2018-07-19 11:26:38

Hello,

today, i'd like to announce the current development of a game under the project name Frontline Combat.

This game will feature tactical, turn-based strategy elements and will look similar to Tactical Battle, at least if it comes to genre. You'll have several fighters on a map, which you can move around freely to attack the fighters of your opponent and to defeat them, gaining advantage over your enemies.

Your fighters will have classes, such as Knights, Spear Fighters, Mages and lots more, and each of those classes will only be able to master specific weapons (you don't imagine a spear fighter running around with daggers like a thief do you?).
Several weapons will gain advantage over others (archers will be able to hit their opponents from a greater distance, but as soon as its up to close combat, they aren't much of a pain).
All maps (or chapters) will play in different locations, but you might also need to grind and play a map multiple times to withstand the future battles.
And all of this is just a part of the stuff we already implemented.

The game is in development since 2014 and since the core mechanics are pretty much implemented now, we started writing the story and composing the music for it. Since 2014, I thought about giving this game a real voice acting setup if it gets ever released, and by saying 'real', I don't plan on visiting amateur voice acting platforms, but rather contacting a voice dubbing company to request actors and actresses to dub our game.

As you can imagine, this will cost more money than just asking friends to do so or contacting some low-budget hobby platforms.

Since we don't plan on speculating with money we don't have and we really want to finish the game as soon as we finish the story and music, we want to ask you if you can answer a short survey.
This survey will ask you some details like your age, but, more important, the amount of money you'd like to invest into such a game.

Please follow this link to answer the survey:
Click here to go to the survey

Feel free to discuss here if you like. I'll probably read this topic and answer questions as well.
You can also leave ideas for features, things you didn't like about the more or less only predecessor in this genre if it comes to audio games, Tactical Battle, and things you'd like our game to do better than Tactical Battle.

Thanks.

Best Regards.

Hijacker

2018-07-19 16:42:55

S...basically an accessible Fire Emblem game. I'm cool with this. Also, is this going to be available for just Windows, or also for Mac?

A winner is you!
—Urban Champion

2018-07-19 17:25:07

Yeah, its highly Fire Emblem inspired, since i'm a huge fan of those games and I played almost all of the games available in the US/Europe myself.
Nope, this game will only be available for Windows. Sad but true, this game started off as a test for BGT those days, I just wanted to give it a try, and then my free time took over and I realized how bad this idea was when I already got about 3k lines of code and a more or less stable game running. I regredded this soon enough and needed to rewrite many of the time-critical features in C++ and link to them in a DLL manor, but now it is like it is and rewriting the whole game in a more flexible language would take even more years to complete.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-07-19 18:04:56

Makes sense. That just makes me want to get a PC more, but I can't right now. I'm excited to hear more about this game.

A winner is you!
—Urban Champion

2018-07-19 18:07:03

If we really manage to get a full dub (without text-only dialogues in between) during the crowd-funding campaign, I already thought about adding texts for a narrator as well and publishing the plain story as a radioplay next to the actual game too, so people who aren't good at such games or don't manage to beat a specific chapter or simply don't have Windows systems at hand can at least listen to the story.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-07-19 18:55:33

wow, sounds cool...
it will be like brave of cloudia from morokuma big_smile

2018-07-19 18:56:30

is it online? is it f2p?

2018-07-19 19:16:22

Nope, it isn't online and it isn't free to play either, hence the topic.

2018-07-19 19:25:25

Mitch, you can use wine to play this game. No need to worry about not having a pc. Or get a virtual machine for that matter.

2018-07-19 20:15:33

do you have a specific voice dubbing company in mind? Have you already pitched the idea to them or are you waiting to hear about how much money you might get first? I feel like money would better be invested in other areas. Voice acting is nice but always comes secondary to the quality of gameplay.

