenging play style, as well as relaxed and fun gameplay that is equally playable with a lot of tactical thinking and calculation.

Starting with a base camp that will take care of fuel gathering and unit production, you have to raise your mancount and try to clear the surface of the opponent's pesky units and their base.
The catch is that your units will consume the valueable fuel you're here for in the first place. Every time you accelerate, turn or produce units, you will need to blow some valueable fuel into the atmosphere. Heavier tanks will consume more fuel than light ones, but can take more damage. Your base is what you really need to protect, though, as you lose the game the second the enemy destroys it.

The key to scoring high is therefore to achieve a lot with little means and fewest units possible, as all your success will be measured by at the end of the day is how much fuel's still left on that planet you're trying to suck dry.




I'm finally done with this project... for now, as I might take it to an entire new level should I win the license.

Let me put some stats down at this point, though:

• I used 90 events in total (internal count used, meaning global and local variables included)
• I started working on this on the 5th of March
• about 20 hours have been put into interface and graphic design in total, not counting their functionality scripting in C2
• about 50 hours have been spent working in C2 - about 20 hours of that hasn't been cut again later on
• you will need about 10 minutes to play through this game against a friend
• I've taken one and a half days off to work on this throughout the month (half of that actually being used wisely)
• I'm so fucking glad I'm finally through

I definately didn't expect such a hassle with this project at all past the point of getting the circular gravity to work (which was about an hour of work). In the beginning, it went very smoothly, but I quickly stumbled upon problems when trying to seperate the units into two factions, or even getting the smoke particles right. About a week until completion, I encountered a project-breaking lack of functionality in C2 (according to my knowledge, of course) that made it impossible for me to get an AI into the game.
So, I was restructuring my work, thinking of how to rescue it, and multiplayer was the only thing that could possibly save me from starting an entirely new project. I was rebuilding large parts of the game to get it somewhere close to what I wanted, and to think that I only today (on the last contest day) started to implement a second unit is definately not worth a good rating on planning skills.
The interface was the hardest part, as I tried to get something done that wasn't copying any existant tactical or strategy games, and specifically rendered to my game's needs. I especially like the way the health display works, but overall, I think it's a pretty nice piece of work on this department. Took me about 30 events and two days of work alone for just the interface functionalities, by the way.
Hope you like the outcome somewhat, even though it's relatively thin. I would've loved to implement an artillery kind of unit that can fire over others, or a jet fighter that can fly over units. I'm sorry to disappoint your expectations already, as this isn't an in-depth strategy game or anything close to it... maybe you can still apprechiate the effort being put into it, and see where this could have gone when Scirra would've let me use families in the free version I would've had more possibilities.

Credits

The song you can hear throughout the game is 'Dictatorship' from Zodio's album 'Fuel' (fitting, isn't it) - make sure to check it out, as it has some very cool, chilled instrumentals in it that are worth listening to! Sound effects are shamelessly stolen from RMVX. Well, not as much stolen as used legally, but either way. The tank graphics are from a Nintendo Wars game I don't have the exact name of. They have been reworked, but not been created by me. Everything else, meaning graphics, interface design, coding/eventing, the game idea, and whatever else is completely my own work.

Special Thanks

Glitchfinder's name in the initial contest advertisement banner got me to actually join this... don't ask me why, but here I am Venetia, for spending way more time into turning this contest in the hbgames.org marketing machinery it is now. Aside from the fact that she got everyone on the right track, I feel she made an awesome grid girl! everyone who used some of their signature space to promote my game! Most of all, all those who pushed me in here and outside this topic to continue working on it, knowingly or not. That's pretty much everyone that posted here or wrote me via PM. Noone ever wasted a thought if I'm actually going to finish this, which is kind of nice... Thanks, and I hope I'm not letting anyone down

Damn it, BlueScope! You can't keep us waiting like this!

