Battlemace: Winds Of Ruin

[Arethrid]

Battlemace: Winds Of Ruin is a 2D medieval combat action game that takes place in a dark medieval fantasy world.
This is a personal project I have been working on and I am doing everything including programming, art, sound design and eventually the soundtrack.

Key Features:

• Realistic, player skill based combat mechanics.
• The player can take manual control of any unit anytime or can give them basic orders by simply pointing and clicking.
• Massive battles with hundreds of units.
• Sieges and open field battles.
• Legendary units with unique abilities and boosts.
• Building defensive walls.

Planned features for the alpha:

• A single player and cooperative arena game mode where hunderds of enemies mass and try to kill the player(s).
• A duel mode versus two players and/or AI units.

Currently working on:

• Combat mechanics.
• AI behaviors.
• First non-human unit's visuals and animations.

[Probo]

cool! You should say something about it

all those enemies swarming onscreen looks great. will the combat be based on 100s of enemies attacking you at once, and you slashing through swathes of enemies with each swing of your sword, or will you be using the amount of enemies just to show a 2 armies fighting on a large battlefield, and the combat be more realistic like one-at-a-time as you work through?

[Arethrid]

cool! You should say something about it

all those enemies swarming onscreen looks great. will the combat be based on 100s of enemies attacking you at once, and you slashing through swathes of enemies with each swing of your sword, or will you be using the amount of enemies just to show a 2 armies fighting on a large battlefield, and the combat be more realistic like one-at-a-time as you work through?

Thanks for stopping by! I updated the original post to give some info.

This is still taking shape and I might try a few things before deciding how game mechanics should be.
There will be huge battles for sure. I am hoping to get more than a thousand units to fight each other at the same time. My stress test results are very positive so far but it is too soon to give exact numbers for now. The player will be able to directly control their own units or give them basic orders.

I am planning to give combat a more realistic feel with few exceptions. By realistic I mean no insane moves and exaggerated magical attacks, at least not for regular units.
Regular units like the swordsman will fight like how you would expect a human swordsman to fight. Human charcters will get tired and might even flee if they are overwhelmed or face a menacing enemy.
But some special characters like legendary barbarians and mages will definitely be far more effective and powerful in battle.

[Vagrant]

This looks rather promising.

It would be excellent if you had top animation talent by your side. To aid in diversifying the movements, have many versions of walks, thrusts, continued attacks, shield bashes, ect. Fluid, delicious animation.

A top down zelda-style game, focused on engaging combat, realism, and large scale war.

It has such huge potential if done right. Combat formations, sieges, castle defense... Just remember the animation talent as well as the illustration style. Style, style, style. Make it look beautiful.

[Arethrid]

This looks rather promising.

It would be excellent if you had top animation talent by your side. To aid in diversifying the movements, have many versions of walks, thrusts, continued attacks, shield bashes, ect. Fluid, delicious animation.

A top down zelda-style game, focused on engaging combat, realism, and large scale war.

It has such huge potential if done right. Combat formations, sieges, castle defense... Just remember the animation talent as well as the illustration style. Style, style, style. Make it look beautiful.

Thanks!
Sprite size turns out to be a problem for the chars. Texture size for a single char is already around 2000x2000 pixels. This might cause performance problems for multiple chars and more animations. I need to experiment with the GPU texture buffer limit. I might switch to smaller sprites and reduce facing directions to 4 if needed.
What do you think about the current char assets? I know there isn't much variation to them but I am working on adding more. Animations are more fluid than seen in the GIFs.

[eishiya]

For how large the sprites are, they're rather boring - the detail density is low. So, if they convey all the information you need to convey, then you can safely reduce the sprite size. The more zoomed-out gifs look more interesting than the 100% zoom ones because all that dead space on the sprites is reduced.

I think you should keep the 8-directional movement though. Your movement handling, with units pushing each other, looks very cool and smooth, and reducing the characters to having only 4 directional sprites would damage that smoothness a lot. 4-directional sprites are good when movement is confined to 4 directions, with free movement, you should have at least 8 directions.

[Arethrid]

For how large the sprites are, they're rather boring - the detail density is low. So, if they convey all the information you need to convey, then you can safely reduce the sprite size. The more zoomed-out gifs look more interesting than the 100% zoom ones because all that dead space on the sprites is reduced.

I think you should keep the 8-directional movement though. Your movement handling, with units pushing each other, looks very cool and smooth, and reducing the characters to having only 4 directional sprites would damage that smoothness a lot. 4-directional sprites are good when movement is confined to 4 directions, with free movement, you should have at least 8 directions.

Thanks for the comment!
I modelled, textured, skinned, animated and rendered the char in 3DS Max and arranged the output into a single spritesheet. This whole process including test renders took more than a week for the single character you see above. Due to a skeletal animation fault (which was my mistake) I had to redo the skinning and all the animations from scratch. It was a really painful and frustrating process.

I was originally planning to make the char size a little smaller but after trying tons of different sizes I realised that this is almost as low as I can go without having the need to edit pixels individually and not lose animation clarity. This is the first character I made for this game and I would have to revisit it further down in the development process.

I was going for a more flat shaded (cell-shaded) style. But decided to add some little bump mapping using a grayscale displacement map on the model. Do you think the char is too flat in color or does it lack the detail in its geometry and shape?
Would it have been better to use for example a single flat skin color for one arm and a darker color for the opposite arm like most do in pixel art chars? That style is much easier to apply but I think it makes chars look too flat.

Here's an alternative render for the same char with "Ink & Paint" (cluster flat render) shader in 3DS Max.
NOTE: This is not the shading used in the GIFs above.