Cairn - An RTS In Progress

Overview​

Cairn will be a single player Real Time Strategy game. You take the role of a Slayer who uses powerful special abilities and tactical commands to destroy his enemies. The player will recruit grunt troops and send massive waves to their doom in the name of glory. Pieces of land will be marked by stone cairn's signifying where Landmarks may be built and it's there that the enemy will be fought off or your forces crushed and your hard fought advances lost.

Setting​

A world recovering from 50,000 years of darkness has reached unheard of achievements. The world of Myos still shakes when pieces of their shattered moon fall to ground, corrosive oceans still eat away at flesh, and beasts are as enormous and deadly as ever before, but the people not only survive, they prosper. The flourish of new discoveries in new steam technology and the spread of alchemical secrets have brought the people to a new age, but few may live to see where the progress takes them. The powerful factions of Myos can't seem to drag themselves away from bitter feuds and old hatreds. So while the world clashes the intelligent continue to prosper by applying their knowledge to the weapons of war.

Gameplay


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Controls are based off of modern RTS controls, but have been tweaked to work better with touch tablets.
The game allows one primary hero called a slayer for each match and he can recruit soldiers and hire adepts to try and destroy his enemy. All of this while advancing his towers and improving his own defenses.

Soldiers come in all shapes and sizes. There are the Slayers which includes the massive steam powered gear known as the Centurion who leads troops in strict battle lines and soaks up massive amounts of damage. The Adepts who act as guns for hire and often specialize in support or Slayer assassination and include unit's like the Dark Scorcher, a soldier once armed with alchemical fire has been twisted by unknown technology to turn his furnace into a source of black heartless fire that consumes even the ashes of the enemy. Lastly are the lowly grunts who are swept into battle for the chance of a little coin more than glory. These unfortunate souls include the Scrappers who have nothing and fight bare knuckled and the grand Legionary armed to the teeth with the most advanced technologies and a flame gladius.

Landmarks Doodads​

Landmarks are structures built and destroyed throughout the game. They are similar to the towers in any Tower Defense game. They are fully automated, but can be upgraded and advanced into specialty buildings that offer bonuses to nearby troops, massive offensive weapons, or deadly defenses.
Doodads are the objects that stand between you and your enemy. Forests, Tents, Barrels, Ruins, and Fences. All of them can be destroyed and sometimes burning down a forest to reach your enemies flank is by far the best strategy.

Concept Art​

Thermocrat Resurrection Cairn:


Thermocrat Tavern Sketch Final:


Dukarim Slek Kajarii Immortals Painting:



Current Progress / Upcoming Features​

• Playable Landmarks
• Technology Tree
• GUI Graphics
• Menu Level Loading
• Web Player Build

 

I finally got around to upload some work in progress videos.

First off is our grunt combat. These are a few of our finished sprites smashing each other to bits and just showing our combat engine off. I walk through our different stances that a unit can be placed into also. Youtube thought it would be a good idea to add some extra light to this video so it's a little bright.

The second video shows off the special attacks of two of our Slayers. They are not finished sprites, but the special abilities are fully functional. We have some buffing abilities, a summoning ability, a charge attack, a ranged area of effect, an instant area of effect, and one that adds special damage to the slayers weapon.

Hope you enjoy!

 

Looks pretty interesting. I really like the tavern model!

 

Our first pass at the tavern models for the Free Blade and Thermocrat factions. They look pretty different despite using textures that look the same off the models, and this is the first thing we're fixing. We're are finishing up our concept for the tavern for the 3rd faction, the Kajarii Immortals.

We also got pretty good looking shadows for low performance cost. I'm anxious to see how shadows for more 3D terrain will turn out.



While bringing in the taverns, I've been busy with getting them to do stuff in the game. So the upcoming video will have the towers attacking, repairing, and upgrading.

 

i like the style of the graphic. im now interested in your game!

 

I just wanted to drop in and say thanks for the kind words from Yanneyanen and delyethsam. We are confident in our art direction, but getting compliments from others, especially others in the industry, is a great motivation. So thank you both

 

Out artist did a great job describing all the awesome work he did on our ground texture tiles. There is way too much detail to post everything here, but I'll show off some pics and descriptions.

Read the full article here: http://embalmit.com/2013/01/20/tiles-and-textures-update/

We talk about adding small amounts of detailed vegetation to the texture. Something we called micro-propping as we worked with it.


We go over the size we choose for our tiles, the seamless edges of the tiles, and all and all it's pretty informative.

 

Some of the music from our game was posted up on SoundCloud by Jose from Music Vortex, who had done an amazing job with sound effects and music.

Embalmit Blog
http://embalmit.com/2013/01/30/cairns-music/

SoundCloud
https://soundcloud.com/music-vortex/sets/cairn-song-of-sorrow

 

I really like your tile system. I never though about using that big tiles. And the thing about using that much texture variations is also great!
Everything looks great! I wish you luck!

 

Thanks for the kind words. We decided on big tiles after a lot of arguing, it all ended up well though, I think it came together nicely.

