Real Time or Turn Based?
about 8 years ago – Sat, Mar 26, 2016 at 12:26:19 AM

Hello y'all!

Thanks for all the great feedback we received from the Battle Demo! Everyone seemed to enjoy it and your comments so far have already been really helpful.  If you haven't played through it yet please go try it out and tell us what you think.

Currently we are really focusing on finishing up the final art assets for the game. We have completed tons of NPC portraits, ship components, buildings for the game's towns, battle backgrounds, UI artwork, cut scenes graphics, and so much more. There's still some work that remains, but we are getting close to wrapping up the graphical assets for Age of Grit. Down the road there will probably be some random, unanticipated stuff we'll still need to take care of, but we should finish up the core artwork in the not too distant future. This is a huge milestone and we're really excited to get there.

One thing we have been toying around with is the idea of transitioning the turn based battle mechanics to a real time system. We wanted to run this idea by everyone and see what your thoughts are. 

A real time system would be more fast paced and energetic. Things would move more quickly and reaction time would become more of a factor.  We wouldn't speed things up too much--players would still have plenty of time to think things through and plan each action.  But with a bit of time pressure combat might be more fun and engaging for players. An airship's engines would also become more dynamic and interesting. Different engines would generate different amounts of steam points at different intervals of time.  Each engine would cater to a certain play style and strategy. 

On the other hand using a turn based system gives players all the time they want to carefully plot out their next decision. A turn based system would be more slow but might feel more methodical and strategic. 

From a programming standpoint it would be fairly simple to make the transition. We wouldn't need to reinvent the whole combat system--a few minor tweaks would do the trick. But we want to hear from you! Tell us what you think and why! What is your vote: turn based or real time? 

And as always, thanks for all the support!

Battle Demo - Mac and Linux Versions Working Now
about 8 years ago – Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 03:51:32 PM

Hello everyone!  Mac and Linux users were having issues running the demo we posted yesterday. We are very sorry for the problem and we're grateful for everyone's patience! The issue is now resolved and the Battle Demo should run properly on both Mac and Linux platforms. You'll just need redownload the files, unzip, and run the game.

The same links from yesterday will now lead to the updated versions.  For your convenience here are they again: 
Age of Grit Battle Demo - Mac
Age of Grit Battle Demo - Linux
Age of Grit Battle Demo - PC (The PC version was unaffected--no need to redownload anything if you're on PC.) 

Things should work fine now, but if you run into further problems please let us know at [email protected]. Again, we apologize for this issue and thank everyone for being so patient and understanding.

A big thanks goes out to backer Flesk who helped us test things out on Linux.

Yipeekaiyaiyippeeyay!!! Battle Demo ready for play!!!
about 8 years ago – Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 10:35:52 PM

Boy howdy am I excited!!!

The first reason--I have a daughter! As you can see from the picture, she is a 1-up mushroom with a bow. Our adorable little baby was born just a few weeks ago--both she and her mother are very happy and healthy. We are ecstatic, but as you can imagine the wee one was kept us pretty busy--I've become very good at holding a sleeping baby while typing code at my desk.

The other reason I'm so excited: the much anticipated Age of Grit Battle Demo has arrived!!!  It's certainly been a heck dang ton of work but now Age of Grit is the proud owner of a fully armed and operational battle system.  This is an absolutely huge milestone for the project!  It's a massive part of the game we can check off the list.

We originally planned on doing a single web build for the demo, but unfortunately Unity's web player is being depreciated by most major browsers. So instead we have three different builds--one for PC, one for Linux, and one for Mac.  Follow the link for your platform below, unzip the folder, and dive right in.  There are four battles for you can check out--see if you can beat all four!

Age of Grit Battle Demo - PC
Age of Grit Battle Demo - Mac
Age of Grit Battle Demo - Linux

The two purposes of the demo are 1) to give you guys a taste of the game and how combat will work, and 2) for us to get some glimmering pearls of priceless feedback. We'd really appreciate all the constructive criticism you can possibly critically construct.  Let us know what you like and what you don't like. Share with use any ideas you have on how we can improve things. For brief general feedback just post on over on the main comment section of the Kickstarter! For more detailed suggestions email us at [email protected]. It's difficult to build anything creative in a vacuum--we desperately need your comments, positive or negative.

There's still a few issues and we'll certainly make some tweaks and adjustments--especially after getting some valuable feedback from our beloved play testers (that's you). And again, this isn't representative of the full game but rather a demo of just the game's battle system. It's a big slice of the pizza but by itself it's not the whole pie. The rest of the game--traveling across the game world, visiting towns, talking with NPCs, upgrading your ship--all that stuff is well underway but still needs time and love and won't be a part of this demo.

If you have any trouble downloading or running the build please contact us at [email protected] and we will help you out right away.

And when you're done playing through the demo, if you're in the mood for some cowboy video game goodness there's currently a Humble Bundle that includes Call of Juarer: Gunslinger.  For as little as $1 you pick up what I thought was a really fun and well crafted cowboy shooter--along with a bunch of other games too.  I had a blast playing through it, it really captures a great fun cowboy feel.  Crazy good deal if you ask me!

A huge thanks to everyone for all your help and support!!!

