Build More Cubes is now on Steam

It is an army vs army game, where you need to constantly rebuild and grow your army in order to survive or win the battle.
You can find the game on Steam Store

It is a small game about defeating enemy armies. You goal is to become as big as you can by rebuilding dead armies.
Each unit have its own skills, one is with bigger range or speed other is pushing back the enemies or deal a lot of damage on multiple enemies and so on.
It is still in pre-alpha. But seems a lot of fun.
here are most of the units:



It will be a casual game - no properties of the units, no health bars. Just simple fun. Some different maps and some objectives like - survive 5 minutes, rebuild 100 units…and so on.

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Cool carnage and mayham, nice work!

The only thing I am missing are some real large area damage things to make the mess complete (catapults, rolling boulders, explosions and spells come to mind).

nice, reminds me of league of legends

Thank you.

The only thing I am missing are some real large area damage things to make the mess complete (catapults, rolling boulders, explosions and spells come to mind).

Actually there are monster units that makes the mess complete :slight_smile: But it is not in this video. Catapults are good idea, thank you. I’l try something with that.

it looks really fun…but looks like it could get heavy real quick in blender with all those animated objects…what are your plans for optimization??

Edit: Looking at it, there are so many animated objects on screen you could cull some of the animation and noone might notice. Maybe?

what are your plans for optimization??

Right now it is supporting up to 200 units with 60 fps and up to 400 units on the screen with 30fps. I’m making progress with the optimization(no bones only ipo animations, logic pulse mode depends on the distance and also culling).
However 400 is more than enough for what is in my mind. What you saw in this video is not optimized and is not actual gameplay.It is just random units with random number spawning on the map.
Hopefully soon I’ll have actual gameplay. The major problem in this game will be the right balance of the units and their numbers.
That is what what will make game interesting. But because it is really weird gameplay, the only way to understand… is to post a demo when everything is ready.
Not a fixed date for the game yet.

I made something similar to this a while back, for optimization I made meshes of every frame for the units, and used replace mesh to animate them. then cycled the updates so that maximally 100 units where updated every frame,every unit got an update every 4:th frame, setting my unit cap to 400. This method in combination with other smaller tricks gave me steady 60 fps on an old laptop (2.2ghz dualcore, 4gb ram). The downside to this method where making the animations as every frame had to be a model. Just a tip how optimization can be done :slight_smile: anyway it looks fun and interesting so far, keep it up!

I’m impressed! The one thing that immediately attracted me were the striking colors, which make it very easy to see what’s going on on the screen - unlike many games that I just can’t be bothered with because of this.

Thank you guys.

Just a tip how optimization can be done

Thanks! I didn’t thought about that method before.

Are sleep sometimes or at least do you take a break from time to time? Or are you the new AI game developing program that will replace us all…just wondering…

Haha…I’m not that nerdy, just I didn’t had much to do at work last couple of months, so I was doing this. :slight_smile:

Haidme, Still using bge 2.49?

ipo animation ? hummm… first time I heard about that (old) method. Interesting :slight_smile:

Anyway, very nice new project ! Good luck !

Haidme, Still using bge 2.49?

Yes, I can make huge progress with a game because of what I already have for 2.49b. Some day…I hope after BuildMoreCubes I’ll take my time and switch to 2.7+

ipo animation ? hummm… first time I heard about that (old) method. Interesting :slight_smile:

:slight_smile: IPO is basically only scaling,rotating and moving whole objects not vertexes as it is with bones. IPOs proved to be much more faster than bones and for that simple game it is fine to be use. :slight_smile:

In Tomato Jones I use only 1 bone for the hat of the character/s everything else is pure physics no custom animations at all.

Thanks haidme… very usefull for my next project too :slight_smile:

Blender is so surprising, even after years of using it ! Blender forever !!!

I see. Well if you are going to switch to the latest of bge(2.77a) then you could try UpBge. UpBge is faster than bge in some areas and maintained.

Surely! UPBGE is the way to go. I’ve already check it and it seems it is going in the right direction.

cool game a sort of snake io but way cooler (gameplay style), in a multiplayer stand that game would be awsome!

Thanks Smoliterno, I guess you mean slither.io There are many games like this, just the concept is great and very enjoyable.
I’ve made some new units and a lot of optimizations to the game. Also the game balance proof to be pain in the as*.
However, now I think it is just fine.

This is my first “strategy” type of game and I face some new challenges, like how to support 500 units in the scene at once with 30 fps fighting each other. I come to the conclusion that using “bubbles of interest” is the best way to do that.
So instead of checking every unit in the scene I check only the bubble of an enemy army in a certain range of my army, then decide if I need to check the units in this army or not.
Also units outside frustum are set to low priority and using lower thick rates.
However that is not enough, now I achieve about 30fps with 400-450 units in the scene(my army + enemy armies)…but sometimes players might be able to go very far in the game and make 200+ units in their army, that means units in the scene would be 600+, which is bad for the fps.(I am aware that StarCraft max units are about 1600 - 4vs4 players with 200 units cap per player, now…how the hell do they do that?! :slight_smile: )
My main problem is not rendering(the units are mostly cubes :slight_smile: …like the title says), it is the script that is executed in each unit.
Are you aware of any other “tricks” like “bubbles of interest”, so I can use it to increase the fps?

maybe you could try not running the script on each individual character. Since most of your mini-armies are separated into groups, as seen below.


Maybe each group could have a leader/manager that handles all the other members of that groups actions. Wouldnt be that hard, and all you could do it try. I mean you dont need to each enemy to track the player. Have the leader/manager set the tracking of all cubes in the group. All you could do is try. But even in my SS of your video, you could cut it from 20+ scripts, to five scripts. at one point in one of my projects when I had enemy NPC’s. They would not each run there own script, but rather the spawner of the NPC’s control behaviors