The Stinker

Hello and good evening everyone, It's way after midnight here, so I'll keep it short. I finished the second Orc hero, the "Stinker":

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different."
(Kurt Vonnegut)

And here is his first spell:

Upon impact the Stinker destroys itself, but leaves the enemies stunned and deeply hurt.

Ok, that's it, I need some sleep.

Thanks for reading, good night.

Help me a bit

Hey everyone!

I'd be very thankful if you could help me boost my ranking on indiedb by clickin on this little button: Thank you, have a good one ;)

Status report - 24.07.14

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

I've decided that from now on, I'll try to give a little status report everyday, containing what I did today, if I finished any milestones etc.

So for today:

1.) Increased performance

The morning was spent looking for potential places to save some drawcalls and/or memory. I was able to eliminate 4 drawcalls for a typical scene without any difference to the looks of the game. That does not look like much, but it produced roughly a 5% increase in frames per second, not bad, eh?

2.) Went through some music from Incompetech, found a few songs that could fit the game, but I haven't decided anything yet.

3.) Made a ToDo-List which can be found here. Some things are still missing, like audio, but other than that it has pretty much everything in it that needs to be done to finish the game.

Ok, that's it, thanks for reading,

have a good one.

Monetization - What I've got planned

Hey everyone,

Ok, after a refreshing 7 hour dose of sleep I'm back with another topic: Monetization!

Basicly, there are a few ways to monetize your game:

1.) Through Ads

Generally, ads are annoying, and nobody likes them. If they are annoying enough, most people will quit, and the rest will spends hard money to buy a premium version, or add free version of your game. A good example for this is the early "Angry Birds", before they came up with all the different IAP (see 2.)

2.) Through in app products that you CAN buy

Again, Angry Birds (at the current state) is a good example for this. Every level can be done without having to purchase anything, but in some cases, you just want to go the easy way, so you'll pay for some extra abilities to continue the game.

3.) Through in app products that you must buy aka "Pay to win"

Ah, the horror. I despise every developer that does this. Quite frankly, I'm pretty certain games like these aren't created by actual game developers but rather by accountants in disguise. One good example for this is the current "Family Guy" "game". Sorry, but if you have to pay not to wait for !24! hours after playing for about 3 minutes, something is wrong. That's not a game at all. That's like the uber-fast delivery service from amazon. What the fuck? Am I supposed to enjoy this? There are some cases where I think "Pay to win" could work, but not this way.

Ok, now here's what I want to do:

Every race has one starting hero, that can be played without paying anything. Also, they have one spell each that is included for free. However, to give you a wider variety of tactics, you can buy other heros. These won't be stronger than the first one per se, but they will give you the ability to change your tactics. The same goes for the spells. This way you'll be able to beat others without paying, but it also gives you the chance to change and adapt your style of play to beat players that you wouldn't have beaten before.

Also, since running server's is expensive, each online game will cost 1 diamond. If you win you can earn up to 3 diamonds back, depending on how devastating your victory was.

There'll be also some products that you don't really need, but you might like, like other skin sets for the gui.

You will be able to earn a decent amount of diamonds by playing the campaign, so there'll be no need to buy diamonds if you are good enough, or play long enough.

Does that sound fair? Give me your thoughts in the comment box or on twitter (@sensegames), I'm happy for every input!

Thanks for reading, have a good one1

Finally, a video ;)

Hello there =)

So, I won't count how often I promised a video, but I'm sure it was over a dozen times. Well, here you go:

Better late than never ;)

IndieDB

Hey there,

Just want to mention really quick that PocketCrusades is now on IndieDB!
Here you go: indiedb.com/games/pocketcrusades
Check it out =D


Thanks for stopping by!

Ambient Occlusion

Hi everyone again,

This is already my second post today, and it's close to midnight here, so I'll keep it short.
Paul Usul Fluegel who's creating DwarvenKingdoms gave me a hint on how to make the trees in PocketCrusades a bit more beautiful, and he was totally right, have a look:

Before - Without AO on the trees

After - With AO on the trees

I had Ambient Occlusion turned on in my light mapping at all times, however, I did not notice that the Unity Importer had "Generate Lightmap UV's" turned off for the tree models.

Well, now it's done, so thanks Paul.


Good night everyone!

Big news everyone

Hi everyone,

The last two weeks I've been on vacation in Croatia, and it was wonderful!
But still, I managed to work a bit every day on this project, and made huge
progress! Here's a list of what I've done:

• I finished the campaign menu, that's the final version now
• I made a tutorial - the first two levels of the campaign will teach you the basics of the game
• Parts of the shop system
• The first "real" level of the campaign
• The game over check of the game
• Refined the animations of the game
• Optimized huge parts of the game
• Tested it on several devices:
• Device                         FPS on High quality          FPS on Low quality
• Samsung Galaxy S4                    ~45                                    ~60
• Samsung Galaxy S2                    ~30                                    ~40
• Samsung Galaxy S                      ~25                                    ~35
• Refined the fighting of units
• Set the values (Gold, Food, etc. - These might still change a bit after alpha testing)
• Refined the hero
• A settings menu (sound, quality, etc)

Basicly, the game is playable, however, there are still a lot of things todo:

• Online PvP
• The rest of the shop system
• Music and SFX
• Optimize even more (I guess I can make it at least 30% faster)
• The human hero
• The fog of war is a bit buggy
• Same goes for the mini map

Since I do not have to study for the next 3 months, I'm pretty sure I can find the time to make a little video on all these changes. 

So, till then, have a nice summer day, and thanks for reading!