Quick Update
over 8 years ago – Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 08:15:48 PM

Just a really quick update. First off, a big thanks for all the feedback on our last post. It seems like we have a wide range of platforms out there and with that in mind I think the best way to go forward is to do a web build for the battle demo. That way anyone can play it with any browser, regardless of what system they're running.  This'll also make it easier to share the build around the web--which we very much encourage!  Everyone can play one unified version of the game and we target all platforms at once.  Of course the actual beta and final version of Age of Grit will be built and optimized for each specific platform--PC, Mac, Linux, and eventually iOS and Android.

With that decision made we now just need to work out a few small bugs and put a UI wrapper around the whole thing--a menu where you can select from various battles. At that point we'll upload it all to our website and send it out to you fine backers!  We also need to figure out a good way to handle your feedback in an organized way. Of course you could just email us whatever comments you have, but it would be nice to have a good system for logging bugs, feature requests, and other such feedback. We're look at a few options and we'll see what ends up working best.  

Thanks to all for your support!

A New Member of the Team!
over 8 years ago – Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:25:32 PM

A New Member of the Team!

First I wanted to announce the newest member of our team:

My wife, Kay, is pregnant with a wonderful baby girl!  Her due date is January 3rd. We are both extremely happy and excited!  We'll keep you posted and let you know when the baby's born.  As for a name we are thinking of either Leia or Amidalla--what do you think?

With the baby on the way my wife and I have decided to move a bit closer to family, basically to the other side of the Phoenix.  The city is pretty sprawling so it's actually a couple hours from our current area.  With all the baby stuff, moving all our crap (why do I own so many NES zappers!!!), finding a new place, and working on AOG I've been pretty dang busy as of late. But regardless we've made a lot of progress on Age of Grit. A big thanks to the rest of the team who have really stepped up and helped out during this busy time for me.

The Battle Demo

We are putting some final polish on things, but the battle demo is just about ready for the searing light of day. It's a little scary to show it to the world but we're confident you'll have fun with it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant--it's time to demo what we have (at least as far as the battle mechanics go) so we can start getting constructive input dumped on our heads. We could have sent it out a while ago but I really wanted to reach a certain level of quality before doing so. It's not all that helpful if we send out a buggy build with no sound and only half the animations working. It wouldn't be all that fun for players and the all feedback would probably just point out bugs and problems we already have in our to do queue.

At this point it's still not perfect but it's playable and overall I think it's looking pretty good. All the under the hood programming stuff is working well, attack animations are looking nice, sound effects and music are in place, the system that builds the modular ships in the game is working well, and we now have several strategically unique battles you'll be able to test out. 

It will be very helpful to know what platform everyone is using. If you're interested in playing the combat demo please take a second comment on this update and tell us what platform you're using--either PC, Mac, or Linux. Sorry, no iOS or Android at this point. This will really help us know how we can best distribute this thing and get it in all of your hands.

Balance

Getting everything balanced properly has proven to be a monumental task.  You'll be able to help us out as you play test the demo and provide feedback.  If combat is too easy and there's not much strategy required and the gameplay won't be fun or engaging.  If a cat batting at your keyboard can win every battle then perhaps the level of mental stimulation will be lacking.  On the other hand if combat's too difficult--if all your weapons are effectively rubber band guns--then you'll lose regardless of your strategical genius.  It will be hard but not necessarily fair.  It needs to be challenging enough that poor strategy will typically result in defeat, and yet good strategy will typically result in victory.  It's a tough needle to thread but the game's success absolutely depends on it.

Part of the struggle for balance results from the sheer volume of unique ship upgrades. There's a lot of different ship components in the game--tons of different weapons, sensors, engines, armor, and other upgrades available to the player as well as enemy ships.  Each needs to have unique strengths, all of which need to be balanced with unique liabilities and weaknesses.  No one components can be the best at everything, yet every components should excel in it's specific niche.  Furthermore, as the player progresses throughout the game upgrades will naturally become increasingly powerful.  Ship components need to be balanced with other components of a similar "power level" and then gradually increase in power as the component's level increases.  This adds another dimension in our quest for challenging, engaging, and balanced gameplay. 

Ultimately it's all a fun but very complex puzzle to solve.  I think we've done well, but with hundreds and hundreds of unique components there's still more work left to do! Again, this is where your play testing and subsequent feedback will help us the most. We hope you'll be forthcoming with your feedback and suggestions with this demo as well as with future test builds of the game.  We don't have the budget to hire a big team of play testers--to properly balance the game we'll need your help.  Having hundreds of players play testing the demo will help us see which components are overpowered, which are underpowered, and which strategies players prefer.

Other Sequences

The battle sequence is just one part of the game. There's also the town sequence, the dialog system, the questing system, the travel sequence, and the inventory screen. We have various programmers and artists working on these areas of the game and we've made some really good progress.  Now that the combat system is pretty solid our next major task is combining all the various sequences together into one cohesive game. This will be a major job for sure--all the different parts of the game need to play nicely together.

Thanks to everyone for all your support and patience! We are doing our best to move quickly as possible and yet make the best game we possible can.

Just wanted to give a quick shout out to friends of iqSoup and their Kickstarter for The Dragon's Hoard--some cool 3d printed dice for you tabletop gamers out there.  Check them out and show them some love!