Tonight was the scheduled closed beta event. I expected about 8-12 to show and that’s about what we had over a period of two hours. I think it was close to about 12 people. We weren’t exactly playing super competitive matches. Most players were still figuring out how the interface and the gameplay actually worked. Nevertheless, we had several good matches and we had a blast. I have a giant list of things to improve and fix over the next few days. Thanks to all that joined up, tonight!
John Bjerk just finished up some beautiful new art work depicting the flat earth at night. This will be rotating in the background as you wait for players to join up for a new game. The lobby allows you to chat and select your government from a pull-down menu.
Flat Earth at Night
You can also check out the Firmament Wars wiki on Github for more protips!
I spent a lot of time today improving the UI. Now all hotkeys are accessible instead of accessing child actions via parent tabs. This makes it WAY easier to use any action at any time. We discovered how frustrating it was to constantly hit C to go back to the combat tab every time we wanted to attack or deploy. It led to a lot of unintended cannon firing and other hijinks.
New Firmament Wars UI
If you want to be ready when a Firmament Wars game night email goes out, prepare by ensuring the following is taken care of:
Optional: If you know anyone that might be interested in trying this out, just let me know.
Previously the active tile scaled in the tile’s flag to indicate your current target. After a bit of research, I found a much better way to indicate your active tile: the glow filter! I double the border thickness and add a glow filter to the closed path which represents your current territory. This might sound simple, but it actually required some nifty z-index trickery to make the border always appear above its adjacent, overlapping tiles. By setting the xlink:href attribute of a use tag, I can choose which tile sits on top.
<use id="topTile" xlink:href="#land0"/>
I couldn’t be happier with the result. It works in Chrome and Firefox so far. I haven’t checked the rest, but if it’s good in those two, it’s usually good in all of the other browsers that matter.
Firmament Wars Glow Effect
Just finished adding cultural milestone rewards in Firmament Wars. Here are the six culture milestone rewards currently in the game:
Here’s the latest UI pic. Added a grid to the background, added barbarian tribe rewards, and added resource bonuses.
Here’s a comprehensive look at what Firmament Wars looks like. In this video I demonstrate a 4-player game on my local development machine. You’ll get a good look at how combat, moving, army deployment, and resource accumulation work. Enjoy!
Check out the neat little four-player game I have going on in my local development environment. The UI basically has three sections: players, target, and resources. I got chat working recently, too, which really breathed some life into the interface. Every time you conquer a tile, it broadcasts it to all players along with flags shown. This helps other players know what is going on in the game. If players pay close attention, it can also help them keep tabs on what’s going on in the game. Since Firmament Wars is in real-time, it’s not so easy to keep track of everything and a lot of action can happen in a short period of time. I’m very excited to see how gameplay unfolds between actual competing players. Very interesting stuff.
Firmament Wars Interface
