Advanced Design Week 10 - Hwacha Fury Launcher

This week I've been working on the swarm missile launcher that Garrett wants based on an ancient Korean arrow launcher called the Hwacha. He wants a missile launcher that fires multiple rounds, is a one time use sort of weapon, and can fire at air units.

Trying to keep it applicable to Warhammer missile launcher standards, but also providing it with the Hwacha twist, I decided to make the swarm launcher (from here on named Fury Launcher) as follows.



As requested, it is a One Use Only weapon. To balance this and not make it horribly underpowered for only being able to fire once, I added several bonuses.

• 72" Range: This is one of the main features of the Fury Launcher, its long range allows it to attack anywhere.
• Three different rounds that can be fired, all standard missiles. Flakk (Skyfire), Frag, and Krak. This allows the Fury Launcher to fire at any type of unit effectively (Skyfire allows the unit to fire at air units at full ballistic skill and not snapshots).
• Good frag rounds. If there are no air units to use this against (it's main purpose), it still has excellent frag missiles to utilize. The 6 rounds it gets, along with it's ability to be fired as a barrage, allows it to rain fury upon enemies from long range without line of sight.
• Krak missiles: The Fury Launcher also gets good Krak missiles giving it the potential to take out armoured and high toughness targets with great effectiveness.
• Missile Lock: This special rule was specifically designed to make One Use Only weapons better. It allows the player to re-roll failed rolls to hit once. So while it can only shoot once, it is given a much better chance of hitting.

Capstone Week 10 - Glitch Virus, UI Changes and EKG

Well I got the EKG done! It looks and works great, a video of it is below.

I also managed to get a good jump start on the glitch virus. It's going to look very cool. I also cleaned up some of the UI, and added an objective scenario to the game. It's basically a standard team deathmatch. Each player has a set amount of lives, and there is a timer in the center of the screen for game time.

Advanced Design Week 9 - Temple Guard

This week I was sick during the class period, but I decided to pick up the Temple Guard task. I found this one to be a very fun task as their lore and concept is very interesting. The temple guard were the devoted protectors of the Slann in the Lizardmen race. They were ferocious warriors that would not leave their Slann's side even if the Slann told them to stay away.

To model this ferocity, the obvious route was to design them as tough close combat warriors.


These are the initial stats that I gave the temple guard (except the armor save was 3+, I took this picture after it had been changed). They are an elite unit so that should be kept in mind.

Reasonings are below!

• WS, BS and S: Following the idea of tough melee warriors, I gave the temple guard a significantly strong weapon skill as it would allow them to hit more consistently throughout melee combat. Their BS of 3 is pretty standard for troops that aren't well versed in ranged weapons, which is how we wanted them. The strength is a respectable 4, and combined with their Wraithbone Halberds, their modified strength of 5 is very healthy and will allow them very nice rolls against mediocre to good toughness. This will also allow them to gain glancing hits on a 5 and penetrating hits on a 6 against armor value 10 (standard for a lot of vehicles).
• T, W, and Sv: Once again, a tough warrior was what we were after. So respectable toughness of 4 will give the temple guard a good reliability in taking damage, and combined with their 2 wounds and 4+ armor save I believe this makes them a very durable unit (while not being entirely indestructible).
• I and A: Initiative is another section where the temple guard shine. They are initiative 5 which allows them to attack before most other units. However, their default weapon is the Wraithbone Halberd which is unwieldy, making the Temple Guard automatically attack in initiative step 1 (last, basically). I kept the attacks at 1, due to their having a higher strength and initiative, and also some special rules they have giving them more attacks in different situations.

• Skittering allows the temple guard to move a little bit extra during their movement phase, which gives them a little more versatility on the battlefield.
• Tough Hide gives the temple guard the ability to re-roll one failed armor save per combat, giving it a little bit of extra durability.
• Fanatic was an extra ability I came up with to represent the relationship between the temple guard and the Slann. It gives a model with this special rule 1 extra attack in close combat when the model is within 6" of that players Warlord/Slann. 

Capstone Week 9 - Decoy Ability and Character Customization

This week I FINALLY finished the decoy ability. It now spins properly based on the direction of the thumbstick. Also now, pressing the left bumper will teleport the player to the spawned decoy.

This next sprint I will be working on the EKG health system. Basically I will be trying to make the EKG represent how healthy the player is. As their health gets lower, the heart rate will go up (kind of like adrenaline flooding the blood stream), and once their health reaches zero the EKG will flat-line.

 

If I get time I will also move on to other things, probably some clean up of the UI and maybe another feature!

Advanced Design Week 8 - Turn Around

I was working on the Totem of Xthotl psyker ability. It is a really fun idea that Jason came up with, so I was hoping I could develop it some more to make it a fun defensive psychic ability to use.



