All right, here it is. Click here to download the beta.
Ya’ll be gentle with her, now. She’s sensitive.
Readme follows:
This is a work-in-progress demo of my game Planitia.
Current version is .73.
NOTE: IF YOU GET A MESSAGE SAYING THAT D3D9_**.DLL IS MISSING THEN YOU NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DIRECTX.
Planitia is a real-time strategy game that allows you to both build an army and use god powers to crush your enemies.
In this demo you play Green. In the main window you will see the game world, your general (the large guy with the green cape) and your village.
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BASIC CAMERA CONTROLS
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Planitia is meant to be played with one hand on the mouse and one hand on the WASD cluster on your keyboard. (Sorry left-handers – I’ll get controls in for you soon!) You use the mouse to interact with the interface. You can also move the camera by pushing the mouse to an edge of the screen, but it’s much easier to move the camera with the WASD cluster. You can rotate the camera using the Q and E keys. You can also click on the minimap to jump the camera to that location.
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GOD POWERS
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On the right side you will see a GUI display with a minimap. The blue bar below the minimap is your mana. Below that are buttons for the god powers. Only some of the god powers work now, inactive god powers have their buttons greyed out. The working god powers are:
Flatten Land (looks like up/down arrows): Costs 3 mana per second.
Allows you to raise or lower land to village height. Click and hold in the world window on any terrain to affect it. Flattening the land around your village will allow it to grow, and the more villagers you have the faster your mana will regenerate. Villages only grow at certain populations, so your village may not grow immediately even if you’ve flattened the land properly. Just be patient. You may also need to use this tool to create land bridges so that you can attack your enemy.
Earthquake (looks like concentric circles): Costs 25 mana.
Drops an earthquake wherever you click in the world window. Be careful not to cast it on your own village. The earthquake prevents enemy villages from growing and forces their gods to use more mana fixing what you’ve done.
Lightning Bolt (looks like…um…a lightning bolt): Costs 10 mana.
Casts a lightning bolt wherever you click. The lightning bolt damages units and throws them into the air. You can even knock them off the game world this way.
All god powers have a shared 1.5 second cooldown.
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MILITARY UNITS
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You can left-click on your general to select him and move him by right-clicking on the terrain. You cannot select your villagers.
If you click on the second tab on the GUI (looks like a red general) you will see the military buttons. You will see buttons for archers, barbarians and warriors, along with a display of how many you currently have of each.
Clicking the archer, barbarian or warrior buttons converts a villager into a military unit of that type and adds it to your army. Your army will always follow your general so you don’t have to worry about controlling units individually. You can attack enemy armies or villages simply by moving near them – once your units get within combat range they will attack automatically.
One thing to keep in mind is that once you convert a villager to a military unit it no longer gives you mana.
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OPTIONS
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If you click on the third tab on the GUI (which is currently blank) you’ll see the exit button. You can also exit the demo by pressing ESC.
If you wish to give me feedback on this demo, you can do so at anthony.salter@gmail.com, or comment on my blog at www.viridiangames.com.
Copyright 2006, 2007, 2008 by Anthony Salter. All rights reserved.
[…] Demo released!! Woohoo, now we get to play with Viridian’s work-in-progress, Planitia! I was playing around with it and took this […]
Congratulations!
BTW, here’s a link to update DirectX, in case anybody needs it: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3
You rock, Planitia rocks!
lovely jubberly
Beautiful! Couple comments. First, it crashes when I lose 🙁
Second, I assume it’s in the works, but a single land-height for city building is bland. One of my favorite tactics in Populous is the flood, which of course is useless if everyone is at the same height. 🙂
Third, the map is a bit dodgy. The view pointer looks backwards to me (I expect the white part to be the field of view, when in fact it’s pointing the opposite direction), and when I click on it sometimes the view moves and sometimes it doesn’t.
Fourth, once I kill the AI general (especially if I’m turtling) he’s completely defenseless. This may be design, but bear in mind that you have to expose your general to attack the enemy. Might not be a bad idea to set up some method of recruiting or promoting a new general.
