HackSlash Brawl

Community Forums/Showcase/HackSlash Brawl

NefariousD(Posted 2007) [#1]
HackSlash Brawl is a turn based tactical/strategy RPG in the vein of games such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea. You assume the role of a guild leader, managing and commanding a hand picked group of adventurers and creatures in search of loot, fame and fortune. Forget honor or glory, these fearsome fighters have mouths to feed, and are ultimately more interested in shiny things than they are helping damsels in distress. Games play out in turns, whereby each character on the field is activated according to their speed, meaning strategic planning is required for a player to be successful on the battlefield.

This is my first 'real' project with Blitz3D after having tinkered with it for a few years. This game was actually about as far as it currently is using BlitzMax and 2D Isometric graphics, but the content and code required to work with an isometric format proved to be way more of a pain than its worth, and the switch to 3D has been a boon to productivity. Being that I'm a programmer and not an artist, however, I'm very much limited to what I can find for free, so pretty much all of the character models are from Psionic3D (Note: Anyone out there with animated models they would like to donate to this freeware project, let me know!). I'm using Sprite Candy for the GUI, TreeParty for the gorgeous dynamic trees, EasyBuilder3D for the level construction, and various snips of code found around the forums (Thanks to SSwift for the cell shading code!).

A few screenshots:

Title Screen


An uneventful in-game shot. Featured here is my custom 'cookie crumb' style pathfinding system. Notice the path to the selected tile curves around the terrain which is more than one 'square' higher than the current square, since you can only travel up one square at a time. The pathfinder will also find paths to spaces within range around obstacles, as well.

That's all for now. Work on the combat system continues (getting the formulas right for this kind of game is always crucial), as does the AI. Comments? Suggestions? Offers of free models I can use? :) Thanks for checking this out.


Jsoren(Posted 2007) [#2]
this looks interasting, final fantasy tactics was a cool game. might I suggest looking into easybuilder for you game terrain? its a very similar style and might save a bit of time and headache.

JS


NefariousD(Posted 2007) [#3]
@Jsoren

Already using EasyBuilder3D :). And you're right, it is saving me tons of time, as the 'tile' based construction lends itself perfectly to this genre. The only modification being done to the meshes produced by EB3D is that I'm scaling the level mesh by 0.5 on the Y axis, so that the jump from one terrain height to the next isn't so dramatic. I wanted to avoid using the 'ramp' tile due to it only being suitable for one direction.