Screens soon? :D

I'll hook you guys up tomorrow... preparing the stuff right now ;)

K', so the first drop of info is up there... not quite screenshots yet, because I wanted to make sure what I put up here is representing, but you should be fed those very, very soon. I actually grew to like the idea myself more and more during developing it, and I already improved the underlaying concept that I thought of so much since I started working on it... I just want to make sure it hits public the right way ;)

I figured before I'll drop all the way to the bottom on the forum with my thread, let me finally feed you some visual impressions, even though they're in highly work in progress state.
I also updated the gameplay paragraph by a bunch of core functionalities, so you should have something to comment about... which you hopefully will, as every input could influence the final outcome right now.

That's sounding like a pretty good idea. I enjoy strategy and blowing things up in games :) Great to see some screen shots. Also great idea with the high score table, but how will you implement it? As far as I can gather there's no in built function for it and that you'll have to write code using ajax! Let me know if you figure out something simple, I'm pretty sure I'll be needing it in the future - luckily for my current entry high scores of others is of not too much importance :)

I've seen a few AJAX tutorials around for Construct, even specific for high-score tables. Either way, I'm a web designer by profession, so the AJAX handling shouldn't be the problem any more than getting used to Construct's object... but I didn't look into that at all yet.
I'm tinkering with submitting my game as an open project afterwards, so you'd be able to look into it anyway... but I'm not entirely sure there, depends on how done with it I get ;)

Bluescope this is a cool spin on some classic strategy action. I'm really looking forward to this, though that may be my inner strategy game nerd talking. These fingers have destroyed so many panzers in Steel Panthers II.

Heh... I just hope I can live up to your expectations ^^" But I'll definitely try my best :D
Thanks for the input.

Hey that's certainly generous of you. It'll be great to see how you did things and I'm bound to learn heaps - especially with the AJAX! (I should try to learn that some time since it sounds pretty handy). Fingers crossed in you getting it done then aye! :D

Thanks... it's definately one of those contest entries I'm hope seeing finished in the end And yes, yours is among those as well ;)

Wow, sorry I didn't get here earlier in the contest to post but your game project sounds incredible. I cant believe what you all accomplished so far with the free addition, very impressive BlueScope. I came here to see if you were stuck or anything since you helped me out with a great suggestion but I see your doing just fine. I'm looking forward to playing this masterpiece when it's finished. Keep up the great work :)

Heh, that's some pretty expectational words there... be assure it does drive me to work a bit harder than I already am, though... didn't think it would get this positive views all around, as I expected an RPG-originated community to be less impressed by strategy games. So yeah, I'll try to work it out until the limit ^^

And as you mentioned 'stuck': It's less that I'm stuck on how to do something, but more on how to do everything in order to have enough events left to do the rest. Right now, I have about 30 events plus globals, however I know I need to multiply a lot of those for new units (as sadly, families have been taken out of the free version for non-apparent reasons )

Thanks for the encouragement, though... be assured it helps me a lot just to know people are looking forward to it :)

Seem a great game, to reduce events you could remove all globals variables by creating an array that you set as global (if you share things with multiples layouts) then store all defaults values in it by index on start of the layout, this is tricky as you can't name values stored there, to solve this you could also create many arrays and name them like variables then use the first index to store the value.

Or you could just use a blank sprite and use the internals instances variables.

To remove some more events you also could use conditionals operators in expressions to set values; almost all conditions involving simple variables/values comparaisons can be replaced by this:

condition ? result_if_true : result_if_false

OMG that last trick is awesome. I briefly wished that it was possible in construct 2 and promptly discarded the thought. That can be used to save so many events.

@afgho: That's some great advice right there, however I know about both things before. I'm already excessively using the ?: operator, and because I'm tinkering with releasing the open project for people to look at, I don't want to go down the non-global-variable-path... of course, when I need a handful of events to finish the game and there's no other way, I'll get back to that...

While I still don't have too much new stuff to say about my game other than it's actually almost done (okay, does sound like progress... ), I'm pretty sure it's going to turn out better, more glorious and actually more finished than what I expected mid-way through.

I also got some news regarding the release of my uncompiled game. If you want to look into what I did, check out the "Grab the uncompiled game data!" spoiler in the first post!

