Physical rewards are on their way!
over 2 years ago – Tue, Sep 26, 2023 at 09:14:22 PM

Headline says it all! Carpenter flew up last week & we gathered up some friends and had a packing party for the 2000-odd letters and parcels we had to ship out. I'm so happy that we were able deliver these on-schedule. We're doing great.

Notes:

Coin tiers ($96+): you should have gotten email with your tracking number.

Sticker tiers ($36 tier): I think tracking emails might have also been emailed out for Veterans  but with an invalid "n/a" as the number; we don't get tracking numbers for small postcard-sized envelopes, but they're on their way to you nonetheless.

Grunts ($10 tier): It ended up being easier for us to just send you all the stickers than individually parse out which one you chose. Enjoy the extras, merry christmas.

Late-comers: There's a handful of people who filled out the survey just too late for the lock-address cutoff. I'm going to start batching these and sending them out (hopefully) weekly until they stop trickling in.* If you filled out your survey just last week and didn't get a tracking email, this may be why. Message me if you're unsure.

Finally, if your package shows up missing anything or it's been like a month and you still don't have it, please message me so we can replace it! Although we did our best, percentage-wise we're bound to have missed a few & some are bound to not make it. I have a healthy buffer of replacements waiting, so just let me know!

Here's a picture of everything you should get, with/without a coin and with a variable number of stickers depending on your tier. As previously mentioned, I re-printed the IPS-N stickers because I picked the wrong material the first time around. Looking at them all in totality, the original glossy one would have been totally fine, but what's done is done and I need to get them off my hands so y'all get both.

* this is a joke. surveys will never stop trickling in. the record-holder from my last campaign filled out their survey six years after the campaign was over.

Progress gifs + rewards update
over 2 years ago – Mon, Sep 18, 2023 at 07:42:13 AM

Last call to fill out surveys!

We'll be packing up rewards this coming week and plan on shipping them by the end of the month! Addresses will be locked this week, so if you've moved or are reading this and somehow have still not filled out your backerkit survey (260 folks as of the time of writing) now is the time to fill it out. If you've lost or never saw your link, you can find it again here.

Generic progress report go!

OK I know I said this month would be slower because I'd be traveling and taking some time off and I swear I did (thought I had to cancel going to Ireland because of a Covid scare) but still found time to add... actually quite a lot of stuff. I mostly focused on adding features to the battle engine.

(it should go without saying: since we've been mostly focusing on the engine and UI design, all these graphics are still only a step past being placeholders)

Line of sight: I was able to re-use a lot of code from the demo, which itself borrowed this algorithm from the rougelike community. I spent a weekend trying to optimize it enough to use in gdscript instead of c#, but it ended up being too slow. To calculate for an entire map, the gdscript version took around ~25 seconds to run as opposed to the ~2 seconds in C#. This means that there's not going to be another web version of the game until Godot 4 is able to export C# code to html5 — which I've seen a few mentions that it's being worked on so a browser demo remains possibly possible eventually.

Pathfinding: Godot's built-in A* algo is not set up to have multiple possible movement costs to enter the same tile (such as the difference between climbing a cliff and stepping there from the same elevation) so I had to come up with a sorta-weird hack where I stacked a bunch of pathfinding nodes at the same tile; one for every possible movement cost that could enter that tile. It now is smart enough to use ramps and step up cliffs gradually using shorter climbable objects as stepping stones.

Attack animations: Although we haven't been focusing on the fancy graphical juice of the game, I still needed to set up the structures that would contain the animation data. Not much to say here besides we've done so and will probably flesh it out more once we start focusing on game feel.

Destructible terrain: terrain tiles now can transform into another specified tile when they are damaged (half health) or destroyed. I also added support for multi-tile terrain objects (like large rocks) that share a single health pool.

Enemy AI: I've added a draft of a controller that gets the enemy to run around and use their weapons. I've tried to make it a little more robust than the version in the demo where they just run at you until they're in range and then shoot, but of course this means there's now more room for strange behaviors. For instance, some of them are currently doing a weird little dance before and after they shoot.

Weapon profiles: it's a very strange experience playing Baldur's Gate 3 while working on a video game adaptation of a different TTRPG. I feel like I have a little peek behind the curtain having dealt with many of the same challenges inherent in doing so. One such challenge is how to wrangle the many, many actions available to a character and deal with those actions contextually becoming available and unavailable.

For example, in BG3, when you cast the Hex spell on someone, you become able to re-apply that Hex to a different enemy without spending another spell slot. One way to approach this would be to give some kind of discount on the Hex action so using it again doesn't cost a slot —  but what they've done instead is a far more flexible, modular, and stateless solution: they simply make an entirely separate second version of the action which does not cost a spell slot show up in your action bar. Having abilities be able to just in general hide and show various versions of  actions means you can use that same system for weapon profiles, charged and uncharged modes, and temporary bonus actions like  the re-application of hexes.

So we've copied this for LT. Here's the Drake's assault cannon, which  has two modes: regular and spinning. Using the "spin up" action hides  itself and the regular attack, then shows the spinning and "spin down"  actions. This is also a glimpse at the direction Mark has been going for  the player interface — we're taking some more pages out of BG3's book  and making an icon-and-tooltip-rich action bar instead of the demo's  nested radial menu system which was stylish but we think would end up  being too impractical.

Contextual actions: Sometimes you need to take an  action that comes from your environment instead of from your own  abilities. Since we've done a good job keeping the code for the actions stateless (they don't know anything about where they are or who they belong to  beyond what we tell them when they're activated) it was just a matter of  asking a unit's neighbors if they have any actions they'd like to  share. Here's an example of that in action: a restock drone giving an  adjacent ally an action to consume the drone.

Finally, I don't have a good gif for it, but I expanded the  Buff/ongoing status condition system to have the ability to run custom  snippets of code in reaction to events, just like legit Reactions do.  This will give us the ability to do strange one-off things like handle the Witch's Chain ability that monitors how far the unit it is applied  to moves and do nasty stuff when triggered.

Next month we're planning be shifting away from the battle engine  somewhat and working on more character sheet + pilot portrait maker  stuff.

Shipping in one month! Please update your address if necessary.
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Aug 30, 2023 at 04:15:24 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Event system, aka, how to handle nested "you've activated my trap card" triggers
almost 3 years ago – Sun, Aug 06, 2023 at 05:43:04 PM

I'd like to take some time this month to talk about how we're  handling the extreme levels of actions / reactions / counter-reactions  in the Lancer system. To summarize the problem that we need to handle,  playing a round can sometimes go like this:

Weapons and systems that respond to triggers and have a wide variety of effects, which can then themselves be reacted to, and so on. Most of the time these reactions can be resolved sometime after the thing they're reacting to, but sometimes they come first and can cancel the original event (e.g. Vlad's spike damage destroying its attacker before the attack resolves).

In tabletop play, there are some loose guidelines for how to handle the order of resolution, but a lot of the time they boil down to GM or player arbitration. In making a computer adaptation of the system, we gotta come up with a more mechanistic system that can handle the worst case scenarios. For reference, the comprehensive rules that dictate the similarly-reaction-nested game of Magic the Gathering weigh in just under 200 pages long. It's not an easy problem, is what I'm saying.

Let's start off with a simple case. Here's a Tokugawa and a Berserker duking it out.

The Toku uses a charged blade to hit the Berserker, which triggers its Aggression trait and it hits right back. Assuming everything hits, here's how the event tree would end up looking in Lancer Tactics:

Nice and linear. Easy peezy. We can resolve them all in a row, one after the other.

Let's throw something extra in — say that the damage on the Toku was enough to structure it, giving the player an opportunity to brace*. If they decide to brace, they'll lose most of their next turn. Now, before the damage event can resolve, we have to go and resolve this side-branch of deciding whether or not to brace.

The brace trigger happens because it's listening for damage events going off on the Toku and will check if those would be enough to structure it, so it inserts itself and pauses the damage event until the player makes a decision. If they decide that they don't feel like structuring today, it'll put temporary buff on the unit to get resistance to the next instance of damage. Once the damage event resumes, that buff will be factored into the calculation of how much damage actually gets through.

You might ask why we're breaking up the attack into so many steps (activate, attack, damage); the short answer is "to let various abilities detect and trigger from them individually", but there's some more insidious edge cases doing so hedges out. Let's now take a look at how the system handles multiple targets.

This Bombard is makeING an area-of-effect attack that'll catch multiple players. The attacks and damage resolves on both the Mourning Cloak and the Vlad before the MC's Expose Singularity kicks in and it teleports away.

Why is it important that we resolve all the attacks and damage before doing triggers like the teleport? Well, if the Bombard was closer to the players, like this:

The explosion would trigger the Vlad's Shrike Armor and do 1 damage to the Bombard before the attacks resolve. If that was enough to destroy the Bombard, the whole attack would be cancelled — including the one on the Mourning Cloak! We'd be in a bad spot if we'd already applied the damage and subsequent movement!

So instead, we queue up all the attacks to be resolved breadth-first and resolve any before-resolution triggers from any of them, like the Vlad's Shrike Armor.

In general, this system has events follow this pattern:

• queue and then resolve all interrupting reactions that happen pre-block (Shrike Armor, Overwatch)
• check to see if we're still valid, abort if not (did the Shrike Armor destroy us?)
• do the thing (move/stabilize/boost)
• queue any events that come from this event, to be resolved either depth-first (being Structured) or breadth-first (all the attacks within our AOE)
• queue any followup reactions (Aggression, Expose Singularity)

* we're currently planning on changing the Brace trigger from any damage to only when you'd be structured — a slight modification to the rules, but one that'll prevent a "Brace?" prompt from showing up every time you get hit. That's 95% of the time when I've seen people brace, anyway.

