Well, I’ve done a bit of work on a post-compo version of my game, adding blood splatters and improving the A.I. and the number of different armies you can fight such. I have quite a few other ideas for things I could do, although I don’t intend to implement all of them. A few ideas include:

A limited number of people in your village, that increases as new people are born or join you from the outside. These people could be assigned to operate the buildings that you build (also everything would be rebalanced, then). You would also need one house per person (or maybe family? I dunno…).

During battles, your men would be knocked out, when they run out of hp, instead of being outright killed. The A.I. (or you) could ‘stabilize’ knocked out men, which means that they would survive the battle instead of dying. If one of your men isn’t stabilized in time, then they’d die. Obviously this would rely on the previous point being implemented, otherwise it would be pointless.

Exp/Levels/Skills for your main character, allowing things like a cap on the number of men that you can take to battle with you (Leadership skill), along with other things.

Removing your character from the battles (possibly… although this idea could also function while leaving your character in the battle. I really don’t know.) I’m thinking of implementing a very limited real time strategy interface, that would work like so: Your army has a specific number of ‘officers’ (which might also be able to get exp and upgrade, though that seems a bit excessive as far as scope goes). Probably 5 max, I think. Your soldiers are automatically divied up between your officers. You can select officers and give one of two commands: Move here and hold this position (self-explanatory), Attack at will (the officer follows the normal A.I. to move towards and try and attack an enemy). An officer’s men would automatically try and stay within a certain distance of his commander, attacking enemies that get within a certain distance. If these changes were implemented, it’s likely that the pace of the game would be slowed down a bit, and the playing fields made a bit larger, so that it’s not too frantic. Of course, that’s not certain.

Greatly enhanced village management: Require food for your people to survive over time, ability to make equipment, using several types of resources, which lets you make different kinds of characters to take to battle (spearmen, axemen, ranged — javelins or throwing knives or bows, perhaps even black-powder style guns.

Mission structure — A basic storyline and set of missions (which would probably all end up being arena battles, but with new styles of terrain, instead of just the highway). This would be complimented by randomly generated sets of side-missions so that you can level-build if you want to. Major missions would possibly also provide special equipment to make special soldier types (military rifles, grenades…?) The special types would run out of ammo eventually (perhaps you can only use them once…), so they’d be best used against ‘boss’ type battles. 

3/4 Overhead art – To make it easier to figure out who is who, and to just make it look prettier.

U.I. ‘Improvements’ – Improvements might be an overstatement, because right now there is none, during the battles. But I think that some information about what’s going on would probably be helpful.

Those are all the ideas I have so far — obviously I won’t implement all of them, but I’d appreciate it if the people that played and liked my game could suggest which of the improvements they’d like to see most. If you read this post before you review my game, maybe you could also suggest there which of the improvements you might like to see (or mention others).

johann.pauw.ca/HighwaymenLD13.zip

Edit — switch to a different server so I’m not piggy backing off OrangyTang anymore.

My server is a bit messed up right now, so OrangyTang offered to host my entry until I get it up and running (sometime tomorrow). I’ll change the link tomorrow when my server is back up.

My original scope had several story elements that would have incorporated the theme a whole lot more than ‘just fighting on a road’, but as time went on (and I played more and more l4d), I pared the scope back a lot. Now the theme connection is pretty damn light…

I’ll write up my thoughts sometime, and I’m compiling my timelapse right now.

Edit to add timelapse:

Gilvado\’s LD 13 Timelapse

Edit to add screenshot:

Well, apparently I didn’t have nearly as much in me this time as last, I’ve been procrastinating a whole lot. I have most of all the boilerplate stuff done, and a playfield, but no movement, collisions, A.I., or upgrade system. So essentially no game. Might push it really hard into the night tonight to try and get all the gameplay functioning before tomorrow. Screeny of a basic map: