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).

So now the mad rush to finish is over and I’ve caught up on lost sleep, here’s all my progress shots that I didn’t have time to write journal entries for.

Project setup, and boring game init / display init:

A tile map and a hardcoded bulldozer sprite:

I added bulldozer controls here, plus rocks to dig for resources:

Placing roads via the bulldozer:

Adding code and graphics to properly make road curves and junctions:

Added hard-coded buildings and cars, plus a hud for better feedback. I should probably have had a screenshot in between this and the previous one but I was on a roll.

Adding in proper building placement, city growth and car spawning:

Compared to previous LD48s I didn’t get much journal writing done during the competition, probably because I only had a single day so was much more focused than usual. Also the game was largely based on logic code (like getting the building placement and car AI correct) rather than lots of visible gameplay elements, so at times where I would normally have taken a picture I skipped it since it looked identical to before.

I’ve decided to leave my post-mortem ’till after judging had finished / nearly finished, so I can see if my list of things to improve matches what other people think.

Also, project source and images are here. It won’t compile as-is because I took the LWJGL and Slick libraries out to cut down the size, but you can browse through my spaghetti code and see how hideous it all is.

I made a post compo version, fixing the typo in my name and adding an easy mode.

Get it here.

If you are getting a blank white screen when you start my game (even if you used your intellect to then click on it and play the game anyway), your video card may be displeased with my non-power-of-two textures. No, I wasn’t just being SUPER minimalist! The version I have up at my site (sorry, it’s in an installer) fixes that, so it may work if you had visual problems before.

Get it here: stillpond_install.exe (1.9mb)

However, that’s also my post-compo edition. It has two new bonus game modes (they are hidden, search the title screen! Think of Strongbad!), but aside from those modes (and fixing the texture sizes) it is totally unchanged. So I think it’s fair for you to judge it for the contest, provided you ignore (or don’t find) the bonus modes.