Welcome to the warlords remake

[piranha]

This our development blog for our remake of the classic warlords turn based game. I just got this forum up and some screenshots from the game in it current status.

Feel free to send any questions in the discussion forum.

Right now our aim is to have something playable in April, and a full game release in the summer 2010.

[SnotlinG]

Update:
For the last few days I have been focusing on the city functionality, for selecting what unit to produce, as well as the functionality for buying other units to the city.
The client side scripting is more or less complete. The design might still need some tweaks from Piranhas side though
After this I´ll start focusing on the server side, and the communication components.

[piranha]

Today I made graphics for temples, ruins, griffons, light and heavy cavalry. I think we have 60-70% of all units done now and 90% of the terrain.

[SnotlinG]

Continued work on the buy functionality. It is almost complete, it is now possible to choose unit to produce and buy new units.
There is a limit of max 4 units, after this the oldest unittype will be pushed out.

The server-side functions are now mostly done for this also. Including checks that the city is allowed to produce the selected kind of unit, and that the player can afford the new units he tries to buy. We cant trust the info from the client-side unfortunately, so everything needs to be doublechecked at serverside

Still need to make an extra verification at end turn/save game on client to see that all city-updates are synced to the serverside, and if not send them again.

[SnotlinG]

Worked the last few days on the produce unit functionality, and now it is working.
Its a bit more complicated than one might think, where you need to take into consideration if the square is already occupied by 8 armies etc...

[piranha]

I completed most of the hills terrain today. Still have road in hills left to do, and quite a lot of mountain terrain.

[SnotlinG]

The last few evenings I have been focusing a lot on the city functionality, so that we will be able to do the beta testing sometime soon

The latest updates is it is now possible to attack a city, and all the defenders in the city will be defending it at the same time. I.e. possibly up to 8x4=32 units! It will get crowded Maybe I can get a screenshot soon.
I have a few bugs still to solve though with empty cities, as well as the changing of ownership of the city after the battle etc... And possible options for destroying or plundering the city on capture.

After this I will focus on income/upkeep as this is closely connected to cities.

[piranha]

I created a catapult, unicorn, orc and archer yesterday.

I now have the following units left to do:

Archon
Heavy infatery
Demon
Worm
Dwarf
Pikemen
Elephant
Ghost
Elemental

And then there are some terrain details here and there to fix. But the graphics is not that far from completed.
I will start working on turn management now.
We have quite alot of ideas to make sure that the game does not stagnate when one player is losing and not making his turn in time.

[piranha]

I've added shields to show player order and current player today. I also made some changes to the account page to make it easier to know how many hours left of your turn you have.

Pikemen is aslo added in the game now, painted by a supporter .

We are going to go through battle calculations tonight.

[piranha]

I've been working on battles the last two days.
First we had a quite diffrent system than the orginal W2 DLX in mind, but now its going to be pretty close. with some exceptions.
We have added unit HP and its going to be used in such a way that if many lousy armies attack a good army and keep loosing they will slowly tear down the HP and kill units. This will ofcourse happend if good armies attack each other as well.

The idea is to make the low level units have more purpose late game than they do now.

The "dice" will still determine most battles, but the swarming stratergy might have a upswing.