This is my idea for the totem. To go through the logic for the different values associated with it, here is a small list:

• Range 36": I made it this so it could be used to aid most of your army even if they are spread out a bit, this is half the board length, and equal to the board width.
• Location must be within 3" of friendly unit: I did this to "balance" the range that the totem ability has. It can be used on far away areas IF the player has units there. This is to keep the totem as being a defensive ability as it therefore can't be used too much to provide advance "cover" for friendly units. 
• Scattering 2D6 - Mastery Level: I used the scattering mechanic for this to give a drawback to the ability. It gives the possibility of the totem scattering far enough away to benefit the enemy as it is for any unit, and not just friendly units. However, having a powerful psyker will allow you to reduce the effect of the scatter. I feel like this gives this ability some nice variety in results and doesn't always guarantee a beneficial use for the caster.
• 3+ Invulnerable Save: I chose to give the totem a 3+ invuln save as I wanted to give sufficient motivation to use this ability. It is a very powerful save.
• Charge 3: I chose to make it cost 3 charges to cast as I felt this sufficiently balanced out the powerful effect of the 3+ invulnerable save. Having it cost that many charges creates a high risk of getting Perils of the Warp, about a 7% chance actually (chance of rolling 2/3 sixes).

Overall I think this ability is pretty well balanced, with a high risk, high reward setup. I think it will add a nice defensive aesthetic to the psyker loadout.

On another note, I'm turning my act around for the rest of the semester. I felt like I was kind of coasting, or at least not doing my best all of the time. So the rest of the semester I will be truly giving 100% towards this class.

Capstone Week 8 - Retrospectives and Decoy

Today is peer review day! I'm excited because it means after this week, the real dev work begins.

Overall, I think I did very well these 8 weeks. I was assigned the position of build master, I set up the GitHub repository for our game, consistently pushed to that each week and outside of class, and was on top of my communication in G+. I plan on arguing for a 4.5 or 5 for myself. I hope others feel the same way as I really think I did very well this half-semester.

I think my areas that need improvement are my work done outside of class, and my blogs. These past 2 weeks I did start working outside of class more, but I need to make it better. Once a week for a couple of hours (besides Wednesdays) is not acceptable to me.

This week I also focused on working more on the Decoy ability. It caused me a bit more stress than I thought it would, as an error I was running into was persisting until a moonlit drive back to my house when I had a light bulb moment on how to fix it mid-drive. It now works properly, you can control the spawning of the decoy by pressing the left bumper to activate the directional arrow, and then use the right thumbstick to control which direction it is pointing. Releasing the left bumper will then spawn the decoy.

The above image shows the decoy spawning ability with a placeholder arrow image.

Advanced Design Week 7 - Retrospective

This semester has gone fairly well for me. I've done a good amount of work on the Mechanics team, and have learned a lot about Agile development using Psyberfire. A lot of that Agile experience is thanks to Sam as she has been explaining things to me as I've asked, which has been incredibly helpful.

I know I definitely could have done more with respect to the Mechanics side though, I've been incredibly busy due to a combination of work, capstone, and other classes. The rest of the semester I will working on doing better at that though.

I know I've definitely excelled on the playtesting front though. I'm definitely a rules lawyer, no rule goes unscrutinized when I'm there. This definitely allows us to get a good, fair playtest in that fits within the proper Warhammer 40K rulesets. I also bought the latest Imperial Guard Codex, so that I can use my Guard army to playtest against our Lizardmen army, to provide a bit diversity in what we playtest against.

Overall for my first design class ever, I think it's going fairly well. My goals for next semester will be to improve the amount of work I do on the Mechanics side, and continue the level of work I'm doing with playtesting and Psyberfire.

Capstone Week 7 - Decoy Ability

This week was the half way point in this sprint. Since I finished my sprint tasks already (game loop), I was assigned the Decoy ability as my new task. I'm particularly excited to work on this one as it is going to be a cool ability. Plus Zach always makes good design docs for his features which always makes things easier. 

Today was dedicated to starting the Decoy ability. I have it to the point where it spawns a Decoy in front of the player. I also spent a lot of today fixing an annoying rigidbody bug, which was due to the mass of the rigidbody not being large enough, and to the physics ray cast that was checking if the player was grounded. The combination of these two things caused the player to make these small "bounces" if they landed a certain way after a jump. Luckily it was fixed!

This picture above is the specific line of code that was causing issues indirectly. It basically checks right below the collider to see if there is anything that the player would be "resting" on. Combined with the rigidbody issue, the player would begin to "bounce".

I'll be working on the decoy ability more this weekend, as the design of it calls for an "arrow" that can be controlled by the player to spawn the Decoy in a 360 degree circle around them. It would be great if I could finish this feature before the end of this sprint but it is not necessary since this feature is an "extra" (it was part of next sprint technically, but I needed something to work on).

Advanced Design Week 6 - Psyberfire Velocity and Vent Results

I finished the tail attachment rework, but we won't be implementing it until the next round of playtesting, so for right now it's sitting there doing nothing. Otherwise, this week (and from now on) will be a lot of Psyberfire work. I'll be creating enough tasks each sprint for each person on the Mechanics team, along with another set of these cards for the following sprint.

Unfortunately, my attempts to set up a vent server failed horribly. I messed up the modem gateway on my network. So Jeremy will be setting up a teamspeak server instead, since vent only had a maximum of 8 people on a free server, while teamspeak allows for 32 people.