Status Update

So how's the game looking? Since the last update, we've:

• Worked our way about 70% of the way through the mission editor tasks, including trigger and dialogue editors. The biggest remaining tasks within it is the pilot editor and managing reinforcement groups. (not counting the actual tile painting, which is still being done in Tiled until things become more solid)

• We've added the VERY basic skeleton of turn/round management and player movement; when we hit "playtest" in the editor, we can now actually tell our lil robots to move around.

• And finally, we put in the full order for the coins! 1.5 inch diameter (to make the Lich more legible as a spooky guy) and now in silver. No more-detailed ETA on shipping yet, but we're still on track for before the end of this year.

The next month or two will be slow going development-wise as I'll be taking a vacation in Ireland to touch some rocks. I love working on the game itself, but the associated project management is taking a toll on my brain so this'll hopefully be well-timed. We built in plenty of buffer time for a reason.

Hope you had a good weekend!

 🌺 Olive

Production schedule // mission editor first look // reward updates
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jul 07, 2023 at 10:04:11 AM

Production schedule

I've gotten a few questions/heard some confusion about when we're delivering what, so I think a picture to point to is in order. This is a living document (compiled from—you guessed it—another spreadsheet) and is subject to change if we need to push a date because things always take longer than you expect, but I think is a pretty good estimate.

Again, if we need to push any of these I'll let y'all know when we know! These are our predictions for key dates:

• Delivery of physical rewards by the end of this year of our lord 2023.
• First public beta early 2024.
• "Bones" version of the game with a tutorial and an instant action mode by the end of 2024.
• Then entirety of 2025 will be the 100% stretch goal "draw the rest of the owl" year, with delivery of whatever we have at the end of that. Continual beta playtest updates throughout 2025 is likely.

This is both a wild amount of time to me (three years? that's almost like an entire college degree, should be plenty!) and no time at all. I'm spreading the stretch goal money to work 2/3 game dev and 1/3 day job for the entire three-year period instead of doing a single dedicated year at the end, but that means every week I have to focus on Lancer Tactics is precious. Between the day job, moving houses, managing the bizdev and production of the project, and a geology field trip in Ireland for much of August, dedicated programming days feel like rare jewels.

My inclination in these cases is to just work harder, so I've been having to intentionally slow down. Things will take as long as they take. Better to build up a good solid work+life foundation than indulge he "oh god I need to have something to show for the next update, go go go" paycheck-to-paycheck impulse.

Mission Editor first look

aka something to show for the update

So with that, Mark and I had a great day this week hashing out the different tools and screens we need for the Mission editor! Even though this is technically a stretch goal, it makes more sense to do this up-front to build the tools that we can use for the rest of development.

A notable absence is the lack of an in-game dedicated map editor; for this first pass, we'll be leveraging the excellent Tiled tool for painting terrain, objects, and elevation. Rather than reinventing the wheel right out of the gate, we would rather focus our development efforts on making the editors for Lancer-specific data like units, command zones, sitrep rules + triggers, and dialogue. 

This is only a coupla days of programming after we came up with the designs, so it's still pretty rough (all map assets are placeholders). The tabs top-left are the six tools that we think we'll need: mission data, map tiles, command zones, units + reinforcement groups, sitrep triggers, and dialogue. The white junk is a visualization of the terrain data coming in on boulders.

I guess this is also y'all's first look at the basic map layout, as well! Accidental reveals of note:

• rectangular tiles rather than hexes (paying the hex technical+asset tax was ultimately not worth it),
•  rectangular tiles (lol what) (it normalizes the number of tiles shown vertically and horizontally, useful for seeing entire 10+ tile ranges for weapons) (it also opens up some neat perspective tricks by allowing units to overlap the tile above them),
• and elevation (we're doing an elegant technical trick to get the cliff edges to line up with tile edges, maybe will post about someday) (also ignore the double-layered ones; they had too many awkward constraints about how they had to be placed to work visually, which meant we had to drop them if we wanted to ever do destructible cliffs).

Coins update

We just got our second coin proof and are reviewing it. It's likely we'll put in the full production order sometime next week.

Stickers update

The production run of stickers has finished! This is what 2500 symbols of being gay and doing giant robot crimes looks like:

Unfortunately, we're not quite done because I messed up the order for the IPS-N stickers and accidentally ordered them as glossy finish instead of matte and didn't notice in the digital proof. I was stressed about moving and dealing with confirming with my bank that the order was real and just whiffed on that detail.

I think we just gotta redo them (a $750 mistake 😭) because everything else is matte and they stick out like a sore thumb, but that leaves me with 2500 IPSN misprints that I'm not sure what I'll do with. Make 'em available afterwards in a digital storefront for cheap? Just send them out to everybody as a free bonus along with the rest of the stuff? Engage in an ineffective guerilla marketing campaign by plastering them all over Portland? I'm open to ideas.

Hope you're having a nice day!  🌺

Olive