Very cool, I like the art style a lot. Also it looks like you’ve put a lot of thought into what you need to work on. Good work and I look forward to trying out the demo!
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Less to report this time as I’ve mostly been drawing pixel art and designing levels. I’ve also mopped up a few bugs I noticed while playtesting the game.
There are four main scenaries. I’m also planning some smaller ‘quick game’ levels and maybe a procgen option to create simple random levels.
Next week I’m making a start on the AI and getting that to fit in with the existing codebase.
A few screens of recently made levels:
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.
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Will you also have the robot opposition like the original had in some levels ? I remember they were super accurate and had a lot of movement points.
Another similar game which I still own is Shadowfire…
A good quality it had was that each character was unique and had their own special abilities.
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Adding droids is currently on the todo list. I also remember being stalked by Patrol Droids with 70 action points. Those were the days.
Thanks for the tip re: Shadowfire… looks like an interesting game from the same era as RebelStar.
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Recent Progress
This week has been dedicated to working on the AI for Rebel Squad. Not true AI but we call it that anyway.
Basic functionality is working reliably. The computer units navigate around the map to the enemy positions, take aimed, snap or burst shots depending on distance to target and action points available, then retreat to cover. Whilst this all works as expected, there are a few issues.
Firstly, the units behave like absolute maniacs - think zombies in your average b-movie. They just pile into the hot zone and let rip. Forget spacing, flanking or anything sensible like that; they even shoot each other by mistake in the heat of it all. Whilst this is fun and intense for a little while, it does make for quite short games and the player can forget any attempt of achieving secondary objectives.
So, I have some further design work to do in this area. Likely have a way of confining AI units to a patrol area and only approaching enemies when they get too close. Also a way of interacting with fellow units to ensure reasonable spacing is maintained.
AI units can also reload their guns and if out of ammo, hunt round for fallen units to take equipment from. These are things you’re not likely to notice in the game but it’s good to have them in there.
Future Plans
Next week, I will be implementing ‘opportunity fire’. A mechanic that allows one team to interrupt the others go if they have enough action points upon spotting an opponent. As this interferes with the logical route through the game, I expect some fiddly code will be required.
Thanks for reading!
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A difficult week and I’m glad it’s over. Difficult because I’ve been working on some fiddly aspects of Rebel Squad, namely the ‘opportunity fire’ mechanics. This difficulty was anticipated but turned out somewhat worse than I’d thought. Most outcomes behave correctly now at least, and I’ll mop up the remaining 1 or 2 odd behaviours next week.
As a break from this I also made a squad overview screen which displays your teams vitals - health and action points stats. This is something not present in Laser Squad and can be quite useful when hunting for yours units which have yet to take a turn.
Mid-week I elected to increase the resolution of the game from 1024x576 to 1280x720. This not only gives the player a wider view of the game map but allows me to fit in some more gui items into the extra space. This has really helped the overall feel of the game and I’m not constantly having to cram everything into such a limited space.
I’ve also given started to overhaul the graphical side of the gui a little. The buttons now look a bit more hi-tech and a little less ‘Windows 95’. I may add some more graphics to the menus and interface during the polishing phase of development.
Next week will be spent fixing various bugs and starting to polish a few things up a bit. I’d estimate the programming part of the game is at least 90% complete now.
Thanks for reading.
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Great! So close to the release, I’m excited! 
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Development demo has been released! The manual isn’t ready so have fun trying to work out what to do 
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Nice, but short, i’ve got a crash on PC Chrome.
Perhaps, heap needs to be raised, not sure. And can’t find crash dump file (does somebody know where is it located?) 
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the crash dump file isn’t as important on web, since you already see the callstack there.
The “OOM” seems to indeed be memory related (from Emscripten):
function abortOnCannotGrowMemory(requestedSize) {
abort("OOM");
}
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Awesome Ben! You spent a lot of time on this! 
The game hang for me too here, after picking up a machine gun ammo and then trying to move further:
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Thanks for the crash reports. I’ll look into those asap.
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I’ve decided to resurrect this previously shelved project and give it a release of sorts. Rebel Squad was supposed to be my masterpiece but it ultimately beat me, exceeding my technical abilities.
Nonetheless it is quite playable and mostly works, aside from the odd bug. Couldn’t get the HTML5 build to run consitently so I’ve not included that in this release.
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Didn’t know you had those. What was the issue, if I may ask?
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Mostly to do with the state system. The game loop path is not at all consitent with many possible detours, particularly in the areas of opportunity fire swapping back and forth between sides, grenades causing chaos etc. It was too much to hold in my head and the project became too fragile to work on.
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That’s a bummer. I was looking forward to this. I’ll check it out when I get home from work!
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If you don’t mind, what was the general programming design that you used? Did you use an Entity Component type system? Cheers in advance.
I use a finite state machine for all my games. This particular one has a lot more states than usual and is controlled by a series of gui scripts (one for each state).
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Thanks Ben. I found some of your source posted on here. I am learning a lot. It’s amazing how effective the simple approach is using Defold. I’m going to simplify my approach from now on. Thanks for the response.
Yep, I highly recommend going for not over-engineering things from the start. Use simple and quick’n’dirty where ever you can to keep momentum and not get bogged down into details. Especially early on in a project where it’s important to test ideas and game play and not code large and complex systems.
I had the privilege of working with the code for one of Bens games when we adapted it for release on Game Distribution (also on Poki and soon on Nintendo Switch). The simple approach taken by Ben makes it super easy for someone else (in this case me) to pick up the code and quickly make changes!
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