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2018-07-19 20:19:25

I thought about contacting Cup Of Tea Productions to get the voice acting done, but I didn't pinpoint myself to them yet.
Since we got a composer who works without getting paid, same goes for story btw, and I already own a large amount of sounds which the sound designer can use to do his work, the only thing left which will effectively cost money will be the voice acting, thats why the money will more or less entirely flood into this direction.
I also didn't yet contact them, I want to wait until I get some more answers to the survey so I will know a bit of where I might end up with and contact them to get at least an idea of how expensive this might actually be. We don't know how huge the story will actually be, at least not in takes, amount of characters and such. It would probably to early to contact them right now.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-07-19 20:40:57

I guess my question is, why does this need to be its own game rather than a campaign for Tactical Battles, like in what direction did you plan to take things that the TB engine doesn't do, and that you can't do with the custom scripts, etc.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
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2018-07-19 20:44:01

This sounds like a cool game. I don't know how good I would be at it, since I've never played anything like it before, but I might download Tactical Battle and give it a shot to get a feel for what it might be like. It seems like more or less a unique concept as far as audio games go, though, so I'll be looking forward to it. I did take the survey as well.

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2018-07-19 20:58:59

@ironcross32:
I guess the most obvious answer would be, because I didn't intend to create this game from the start. I just kicked it off as a test to see what BGT can actually do. It was already dead by then and I wanted to check out if its really as bad as many people told me. It was about half a year later when I decided to finish this project as it is instead of rewriting it entirely in some other, probably better language, neither that, nor for Tactical Battle.
I also didn't want to rely on some outdated game which itself didn't get any updates for years now, and I wanted to be free to make my AI as intelligent as needed. Tactical Battles AI can be kinda easy sometimes, and the way as it is now, I can add in different classes which behave differently, like healers don't fight, but instead heal their allies, thieves won't battle except they need to, but instead go and hunt for treasures and more.
I can also have dialogues between chapters, shops, yeah, maybe we can even introduce a conversation system like the original Fire Emblem games have, and I didn't except Tactical Battle to support all those features in a way I'd like them to work.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-07-19 22:29:11

Sounds pretty cool. If I remember correctly, AHC used volunteer voice actors, and they were pretty good. That's something to think about if you don't want to spend more money hiring a company.

2018-07-19 22:56:52

You are right, but you were also able to hear that some of them played multiple roles, which I don't want in my game if possible. Some of them were also pretty good, but the recording equipment wasn't that great, like Alexis for example. All of this shouldn't be any problem with professionals though. But I will consider this if i won't be able to gather enough money for this game anyway, thanks.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-07-20 07:56:41

Hi.
The game sounds really interesting.
So, when you're using BGT which has been abandoned, will that give you, or the players any issues in the future? I mean, when the programming language isn't going to be updated, would that maybe give issues in the future updates of Windows, or when updating a screenreader?
If this is not going to give any issues, then the programming language shouldn't matter. If you feel it fits your needs and it does what yu need, then it's all fine.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
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2018-07-20 08:07:55

Hi,
good question. The thing is, even when using a more advanced programming language, as long as there isn't anyone who cares about fixing bugs which might occur in the future (either on programming language or application level), even the most advanced language isn't resistant to bugs introduced by software updates, may it be Windows or the screen reader.
I will do my best to keep the game playable even in future Windows versions, but you are right, if BGT becomes unusable on any Windows system at some point, this game will probably be dead as well, and there won't be anything I can do against it. But I seriously doubt it, at least AngelScript, which is the core engine behind BGT, is pretty stable and will probably run for several years without serious issues.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-07-21 04:16:03 (edited by defender 2018-09-25 14:19:33)

I truly feel like the insistence on triple A voice acting is going to be the death of this awesome sounding project, or at least that it will result in deficiencies in other areas.
AHC got made only by the skin of it's teeth because of voice acting costs, and they even went with mostly non professionals too.
Of course full voice acting would be amazing, but I'd rather have a well rounded game and at least decent unit voices, with a well written text story with maybe sounds and music to go with it.
Otherwise, it's going to be almost impossible to raise enough money with this size of community, and the fact that it isn't available for at least the Mac, which cuts out allot of potential funders.
Every funding site I know of  has a time limit under a year, so you unfortunately can't just leave it up for a couple years and hope that continued effort on your part to get funding will get you through.
And I doubt many people would go for the donation rout without having a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo acting as the middleman to help get their money back if things fall through.
Besides, I'd be perfectly happy to pay 40, maybe 50 bucks for a game with full voice acting and nice music ETC, though I'm not a huge fan of that genre, but funding the thing on top of that? I don't think I could justify it to my self.