This should be the post where I say that I'm almost done, ready to rock and just finishing everything. Instead, this is the post where I say that C2's restrictions might be fucking me up here, and I can't get the simplest AI to work... Maybe I'm wrong - in that case I'll figure it out in time - but maybe I'm not, which means you'll get a shitty, multiplayer-only version of the game. Or in other words, no version of the game whatsoever, because I won't throw bullshit into a contest of this class...

I dunno, I think I just want to vent here. I put too much time and effort into this to drop it now, so I'll do what I can, but... I'm feeling pretty damn down right now.

Is it because of the number of events used? I could help you on that.

Nothing to do with that... I might even end up with 50 events unused XD Nah, it's a lot of fiddling around with event conditions, but basically, the invert feature doesn't really work as intended (not to say it doesn't work on half the cases I tried to use it), and the lack of a "select instance of an object with instance variable X set to Y (that is closest to (select instance of an object with instance variable X set to Z))" condition that seems to be impossible to recreate is seriously blocking me off here... if anyone can help me out with that, I'd be most grateful ;)
And yeah, I'm still trying to avoid plugins... but maybe it can't be avoided...

In general, as soon as it gets a bit more complex with conditions, Construct seems to be the inferior choice. Maybe it's just me, but the ability to throw a line of code in as a trigger condition is really really missing imo...

Do you try to do that on the same object? You could use pick nearest if it is different objects.

Otherwise i guess the only way is to do it manually using distance function with pick all condition and such (altough i recall more easier solution on scirra forum)

So, aside from conforming the thread to Venetia's beauty ideals and updating the Credits accordingly ;), you can finally see a second screen of yours. Lots of background mechanics have been done in the meantime that I couldn't really show in screens, and even now there's only half of the interface you can look at (I will keep the unit construction menu to myself until I know what units you will be able to build in the end ;) ).

What you can see is the multi-purpose control display that serves as a hint on what you can do overall, which keyboard keys you have to press to trigger an action, as well as functioning as clickable and probably touchable (if I have the events left).
Other new elements are the unit's health indicators underneath them, as well as the current player turn being displayed underneath the fuel tank. There's also a less distracting background that you'll also find as the background of my thread (which you didn't notice yet because it's not distracting :p )

If you feel like it, give me input - but be fast :D

K, looks like this is my last update before the submission topic post, but there's finally a playable game in the first post... enjoy testing what I packed together there, and I'm definately glad for every input I get out of you - good or bad ^^

Very nice thread, BlueScope. I look forward to judging it :>

Not quite sure why that sounds threatening, but I'm glad I could win someone with simplicity ;)

And just out of curiosity... what did you need to edit in my submission thread post? It looks exactly how ai posted it...

I had edited it to ask you to please shorten your game's description. And then I saw that a couple of people had semi-longish descriptions, so I figured, ah, fuck it. I'll worry myself into the grave with trying to make people adhere to strict rules, lol :) (it's hard enough just getting people to submit forms the right way at all).
Already added it to the judge's forum so don't worry about it.

Aside from the fact that the widescreen format is too wide for my default setup (I've said it before, and I'll say it again, but I keep my browser on half my monitor), I couldn't get the controls working. The only thing that seemed to actually work was the escape button, and that didn't lead very far.

Glitch, that's not a valid crit ... If you're going to play a game, and it doesn't fill your window properly b/c you've scrunched your window weirdly in a totally atypical manner, and you can't be arsed to maximize the window, it's your fault, not BlueScope's :P


Anyway, BlueScope, I feel retarded here, but I have zero clue how to play this.
The game is beautiful and the music is amazing, but all I can seem to do is FUEL UP.
I really hope that I'm just doing something wrong here because it is too late to fix this bug (if it's a bug) and update it. Any submitted game HTML updates now = DQ.
Is there a key I need to press to create a unit? I tried mashing every key on my keyboard, but only [Esc] does anything.

It's a rotary strategy game. FUEL UP is kind of like "end turn". You click on the building thingy with the colour correspondent to your turn (blue or red) to build units, and you click on the created units to control them. The rest of the buttons are for the units: left or right to move around the planet, the bottom left button to shoot. I think a unit can only shoot once. As the units move, fuel is spent. Creating units cost fuel too, but ending your turn ("FUEL UP") will earn you a bit of fuel.