Units

We have 5 units in total. To create units you select your base and select which one you would like to build. It will take time for this to happen and you also have to take note if you have enough resources in order to build the specified unit. Once they are built, they will spawn just outside your base and you will be able to freely move them across the map.

Gatherer: Finds and gathers resources which can be used to produce new units.

Scout: Fast and has a long attack range. It is able to detect stealthed units.

Demo: Stealthed unit (while not in combat) which can pierce through armor but is limited to close range attacks.

Heavy: Has high armor and attacks cause splash damage.

Soldier: All-rounded unit which is also able to slow down units movement speed on attacks.

Balance and Conflict

Conflict Tree

To make the game balanced we have made it so that every unit can be countered. This way players won't just be building one specific unit in order to win, they will have to strategize and combat what their opponent is building in order to achieve victory.

Development

I thought it might be a good idea to go through the development process of how I create the unit sprites. Before I even started, Chris and myself had to figure out exactly what kind of memory we where able to allocate. This covered the texture size, bit depth, number of colors in a palette, number of units, number of sides of each unit, number of frames we could give for animations per unit, and so on.

In the end we decided that I could work with 32x32 textures and use up to 32 colors on a palette for the units. This included alpha levels also (which was used for drop shadows). Each unit has two sides, a front and a back. They are translated in code to create 4 sides for each unit so that we can save memory. Animations are 3 frames each, which brings a total of 6 textures per unit (at a minimum with just an idle animation).

The program I used to do all sprite work has been in Graphics Gale.

A screenshot of Graphics Gale in action.

Each unit went through a few changes before they ended up being complete. Below I have added a picture of the units as they started out, and how they turned out in the end. Some needed to become smaller to fit the unit characteristics, while others where bland or the biggest one, the units did not translate correctly once they where in-game. Since the grid is in 3D, the angle does not fit for isometric sprites so they had to be tweaked to look right.

Units before/after

That about does it for explaining units in CMD and how they fit in the world. Next time I will go into animations and show the development process I went through.