Maybe you could try to get sponsored by some bigger companies? blindness related ones like VFO and ATGuys and such are probably your best bet, though maybe some non profits like the AFB, APH, NFB and ACB would help too, and if you can find some funding programs from the bigger guys like Microsoft and Google for accessibility projects then, who knows.
Either way it's going to take a ton of work and allot of perseverance on your part...
But I mean, you've gotten this far, and you even rewrote 3000 lines of code! Which must have been pretty soul sucking... So I bet you could do it, but I don't know about that 2020 release then, because sponsorships are slow going.


Gameplay wise I really would like to not spend 10 minutes after each turn just trying to keep my head above water and atempt to understand what the hell is going on.
I know that some people really do have the patients for a 8 hour game like that, where every single move is planned out with lots of forethought and care, but I hope at least that their are many smaller, less crowded maps (without 20+ units to deal with) that can be played, or some kind of simple mode for n00bs like me.
Maybe I just don't play strategy games right? I don't know...
You should talk to Creg Bret and Shadow Mamba and such to get some idea about what they'd like, their the biggest names in TB and they can talk allot more when it comes to the nitty gritty of it.

2018-07-21 04:39:17

I agree, I like good voice acting too, but the thing is, I'd rather have a good game that has a text story than wait another 3 years and maybe the voice acting comes through, maybe it doesn't.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-07-21 10:52:09

Hi there,
@defender:

defender wrote:

I truly feel like the insistence on triple A voice acting is going to be the death of this awesome sounding project, or at least that it will result in deficiencies in other areas.
AHC got made only by the skin of it's teeth because of voice acting costs, and they even went with mostly amatures too.
Of course full voice acting would be amazing, but I'd rather have a well rounded game and at least decent unit voices, with a well written text story with maybe sounds and music to go with it.
Otherwise, it's going to be almost impossible to raise enough money with this size of community, and the fact that it isn't available for at least the Mac, which cuts out allot of potential funders.

Well, I already noticed that we probably won't obtain enough money to hit the goal of an entirely voiced game with this level of professionality. I thought about doing it like the bigger JRPGs do with cut scenes, the rather unimportant pieces of story are text-driven, but the key-scenes will be fully voiced and stuff. It'll probably depend on the amount of money we will get in, such as the project itself will only collect the really minimum of money needed to go for releasing this project, and the more money we get, we can add stretch goals to add even more spoken text to the game.

defender wrote:

Maybe you could try to get sponsored by some bigger companies? blindness related ones like VFO and ATGuys and such are probably your best bet, though maybe some non profits like the NFB and ACB would help too, and if you can find some funding programs from the bigger guys like Microsoft and Google for accessibility projects then, who knows.

MS and Google would be great, thats right, and I will do my best with blindness-related companies as well, maybe we will be lucky and get some kind of support in that matter. Thanks for the ideas though, I really appriciate it.

defender wrote:

Gameplay wise I really would like to not spend 10 minutes after each turn just trying to keep my head above water and atempt to understand what the hell is going on.
I know that some people really do have the patients for a 12 hour game like that, where every single move is planned out with lots of forethought and care, but I hope at least that their are many smaller, less crowded maps (without 40+ units to deal with) that can be played, or some kind of simple mode for n00bs like me.
Maybe I just don't play strategy games right? I don't know...

Yeah well, thats the more tricky part. I already noticed that we can't create the chapters (maps) as large as the RPG maps for sighted people are, because we simply don't have the possibility to overlook the whole map with all units and their relations in total. For now, i'm planning on having a maximum of 5 to 6 or maybe 8 playable characters on the map, maybe some ai-controlled allied characters as well, and of course some more enemy fighters, but I guess this should be more or less better to handle. And the maps won't be multiple thousand tiles large of course. But then the strategy thing starts and yeah, it will need a bit of planning to work it out, but there are different difficulty levels and easy should be your first bed if you aren't into map-related strategy games, there shouldn't be a problem with that.

