I'm playing around with some C++ programming, and thought it'd be fun to make a (small) turn based strategy game. So far I've got a basic tile engine working, along with a couple of example tiles.

Here's a screenshot of tonight's efforts:

If anybody feels like doing some artwork for free, let me know! So far I've just done a couple of basic placeholder tiles, as you can see in the screenshot. One's just of some ground, and the other a palm tree.

You can also see a red tile in the pic - the tiles are highlighted as you pass your mouse cursor over them. That's all there is to it at the moment, but I plan to add units that can move around and the like very soon. I don't know what I'm going to do as far as the game mechanics go though, so I'm open to suggestions.

Oh, I'm happy to put a link up for people to download the game and have a play around - I'd keep it up to date as well.

I have always wanted to work on a strategy game, but I have no talent for programming or art design, lol.

If you need help with a soundtrack/ game design/ plotting/ writing, I would love to help - shoot me an email waltzit@gmail.com

Haha, I think it's pretty clear from that screenshot that I don't, either!

Thanks for the offer - I dare say I'll take you up on it. I just want to grind out some more of the basic programming stuff, after which I'll get around to some more of the fun stuff!

[quote=Wheels2050]

[/qoute]
YELLOW PALM TREE VS. INVISIBLE-RED-GUY, more about it at eleven.

Seriously answering, I know zilch about coding and have no degree of any kind, I could probably bend a nice tale, design some enemies, characters, maybe design a combat system, but beyond the creative process, if that, I doubt I could do anything.

Haha thanks Void! As I said above, once I've laid a bit more groundwork on the actual coding side I'll start getting some input from the NL community on fun stuff!

I spent last night cleaning up my code and making it a proper 'game'. I had started yesterday thinking it'd be nice to get a couple of tiles on screen that lined up correctly etc., so I did a fairly sloppy bit of programming to make that happen. As is often the case, that grew into a more fully-fledged tile engine, but was too unwieldy for a game. As a result, I've tidied up the code, put stuff away in functions where it belongs and I now have something I can more easily expand.

You can't really tell that's the case as a player, but it really does make a difference from the coding side of things!

Oh, also, for those people who play a lot of TBS games - how important is elevation? Is the gameplay improved by the battlefield offering different elevations? Currently I'm planning on implementing impassable/LOS blocking terrain, but I'm also wondering if I should allow for high ground as well.

It's easier to implement something like that now than down the track, is all.

When I saw my TBS game first thing I thought was please not another Tyler Perry project lol

What are you making this with?
I'm not sure elevation would work properly. It might be confusing.

Just C++, using the SDL library (and some extensions, such as SDL_image) to handle input, sounds and graphics.

Yeah, I thought that might be the case with elevation. I could try some graphical tricks such as shadows to attempt to imply elevation. I'll look at what some other games do.

Need help writing the plot/characters/etc?

I could definitely help.

The
Bull
S....
Game
jk
serious im not a fan of srpg i do love devil surrviour though

Huh, is that easy to use? I'm trying out Visual Studios and it's extremely confusing.

It really depends on how strategic you want to make your game.

In the real world, elevation is of critical strategic importance. The guy standing on the higher elevation is substantially more likely to win.

A lot of games do away with it, though, because it's not the most accessible mechanic to work with.

OK, a quick update.

It's a bit hard to tell, but I didn't have the dimensions right on my original tiles so they fit together in a slightly strange way. I've edited the tiles, and they fit together fantastically now. It means that they appear to be 'flatter' (i.e. the elevation of the viewpoint is lower), which I don't mind too much - what do you all think? I don't know how else to draw them, to be honest.

Also, I added a few extra tiles just for testing:

I read in tiles from a spritesheet I made. It's a bunch of blank tiles that can be filled in as I go. In addition, there's a header that contains a small description of the tile for identification purposed:

Apart from that not much has changed, but at least I haven't broken anything along the way!

@GuardianKing: Thanks, as I sad above I'll definitely be looking for help soon!

@mieu-fire: Not the TBS I was going for...

@EmpireIndustries: Well, it's just C++. SDL is a decent library, it's fairly powerful but isn't quite as object-oriented as I like my C++ to be

Just in case you're not aware, Visual Studio is just what's called an integrated development environment (IDE) which is different to a language - an IDE usually includes a text editor, compiler, debugger and a bunch of other things to facilitate writing programs, but it's not a language. Visual Studio can be used with a bunch of different languages. I'm using another IDE called Code::Blocks, but I do my programming in Linux simply using a text editor and command-line compiler.

I wouldn't say C++ is 'easy', as such - it's a nice language to program in, but there is quite a big learning curve. As one can't make graphical programs with the basic C++ library, I use SDL that does all of the graphics, input, sound and window management (there are other, similar libraries around such as Allegro and SFML). I'm self-taught (I need it for work) so it may be easier if one was to do it in a structured course. I do enjoy it, though, which helps things.

@OlympicCho: Hmm, I might give elevation a miss then. This will be my first game, so I don't want to get TOO complicated. It's entirely feasible to include tile-based status changes, though, which could introduce extra strategic elements (much like elevation might).

EDIT: OK, I figured out how to do an 'intermediate' projection for the tiles. Here are the 3 options. The left-most is the new intermediate projection, the center the one I have now, and the one on the right the projection I had to begin with. What do you all prefer?

Ah, ok. That makes more sense now. Sound and graphics management sound nice, as I can't quite see how those are done just yet. I've only just started programming.
I prefer the third view. The other seem too narrow. It looks hard to see depth if its so flat. I find the example above confusing to look at, honestly. Its like some kind of optical illusion.

Thanks for the feedback - I'm now thinking I might move away from the new perspective, as I also think it might be too flat. I'll sleep on it though!

Good luck with the programming. Which language are you learning? If it's C++, I'm happy to help out if you have questions/problems (although I'm far from an expert). I'm afraid I won't be of much use otherwise, though.

EDIT: I'm going to keep tabs on my progress in this thread, too. My next task is to code up some basic menus for the game. They won't be too flash, for the time being - it's easy to concentrate on peripheral stuff like that and lose sight of the big picture - but will hopefully be fairly robust. I'm coding the menus (as well as a bunch of other stuff) up in my own game library with the goal of being able to reuse them in other projects, which should help me avoid rewriting large chunks of similar code every time I want to write a new game.

I can draw characters for you on paper (that's about all I can do) also don't know if you would mind anime style. I can also come up with a story for your game since people say I'm good at that.

This looks like it's fun make. Good luck with it.

You don't really need to add elevation to this kind of game, isometric graphics + various levels = headache for the player and the programmer so, unless you really want to implement it, feel free to ignore that aspect.

I don't think you need to add differences for elevation or elevation, a large part of it I feel hinges on what kind of world you want to set it in, and what weapons will be used, I mean, if space ships are firing on a guy, his elevation won't make a difference, but if it's medieval and you got archers raining arrows onto some other units, it would make a pretty big difference.

I'm just trying out Visual Basic for now, but I'm considering eventually learning C# or C++.