Games Planesword: 4th year Solodev, Grand Real Time Strategy

Planesword Latest Video:

Describing this game is going to be hard. No XP, no HP. Unique battle mechanics, unique style of levelling up, unique generation of quests and rewards. A unique way at looking at games in general. The multiplayer is still questionable, but a lot of the design decisions are based on a new way of multiplayer.

I started out in Dec 2017 without knowing how to code. It has been a long journey.

It is heavily procedural. and in a nutshell, it uses a multi-dimensional, interconnected array of variables, the end result being a game where you just play, Play according to your character sheet, and the game will go better than if you don't.

There is so much I am taking aim at here: grinding, bots, long buff times, information overload, level caps, having 10000 OOAKs, and cycling through each one for the best job, each time, micromanagement hell, Big ugly blobs of soldiers killing eachother, repetitiveness, zooming out and seeing a bunch of icons, (making RTS art pointless, among other things).. ...I am not making these design decisions just to be unique, although I do want to be unique as well. I truly believe there is a different way to make games and current design paradigms are antiquated relics of the 20th century.

Nobody even dares to really break free of old conventions. So I will.

There is a race creator, that allows you to create races, with different physical attribute ranges, mid-prototype phase.

You can create unique planes, with unique color gradients, sea colors, snow colors, terrain types, and textures... ..easily, in game.

I also have three other planes (Unther, (underworld) Pyre (Core of planet), and the Dead Plane, in various stages of development.

I am on year 4. I expect to Alpha release late 2022.

There is no real pitch here. I don't know if it is going to be free or pay. I know it will not be pay-to-win. Maybe have some vanity gear. But I expect the real revenue to come from something on a plane different from the game. It does not matter. If I am the only one that loves this game, that is fine, because it is my purpose in life to make the game I want to play, and the game I want to play is customizable, fun, complex as hell, but easy to just play and let the world work as it does.

I want to play a game full of challenges, creativity, novelty, and most importantly, magic. So, I have put my soul into making it happen. It's ship or die for me, and I would not have my life any other way..


This is a long video, just showing super fast city and border growth, fog of war, and seasons. Not much else. What is displayed here is the procedural world map, with air cutters quickly uncovering the fog of war, and cities and borders growing at an even crazy faster pace than they would in normal game. You will also note the seasons change, (an important part of the game).

You can create your own characters, and use an armor shader that allows you to actually change the armor and underclothes, and I mean, change the model shape to one never made before ("made before" itself becomes an interesting phrase in a world of deterministic procedural generation). The armor shader is in late prototype phase, the plane and world editor is also late prototype.

Current Armor Shader / character customization screen

 

An epic pace of a game. For this one, I am thinking it will be 90 seconds a season, which is 6 minutes a year, which is 10 years and hour, which means 100 years a day of play.

6 minutes is half a good RTS game. 90 seconds is too short for anything, but 6 minutes may not be enough for diplomatic negotiation, and 90 seconds is too much time if nothing else is going on.

Overall, I am designing the wheels of the game to continue turning. Single player will have pause, multiplayer will not. How that timing will be paced, I have yet to determine, but I have a couple of ideas.
First video is a year in two minutes. Second video is a year in six minutes.

https://odysee.com/@Planesword:7/OneDayFourSeasonsTwoMinutes:1

https://odysee.com/@Planesword:7/210726_OneDayFiveSeasonsSevenMinutes:0

 

A look at race, nation outfit and soul forges:

 

My models looked poor. I thought it was lighting or something. I made the noob mistake of forgetting to import my normal maps as normal maps. The armor shader is now a hybrid of mesh rebuild and shader... ...will probably be taking out the cloth weight, cloth thickness and armor thickness part. Too unpredictable and ugly... ...which also means no need for the fat and thin shader anymore, as the model already has adjustment bones that can be used for that.