I'm also looking into ways to make the map even more accessible by adding convenience features. Even the sighted ones got features like the lines which show them which of their characters can be attacked by which enemy if they place them there and stuff, and I already introduced keystrokes which do the same, but its still slower than the sighted games, since they just got the different lines at the screen, while we need to press a key and check a menu to do so. I also added points of interest, such like enemy fighters, treasure chests, closed doors, which can be configured freely by the player and checked while on the map, and there is more to come, I just need the ideas, and if someone of you got an idea, just post it here and I will see what I can do about it.
Well, thats it for now, and thanks for those ideas.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-09-25 13:44:50

Here is a quick update on whats going on right now:
My story writer already provided some level sketches as well as character overviews for the most important characters, story backgrounds, class overviews as well as skill and weapon ideas. I am absolutely into it already, even though the genre isn't what I usually like to read or play, but I guess thats going to change. I already added about 1500 lines, adding bonus experience like in fire emblem games, a shop system, fixing several new things, improving level management and loads more.
Currently suffering from server refactoring on my end, limiting my sound design capabilities due to sounds not being accessible right now until the server is fully up and running again, but since it will take quite a long time to finish the game anyway, this probably won't matter that much.

Just thought I'd keep you posted to remember you that this game still exists and probably won't get canceled either.
If there are any questions popping up I can help you with, feel free and ask here. I guess other people are following along and probably will join the discussion as well.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-09-25 15:42:05 (edited by hadi.gsf 2018-09-25 15:42:50)

Hello,
I just want to express my ideas in very short lines and say that in my opinion what can insure the success of this type of game.
First of all, I think  it should have a little bit of graphics so sighted  players could play alongside of blind gamers.
Then i think online play should be supported. I honestly would get bored  with single player games unless they're extremely complex and big, like Aurora 4x, in which you could make your own story in space.
Finally, I really do think that i myself would enjoy strategic games with deep tactical options with a lot of outcomings based on the choices that i made. If there's a story to it, i would appreciate it. If i was the project manager, I would spend most of the resources on more content, more options and more features and not a lot on hiring voice actors.
Honestly the reason that i didn't play AHC and never touched it was because i felt like you were just pushed through a scripted story with some options and choices along the way.  i could just  go watch Hollywood movies for best voice acting and best sound effects, i assume.
Short version, in a tactical strategic game I want to call the shots and use the available tools at my disposal to shape the battle the way i want it, or at least try to hahaha.

Oh and best of luck to you and  the rest of the team who're working on this.

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2018-09-26 07:57:21

Hi,

well, thanks for your post.
I'm not sure if this game will be the right one for you then.
It won't have graphics, due to BGT being used. I already know that I won't use it again, but its a little too late to rewrite this game in some other language which is capable of creating graphics for it, as I already stated earlier. I regred it, but it is like it is now.
Online play for such a game won't happen. Its simply too exceptional. I don't see any worth in enabling people to play against each other on fixed maps. It is a strategic game and similar games for sighted people also don't enable you to play online.

If it comes to strategic options, you'll have loads of them. The battle is absolutely interactive and you can play just as you like, deciding over life and death of your units, and as long as you manage to win in some way or the other, you're free to do as you like.
The story however is pretty linear. You'll have the opportunity to grind if the story gets too hard and you'll probably be able to take on side quests to maybe get some additional character or additional items, but the outcome is clear, the dialogues will be scripted and you'll know a big part of the story when played through it once.
The Fire Emblem series create individuality by adding in support conversations, which add in a real character development, enabling you to make your units marry each other to strengthen their bonds, getting children as new characters and more. Their lifetime also decides about their final development at the end of the game. But due to time limitations I don't think that we will add in support conversations, at last as far as it is now.
But if you got other ideas which would ensure your interest on this game, please let me know.
Best Regards.
Hijacker

2018-09-28 00:13:06

Yeah no to the online thing.  At best you'll just have a tacked on system which does not translate well as what worked in story mode does not translate well when players are involved.  In games like Fire Emblem and the Xcom games, "Everyone" used the exact same setup to play against each other (with xcom 2 getting quite hilarious pairing a medic with those virtual sentry thing that splits whenever hurt.  queue a player making an army 40 members strong).   Since FE is the inspiration, they're just been mostly known for their long single player campaign in a linear format.  I think if another game like this were to crop up again, you'd probably enjoy the Xcom form of this gameplay, where there are story objectives to reach (and sort of within a time limit) but you're allowed to do whatever you want to try to work towards the goals, push back the clock, and get your squads powerful for stronger enemies later in the story that will populate other missions.

The answer to your question is forum.audiogames.net/search