I've been keeping an eye on your tile editor for a long time. Keep up the awesome work on it.

 

Update:

Finished the 3D work on all of our tavern models. Next comes their upgrades the Forge Guild Hall. Turn the tavern into a place of finely forged weapons or allow a nefarious guild to take over. Either way your enemies are in for a surprise.

We also implemented our Doodads. Destructible terrain is a big part of gameplay. Players need to burn down forests, cut threw fences, or blow up small buildings to reach their enemies in the best way possible.

 

Looking great,well be an eventual must play for me

 

this is good, I'm a fan of RTS genre, so I'll try it out. Most def.

 

Thanks for the hype Myhijim and Genebox.

Just finished up our resource system. Now it's back to arming the landmarks with upgrades advancements and unit recruitment.

We are looking to do a playable build after the these last few game mechanics are in place. Right now we host on our own FTP, but I want to try a web player for our demo level and perhaps a public download for the bigger stuff.

 

Here are some older concept art and sketches from last year. Many won't be used in promotion or as concepts, since we've had to make content cuts as time has marched onward. If you are interested in the short stories behind them check our blog.

Thermocrat Resurrection Cairn:


Thermocrat Tavern Sketch Final:


Dukarim Slek Kajarii Immortals Painting:

 

We put up some very, very old art pieces on the website. Here is a look at some if you don't want to bother with the link.

A gameplay concept. We wanted to use he-man as an art influence, but took it a little extreme in this concept.


Our first Kajarii Concept. The Kajarii Immortals are mask wearing undead. They use blight serum to boost their stamina and fight with weapons made of irradiated glass.

 

It's a good week for us. Lots of GUI progress, new landmarks, and big programming accomplishments.

We added a pool manager to the game to handle our status effects, projectiles, and blood splatters. It's done wonders for performance. I'll be posting a detailed example of how it's used and sharing the code later this week.

We are now using a rendered texture to create the minimap. Using culling we only show the ground and will represent Units, Landmarks, Doodads with small image icons for easy readability.

For new buildings, this is the Guild House. An upgraded version of the Tavern, they add an extra floor so that they can blast the enemy with even more arrows. Banners adorn the buildings announcing the alliance of the guild inside.


Here is the legendary Cairn. Each landmark is marked by these Cairns, showing to the world that the ground around them is marked for greatness. No one knows where the Cairns came from, but they are respected by all of the cultures of Myos.


We're also working hard to wrap up our GUI design, here is a sneak peak at what we're cooking up there:

 

Nice !
I like the ground tiles, good choice going for less micro detail.
The upgrade of the Tavern also looks great and can be easily distinguished from the standard one.
Also the taverns artstyle reminds me a tiiiny bit of "the settlers" artstyle, which is a good thing !

good artstyle choice in general, imho !
I hope you are still working on this

 

Oh yes, we're still working on it.

There are some big updates coming actually. We just finished our own game object manager that I am going to share with the community soon. We are knocking out GUI pieces like attack type, defense type, and elemental type icons. The status effect icons are about to be finished as well. Almost all of our in game special effects have sounds now as well.

I'm adding more debug features for our QA guy, so that we can get some feedback on balance while finishing up the attacks and special abilities of the landmarks. Right now most of our balancing is done using calculations, but long gameplay sessions will always find the big gaps.

Good to hear from you as always RBX, thanks for checking up on us.

 

We have been doing some play testing, trying to find bugs and test our unit limitations. Here are some screen shots we took while testing our new Game Object Pool Manager. Since every game should have one, here is the code to our Pool Manager.

 

Our one man sprite machine, Rodrigo, has been hard at work finishing up the basic soldiers for our Thermocrat faction. They are fire worshiping greko-roman and steam punk inspired. Along with the sprites, Rodrigo submitted a great write up about how we came to these design decisions.



Here is some information and shots on how he is creating and assembling all of the sprites.

 

Dude, awesome!
It looks so nice, cool characters too!

I'm planning on making a strategy game too, only this will be turn-based. And I was thinking about how I wanted to create the characters.(Sprites/3Dmodels). Why did you chose sprites? Is it for the performance or other reasons? I also want to release it later on mobile devices so would 3D models even be an option?

Anyway, good luck with your game!

 

We chose sprites because we wanted our characters to be very detailed. We have some larger characters that will be coming up in the next few sprints, things like steam powered giants, clockwork automatons, and a nasty monster. Along with that we took our teams strengths and went the direction we thought would be result in the highest quality.

You can do 3D units on a mobile platform, but you're going to be limited. You'll have to keep poly limits tight and the number of units on screen will have to remain fairly low.

Parts of our game are in 3D. Most of the terrain and all of our buildings are 3D. We wanted the largest objects to have some perspective as the player moves the camera and having a forest, ruins, or tower shift like they do adds a little something extra visually to the game. The units are on a 3D plane as well, so when they rank up you get that same 3D feel as they stretch out into the distance.

 

Thx Adam, for the explaination. It's really something I need to get in mind too. Good luck with your game!