Debug mode

Hello everyone! It’s time for a devlog about future releases and the future of the game. For those of you who hang around in Discord, you may have notice the absence of teasers that I usually post and that’s because of two reasons. The first one is university, because of it development has been a bit stale during the last few weeks, though not stopped by any means. The second reason is that I’ve working mainly on “Behind the scenes” stuff. Meaning, stuff that doesn’t have a visible impact in the game right now, but down the road will make future aditions a lot easier to make, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

You have probably already guessed what’s the main thing I’ve been working on because of the title. The “Debug mode”, but, what is “Debug mode”? Well, a more appropiate name for it would probably be “Sandbox mode”. And why do I need a “Sandbox mode”? For a very simple reason. The more units and mechanics I add to the game, I need a way to test them without having to wait for them to happen naturally in a normal match. Pretty obvious if you think about it, but I didn’t really know how much I’d need it until testing in-game started taking a big chunk of my time. Being capable of placing 2 units and make them fight without waiting for the match to develop and those units be trained by the AI actually saves a lot of time, and that’s exactly why I made the “Debug mode”.

In version 0.4, you’ll be able to create a “Debug match” simply by pressing a button in this menu that you can access by pressing the “Singleplayer” button in the main menu. Pretty easy, right?

After pressing the button, the match will start normally, except for a few differences. The first thing you’ll notice is that you (and every player) now start with 1.000.000 gold, so you can buy anything you want right from the start. And the second thing that probably attracted your attention is the 2 button menu on the left side of the screen. Each one of those buttons is actually a dropdown menu. When pressing the “Units” button, you’ll see this. (Things may actually change during development but this the idea will probably remain the same.)

Wow, there’s now a bunch of buttons with units there now. That’s the unit selector and its function is to spawn any unit in the game anywhere you want without restrictions. Let’s say you click on Tremendinius for example, well, now a “ghost” version of the unit will follow your cursor until you click on the map. Pretty standar RTS stuff, I know, but developing and explaining it still feels pretty exciting.

If you click anywhere on the map right now, Tremendinius will just spawn there. And you aren’t limited to only one like in a normal match. You can now fill the screen with heroes if you feel like it! But you probably don’t want all of them to be friends and just stand there all day. That where the “Team” menu comes in handy, just as with the unit menu, you can click it and a selection of colors will appear, each color corresponding to one of the four players.

This is all good and everything, but debugging not only requires units fighting, but also actual info to work with. That’s why I added a new piece of UI, that’s not limited to Debug Matches, the stats HUD. You can now click any unit or building, and it will get selected. When a unit/building gets selected, this will appear on the lower part of the screen.

I admit it looks a bit too rough for now, but it gets the job done. The stats hud shows basic info about the unit, like its current health, name, armour, damage, range and splash area. Pretty useful when testing things like new projectiles for example. Also, pressing F3 now brings info on screen that was previously displayed on the window title!

Last but not least, I bet you are curious about the “under the hood” stuff I talked about at the beginning. Because all of these doesn’t look really hidden. Well I can’t talk too much about that yet as it’s still a work in progress, I promise I’ll go more in detail in the next blog but here’s a little preview. I’ve been working on a system of triggers to control unit’s movement so they don’t just take the shortest path between barracks and instead follow “Lanes”.

And I’ve also been working on a map file format, so I can actually edit building positions and triggers without editing the code. Meaning the map will no longer be hardcoded in the game but instead saved in its own file.

Well, that settles it for today. Hope you enjoyed this blog and are excited as I am about the future features. See you next time!

PD: The forum is just around the corner.