I've managed to knock my blog offline for a day or so while the nameservers update so I thought I might as well post a bit of what I've been doing on Free Company in this thread instead.

I've been cracking on, programming the basic set of UI widgets that a prospective player will use to equip his mercenaries and send them off on contracts. Eventually I intend to have the bit of the game 'between tactical battles' be a fully developed half or more of the game by itself; but right now it's just a thin wedge. I'm nearly done with the first pass on this 'overgame' section but it'll probably experience extensive tweaks and revisions before the Alpha version is released.

This is what the campaign shop looks like right now:

[img]http://www.myrespace.com/campaign_shop.png[/img]

Right now you buy everything from this mysterious generic vendor and temporarily store it in the company's group inventory. Once you're done buying and selling you can head over to the 'Edit Mercs' screen to equip individual mercenaries from the group store. And yes, I need to make a whole bunch more item icon graphics

Once you've hired, equipped, given nicknames to and generally fiddled with your team to your hearts content you can send them out on Contracts to earn more gold to pay their wages and buy further new shiny things.

It's a very simple little layer between battles but hopefully it's just enough to provide a bit of ongoing campaign context and start to provide that feeling of building and nurturing your team of medieval badasses.

Once I'm done here there is a giant bug/task list mostly concerning the tactical battles to plough through before I can move onto the playtesting/polishing/piling in more content cycle which will fill up the rest of the time until the game is just about good enough to get alpha testers in and pump out a new demo.

Sounds VERY promising, mate. Really looking forward to seeing this develop!

Looks cool
Id sure love to test when your ready

Thanks for the kind words fellas.

I've gone ahead and made one of these modern 'facebook pages' that all the kids are raving about so that anyone who wants to 'like' my indie game dev company can now do so to their hearts content.

Apparently if I manage to hit 25 likes I get some kind of exciting prize!*





*May not actually be a prize.

I've just hit 'like' mate!

*bump*

I've done a little bit of work on the game's lighting today that made screenshots come out a little better, at least in my opinion:

[img]http://www.myrespace.com/images/june_screen_2_small.png[/img]

Still lots to do, but you can now navigate through from the campaign screens into a battle and then once you're done fighting back out to the campaign screens again. Progress!

EDIT: Aaaaand another pair of shots showing different colour themes

[img]http://www.myrespace.com/images/june_screen_3.png[/img]

New screenshot, showing off a fresh tileset and some other changes like the now much improved shadows:

[img]http://www.myrespace.com/images/july_screen_4_small.png[/img]


Right now I'm working on improving the physics related code which should lead to a few visual improvements and some gameplay ones too.

I just saw this thread today... Is the game development still alive?

EDIT: Well... In any case... I found this bug where if two enemies stack over each other you can't attack them but they can still attack you. Screeny doesn't lie:
[img]http://i.imgur.com/lzcE0.jpg[/img]

I'm just trying to be helpful...

Hey!

Yes the development is still alive, just fairly lengthy for an indie game. That build you're playing there is a general test of my engine from early last year. I've been working on it on and off since then and actually only managed to fix that bug just last week

I'll definitely post here when I do a new playable version so you can compare and see how much it's changed.

The shots look real nice. I'm sure this game has the potential to really take off.

Interest piqued.

*saw X-Com in title*

*clicked*

sadfaic. I can't dl anything atm, but I WILL remember to check this out!