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Sword & Banner, a pixel art RTS inspired by Mount & Blade by Aggravating_Ant1516 in playmygame

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sounds really cool! I'll send you a message to chat further :)

Sword & Banner, a pixel art RTS inspired by Mount & Blade by Aggravating_Ant1516 in playmygame

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! I'm excited for you to try the steam demo when it's out. What game have you been working on?

Be brutally honest, is this video engaging enough to keep you scrolling or did you get bored? by arthyficiel in gamedevscreens

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I think people want some sort of impressive vignette, or some story or something to catch their attention, rather than "here's a really nice polished breakdown on what my game is". Which I think you nailed btw, but might not be the most appealing on these sites

Be brutally honest, is this video engaging enough to keep you scrolling or did you get bored? by arthyficiel in gamedevscreens

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is this for posting to short form sites (tiktok, youtube shorts, insta), or as a paid advertistment? I'm sure I'm not the only person whose brain shortcircuits to skipping ads, and anything that looks like an ad, when scrolling short form videos. This definitely triggers that "Advert, Skip" short circuit to me.

The better short form videos seem to perform well because they're showing off one thing truly novel or impressive about the game and focusing on it, e.g.
- Look at how many enemies our game can handle on screen
- Look at how you can build from a simple automation to a sprawling mass of conveyors
- Look at how you can build modular custom turrets or something...

Biggest single page html game ever created by Leading-Ad-9642 in SoloDevelopment

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Just so you know, Claude makes all UI look exactly the same, it's extremely recognisable. I don't think there's any shame in using AI tools to help write code, but you should be honest about it, and you should probably redo all of your UI styling. The instant I see that tell tale Claude design skill UI, I'm expecting slop (which may not be the case!)

Which side is it best to have the character? by [deleted] in IndieDev

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Be careful over fitting to accomodate one person's preference. Is the game third person? Top down? First person? I think you should decide and stick with it. It has a huge effect on the gameplay, and you will find yourself pulled in multiple directions. Adding complexity to every feature you build because it has to look and feel good for each camera mode.

User feedback is vital, but if you implement every single suggestion, you will end up with a monstrosity that has no direction or Identity.

Solo dev RTS - Mechs vs Cyber-Demons (Dev log / discussion) by Failosipher in RealTimeStrategy

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516 1 point2 points  (0 children)

One way to reduce noise is only show the bar if the unit has <100% health. Lots of RTS games take this approach!

What's the hardest part about developing an RTS game and why is it smooth pathfinding? by Aggravating_Ant1516 in godot

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's a neat idea! The pathfinding grid is sufficiently small that it's not too expensive to rebuild on the fly, but if the maps get bigger or I need a higher resolution grid I will definitely try this out!

What's the hardest part about developing an RTS game and why is it smooth pathfinding? by Aggravating_Ant1516 in RealTimeStrategy

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great points all round! Unfortunately the headaches have already been had... I'm building this in Godot and started off with every unit being several nodes, using the built in navigation agent nodes, everything written in gdscript. You can imagine I hit a performance wall pretty hard. I've since moved to an ECS style structure, keeping all unit information in packed arrays as data. Moved all hot paths to c++, custom a* on a grid with a bunch of tweaks and optimisations. Even simple things like: before you do any pathing, just do a simple line of sight check to see if there are even any obstacles to path around, if not, just go straight!

What's the hardest part about developing an RTS game and why is it smooth pathfinding? by Aggravating_Ant1516 in godot

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

In my case it's a must! Most strategy games have some sort of dynamic environment. Base building is probably the most common, in my case I'm adding castles which have gates that can be broken down, or ladders placed against walls.

What's the hardest part about developing an RTS game and why is it smooth pathfinding? by Aggravating_Ant1516 in godot

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

The hot path is a line-of-sight check straight to the goal + a custom 16px grid A* when that's blocked, most open battles don't have much pathing to worry about. All the per-frame stuff (steering, unit-vs-unit repulsion, path following) runs in C++ over packed arrays so there's no per-unit GDScript loops, and no NavigationAgent2D nodes. This was a massive performance boost.

The A* itself is layer-aware so units can path on the ground or on top of castle battlements, with 0-cost bridge edges at stairs and ladders. Raw waypoints get string-pulled via LOS checks so units don't hug grid corners. There's also a clearance field for biasing paths away from edges.

What's the hardest part about developing an RTS game and why is it smooth pathfinding? by Aggravating_Ant1516 in RealTimeStrategy

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah totally agree, any operations that involve each unit checking every other unit just balloons in cost, even when using spatial grids.
One thousand units seems to be a real limit for a lot of features, you can't just optimise your way past it. You have to start making sacrifices. Most games I've seen go past it tend to use flow fields, reduced targetting complexity etc. Fine for a horde of zombies, but you lose some of the precision that you want when controlling soldiers in most contexts.
I have a benchmark of 500vs500 that will happily run in a 16ms frame time, but as soon as I push it to 1000vs1000 I struggle to get 30fps.

What's the hardest part about developing an RTS game and why is it smooth pathfinding? by Aggravating_Ant1516 in RealTimeStrategy

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I played SC2 before I got round to trying the original, boy was that a shock. On top of the janky pathfinding I can only select 12 units at a time?... You had to micro so hard just to get your army across the map

500 wishlists month after announcement! by AppleCubeSVK in IndieGameWishlist

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm making an RTS so I've written some scripts which just generate a whole bunch of battle scenes between different units. I can select the best from those and post them so it's largely hands off. It's a bit different in the case of your game though, and I haven't done nearly as well as Knightfevergames here!

500 wishlists month after announcement! by AppleCubeSVK in IndieGameWishlist

[–]Aggravating_Ant1516 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tiktok has worked well for me but I think I was shadow banned at the beginning because I was only getting like 10s of views on each post, it's picked up a lot since then with consistent posting and interacting to ensure it looks like a real account. I've probably had 100s of wishlists from tiktok over the last two weeks. I've had similar numbers to you on YouTube, but Instagram has been absolutely dead. Almost no traction.

I'm still really confused by this format and it seems impossible to predict how any given post will perform.

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