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Author:	Muz	Submitted:	30th July, 2008	Favourites:	1
Genre:	Real Time Strategy	Downloads:	330
Rated:

Edited By Muz on 8/2/2008

Designed for Eegra's Game 1st Annual Game Making Shindig
http://www.eegra.com

For Eegra's judgement on this game:
http://www.eegra.com/pages/show/title/29_07_2008_First_Annual_Game_Makin__Shindig_WINNERS_ANNOUNCED_HOORAY/page/2

Chaos Wave is a game about colors. Long story short, the world consists of generally 3 colors, Red, Green, and Blue. Creatures evolved out of the colors, taking the form of Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan. When all 3 colors are mixed, it becomes either white or gray... white meaning that it's disappeared, gray meaning that it's a tough, dirt-like substance.

It's a side-view strategy game, works a lot like some other strategy games but with all the boring mundane stuff like resource collecting simplified.

If you want the long story, see: http://www.create-games.com/project.asp?view=main&id=1181

Or just download the game and read the documentation

Be warned that this game has a very high learning curve, so the controls take some time to get used to. And the yellow AI is brutal!

Aside from the controls, let me know what you like and dislike about the game. I'm planning to make a sequel to it next year, so your comments will certainly affect the gameplay

Source code: http://smuzani.googlepages.com/cwsource.zip

Review This Download

http://eegra.com/Downloads/Shindig_2008/chaoswave.zip (6.11 mkb )

Posted by Codemonkey

30th July, 2008

I saw something about this compo on TIGsource, looks cool! Downloading....

Posted by Zezard

31st July, 2008

Rated :

Although your game is really cool and original, it was way too advanced for me to take in.

I don't understand why the player is supposed to remember all these random color codes, and why the list of how to build them displays info about a random unit it the list (the hint feature).

All teams have pretty complex and unique strategies, and the whole thing with colors i very inspiring, but the game is just to much to learn and memorize before it gets fun. You should have added menus with info of all constructabel units instead, and perhaps made it possible to control with the mouse, although I see the problem with two players on the same computer there.

I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Posted by Mr_Tom

1st August, 2008

Rated :

in a game, when someone thinks 'i want to build X' they want to actually be able to do it not too long after they've made that thought. In this game, the problem is that even when you DO know the codes for getting different things, its still a pain to enter the code in and make it happen.

It would be impossible to play this with a friend who hadn't seen it before, for example, because they'd have no idea wtf to do and you'd pwn them, and they'd say 'wtf was that i had no idea what was going on, lets play something else' and since this game is supposed to be played by 2 people on the same PC and it is kind of flawed for that purpose. I didn't really like the gameplay, graphics weren't anything special and the music was just not very nice to listen to, which i'm sure many will disagree with me on.

Having said that I give 3 stars out of respect for effort put into it and the fact it probably involved a little more complex programming than your average DC game.

Ooo now i feel all bad for saying nasty things.

oh i forgot.. I DO like the whole idea about colours and using it for an RTS as a counter system , unfortunately it was just its implementation which let it down.
Comment edited by Mr_Tom on 8/1/2008

Posted by Muz

1st August, 2008

The gameplay is fun once you get used to the controls, but yeah, I guess it was the experimental codes that kept it away. There are a few hidden codes in the game as well, which gives you cool things like artillery and grenade launchers, but I don't think it's really worth the code system.

Posted by Attan

1st August, 2008

I won't rate this yet since i suspect that it's going to be awsome once you learn it. What you would need for people to get in to this is some kind of tutorial campain in which the gameplay is challenging but not too hard to scare people away. Look at how games like Age of Empire does it. It starts with the basic controls, but then it moves over to a simple mission, and things get harder and more complicated - even if it's a tutorial. I think a really well worked through tutorial is what this game needs, that really gets you in to the controlls in an inspring way.

I love the color concept and how everything seems so.. i don't know... obvious. It's really a great concept, that you should take futurer!

Posted by Mr_Tom

2nd August, 2008

Rated :

yeah i expect its the pressure and time constraints of being a competition entry that is the reason for some of the problems.

Posted by Muz

2nd August, 2008

CW Trivia:
Total time available: 3 months
Game design: >1.5 months
Main engine coding: >1 month
AI: 1 week
Graphics: 2 weeks (except for title screen)
Testing: 2 days

I think it turned out pretty well, considering the quick, complicated AI and minimum testing. A lot of the time, I had to mix several things at once, like design and code.. I'll write something on that later. The game was surprisingly very hard to think up and most of the documentation were personal notes. That left me with only about 1.5 months to make the game.

Anyway, Eegra gave me the green light to release the source code, so it's out now!

Posted by Fragasnap

7th August, 2008

The control scheme is really the only thing creating the steep learning curve.
The AI is quite good and unlike some similar games (I'm primarily thinking of Siege) you can see everything that it’s doing, giving you perfect view of the fact that they aren't cheating.

The Yellow tribe is quite one-dimensional since all you can really do with them is build green and red collectors, a sky shield, barracks, and start sending worms.
Any attempts to move to the surface will be met with painful failure at the hands of blue radiation (Even your green collector which has to be on the surface suffers from the toxic rain) and the skirmishers really aren't worth paying for since they'll end up in melee combat so quickly.

The Magenta tribe is also pretty much stuck to the bottom since their ground based units are utterly destroyed by green radiation.

The Cyan tribe has a noticeably larger repertoire of units that use grey than that of any other tribe.
They are also the only race that can easily run about the surface since they aren't affected by green or blue radiation.

The chaos wave isn't particularly useful since you pretty much just be using all your resources to hold back or destroy the enemy. It's not really something you can just take advantage of once it comes around since you have to save up so much within the thirty seconds of the chaos wave.
The yellow, despite only having two units that I could find, seem to get the biggest benefit from the chaos wave since they can produce better melee units to compliment your worms.

Three glitches:
1-If you're player one as the yellow tribe and you place a red collector you can't place a green one.
2-If you play as the Cyan against an AI Cyan tribe then, after building a node and two barracks, it highlights the square next to your base and tries to create green militia until you destroy one of his barracks.
3-The Cyan don't take damage from the red radiation!

I'd recommend (or perhaps request) a 1.1 if only to fix the third bug.

Posted by Muz

9th August, 2008

Ouch, I thought I fixed that 3rd bug. But I'm kinda dropping this project to finish CW2. Any of you could pick it up, though. Source code is released

Well, I disagree with pretty much all your points cept the one in the 1st & 4th paragraph, lol. But I guess that's good.

Yellow is a 'horde' tribe, no thinking, just massive unit churning and against a good player, the skirmisher will be invaluable. The stupid AI uses yellow mercilessly, lol. It's possible to do surface attacks if you time them right.. I've used a lot of them either as decoys or as flanking attacks.

Magenta has some good 'hovering' units, namely the spindel and spindel rider. IMHO, the spindel rider makes it worth saving up to upgrade a tech level.

Cyan also gets the killer grenadier on level 1. Those things are expensive, but hard to kill without artillery or bombers. They could wipe out the entire surface if used right.

Posted by CodeCannon

14th May, 2009