Overall it’s very nice. I like seeing the AI build a land bridge to me, and occasionally throw a bolt or two. You might want to adjust the aggressiveness though, he’s extremely susceptible to a mass mana dump early on. Though future balancing changes could mitigate this as well, since it doesn’t take very many cities before bolts and earthquakes become insufficient to do the job effectively alone. And the land is pretty, but the sprites don’t really look like they fit. 🙂
Also, I keep ending up with a little red man in the corner nearest my village. Every time I lightning bolt the little bugger about 15 little warriors fly up and the game crashes. 🙂
Actually, this may be to do with the general being dead. The game probably doesn’t know where to spawn them.
when in doubt, spawn in a random spot in system mem! oh wait no NOOOOO *bsod*
First comment. It works! This is the first Planitia demo I can actually play.
My first game I was figuring things out when a bunch of red dudes showed up and crashed my party. Not cool, they were NOT invited. You may want to add a “restart” button as I had to exit and load the game once I died.
My second game I actually had 3 villages before I was killed (ok, so I am not a master at Planitia yet). After I died the game crashed.
I notice that Earthquake does not do much. The land doesn’t deform much, and the units only are thrown around for a half second or so. It did not disrupt the computer player at all.
For some reason only 1 out of 5 or 6 clicks on the mini map would actually move the view to where I clicked.
Last comment. The little circular cursor seems to be placed on top of the ground texture, but below the village texture. It was hard to see where I was placing the lightning bolts and earthquakes.
I very much like the terrain movement. The land rises and falls very smoothly. Very nice. I also like the units bouncing around during the earthquake and lightning strikes.
Great so far — Better than Bioshock! 😉
For movement and camera suggestions. When the camera moves with the mouse but not toward the right, it’s sort of annoying. Also the mouse is locked to your window and that’ annoying. Also you have to right and left click before moving the camera. A suggestion I would have is that you have a camera key that you hold down while moving your mouse to change the position, and that when you let go of it you can move your mouse anywhere on your screen (thereby letting you select other windows other than Planitia).
If you go over the minimap in non-camera moving mode you could allow the camera to be dragged around the minimap. You don’t have to worry about whether or not there is a spell being used, just whenever you’re on the hud you don’t do anything like using god powers and what not.
Use wasd to move your general in addition to the movement mode you already have.
Anyways these are just suggestions, take them as you will 🙂
Keith
Also I don’t know how you have the village creation setup, but sometimes the terrain can be “almost” flat, but still have a little dark shading to it, that you don’t notice until you go over it. I would suggest to find a way to make sure your villages could still be put on top of those. That way you won’t get mad if your village isn’t built even though you’re sure the land is level enough
[…] Salter’s god game Planitia is now at .73 (don’t let .70 fool you in the title). I just played it. That’s right! […]
http://www.gamesafoot.com/?p=198
Here’s a funny thing. I’m sitting here won the game and no peasents are reproducing. Since everything is still here, I decide to play around with lightning. Well soon I kill off some villagers. Then suddenly more villages pop up. And soon there’s a certain amount (something like 9 or 10 blocks, which is a 3×3 set of squares). And then it crashes on me!
It’s an interesting kind of meta-game in and of itself. It’s hard to generate more villagers. I found i had to do a couple of things one is, I had to make sure that all the land was cleared for them to make villages on. Next I needed to destroy a village utterly in order for it to make more. Only this didn’t just do it. I also felt I had to destroy some of my soldiers, so it would spawn more villagers. It’s fun but at some point it crashes, maybe too many villagers or who knows what.
I still get a crash in game. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with it, but it may have something to do with the villages getting destroyed. I was following around the bad guy who kept destroying my villages, and it crashed after one was removed. Same thing happened after I won, when i tried destroying a village with lightening it crashed after utterly wiping it off the board.
keith, i think he’s got a peoplecount cap per village. i forget how many villages my guys built, but if you get to the cap and make some room – and then kill some of the farmers at the other end – they’ll build a new village. i don’t know how many villages you can potentially have doing it that way.. it might be a fun experiment 🙂
Okay, got my backside handed to me within minutes. Make sure the game has some easy tutorial levels =)
you wussy. be aggressive! go right over and slam him with lightning until he’s dead! or build a bridge straight to him as fast as you can and turn all of your farmers into any of the three attackers and send them over right away! sheesh. PANSIES!
Probably – I was just happily expanding the town to see how it grows, didn’t experiment on the other UI components, and suddenly I’m dead.
sudden death can be a real bitch.
man its really fast
1st time im like O_o
2nd time im like ima kill you and massed but comp still over powered me some how and yea… sweet game though… mabey make a sand box where you could make ur own lvls…
nice game a bit wierd every time i run it i die cause the other guy gets loads of soldiers and kills my villigers