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Author Topic: A Spiritual Successor to W:A  (Read 16946 times)

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Offline Bamboy

A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« on: March 18, 2016, 10:51 PM »
Current build for this project can be downloaded here: https://bamboy.itch.io/asteroidians

Greetings, fellow wormers.
I have been hard at work since the 1st of March programming a spiritual successor to W:A in Unity3D. Our working title as of now is 'Asteroidians', and the game takes place on an asteroid that is sinking into a star.

I have always loved W:A over other worms games but it has its share of problems that we are aiming to fix. The most important being accessibility for new players. A veteran and a newbie should be able to sit down together and both be able enjoy the game equally. However this is not an easy task to accomplish without also damaging the depth and variety that gives W:A its extensive replay value for veterans. I am hoping to get ideas from the W:A community about how this could be accomplished.

Another MAJOR thing that is specifically important for myself in this project is all the customization and features that W:A includes,  except tenfold. The other day I regarded the project as much as a tool as a game. Worms Unlimited has been a useful resource for ideas thus far.

Critical aspects of W:A we are looking to preserve, and features we want to include:
  • Worm Physics
  • Roping
  • Large number of worms/teams
  • Weapon Variety (+More of it)
  • Smaller explosions so the big ones feel devastating
  • Customization (Schemes, teams, exc)
  • Importing PNG as maps
  • Pre-placement of worms/teams/objects on maps.
  • Online play (AI for single player will probably be an after thought)

We also are thinking about implementing a "buildables" type game style where you have the option to build something every turn as well as attack. These buildables, for example, would be in the form of being able to place a girder and fire a weapon in the same turn. We are hoping that this would develop a more interesting attack/defend style gameplay. As of all things, this would only consist as a scheme and could be toggled off in your created schemes. We are also playing with the idea of a more accessible mario-style movement system, which would also be swappable with the classic movement.

The project so far is very much still in early development. Functional gameplay as of now includes the basic team rotations, bazooka and grenade, terrain deformation, and randomized level generation.
Here's a video I threw together real quick. Note that all W:A sprites are placeholders and will be removed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OU-npvyPU
I also stream my development on this project early mornings PST. https://www.twitch.tv/bamboy360

We are potentially looking for 2D artists and maybe C# programmers. If you are interested send me a PM with some links to stuff you're proud of. Although if you do not possess these skills then ideas and comments are also very appreciated. I want this project to be something that evolves and responds to the community's feedback.
« Last Edit: March 28, 2017, 07:52 PM by Bamboy »
Asteroidians, the spiritual successor. Download on Itch.io:
https://bamboy.itch.io/asteroidians

Asteroidians Discord: https://discord.gg/Hk4Dsdq

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Bamboy360

Online TheWalrus

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #1 on: March 19, 2016, 01:11 AM »
Awesome!  If only T17 was like minded!  If I can help in any way let me know, unfortunately im not a programmer, but i have  been around the online community since the very beginning.  GL with the project!

Offline Bamboy

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #2 on: March 19, 2016, 01:12 AM »
If only T17 was like minded!
My thought precisely.  ;D
Asteroidians, the spiritual successor. Download on Itch.io:
https://bamboy.itch.io/asteroidians

Asteroidians Discord: https://discord.gg/Hk4Dsdq

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Bamboy360

Offline Kradie

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #3 on: March 19, 2016, 01:23 AM »
I am glad that there are committed and passionate people out there, that are willing to make a spiritual successor of Worms Armageddon. Perhaps I can be one of them, if you wish for my assistance within the development of music & voice, I wouldn't mind giving it a try.

Regardless of the matter, I wish you the very best with this project!
Global Wormin' - A Friendly Discord Worms Server
https://discord.gg/zvFwZuAKQB

Offline h3oCharles

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #4 on: March 19, 2016, 09:20 AM »
You might want to see Hedgewars. Not only it's open source, there is way too much potential to it and too much lazy and missing devs that you might do something too.

Offline Tomtysti

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #5 on: March 19, 2016, 09:43 AM »
This is awesome! Good luck with the project! Just followed your Youtube and Twitch :)

Offline Triad

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #6 on: March 19, 2016, 04:07 PM »
Also one of the most important feature of WA is replays. Thanks to replays TUS Leagues, Cups/Tournaments, Challenges works like a charm for example. Good luck with the project.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2016, 04:10 PM by Triad »



Offline Bamboy

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #7 on: March 19, 2016, 04:37 PM »
Yeah I've been hearing a lot about Hedgewars. I will check it out eventually.

I am not sure how I would go about doing replays. If they are a big deal then I will look into them for sure.

I never got into the community aspect of W:A outside of the game (as can be noticed by my 3 posts), so all of these tournaments, clans and stuff is completely new news for me. Help with what strengthens the W:A community would help greatly.

I have also thought about having services integrated into the game for easy sharing of maps/schemes but I absolutely do not have the knowledge of how to implement these things or manage the servers that would be required.

I woke up late today but I will be streaming dev shortly if anyone is interested.  https://www.twitch.tv/bamboy360
Asteroidians, the spiritual successor. Download on Itch.io:
https://bamboy.itch.io/asteroidians

Asteroidians Discord: https://discord.gg/Hk4Dsdq

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Bamboy360

Offline Xrayez

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #8 on: March 19, 2016, 05:18 PM »
Oh boy, here comes competitor  :D

I have very similar attitude towards developing that kind of game like W:A, but I'm still learning to make something (though I have much more experience with community and it needs). I made some stuff in Gamemaker back days, not particularly W:A style game.

Do you feel like Unity tools/engine are enough for your needs or do they limit you in some way?

P.S. Sophomore in Computer Science  :-[

Offline Bamboy

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #9 on: March 19, 2016, 05:21 PM »
Unity is basically a renderer for C# just with a crap load of built in utilities. There are some security type things depending on platform you're targeting but other than that there isn't much you can't do.
I'm still learning myself. I'm a self taught programmer specifically with unity. Been at it for ~4 years now. :)
Asteroidians, the spiritual successor. Download on Itch.io:
https://bamboy.itch.io/asteroidians

Asteroidians Discord: https://discord.gg/Hk4Dsdq

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Bamboy360

Offline Bamboy

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #10 on: March 19, 2016, 10:17 PM »
Hey does anyone know who did these concept UI designs? Is this person still around? http://worms2d.info/Concept_images
Bridging the gap between user and code is half of the work. Having someone to design how it should all work would be invaluable.
Asteroidians, the spiritual successor. Download on Itch.io:
https://bamboy.itch.io/asteroidians

Asteroidians Discord: https://discord.gg/Hk4Dsdq

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Bamboy360

Offline h3oCharles

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #11 on: March 20, 2016, 10:35 AM »
Hey does anyone know who did these concept UI designs? Is this person still around? http://worms2d.info/Concept_images
Bridging the gap between user and code is half of the work. Having someone to design how it should all work would be invaluable.

http://worms2d.info/User:Run!

Offline Bamboy

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #12 on: March 24, 2016, 08:33 AM »
Spent about 20 minutes looking at Hedgewars and I'm not impressed by it. It might be worthwhile to look at the level generator code.

New stuff since I posted last!
  • Weapon system backend improvements
  • Homing missile (A result of the above)
  • Mines (including duds)
  • Level generator "previews"
  • Lobby screen with basic settings. (Level, Turn time, team count, worm count, starting health, exc)

Physics backend will be reworked soon! I'm getting an experienced individual to help out with this.
In the mean time I want to ask... What weapons I should implement next?
Asteroidians, the spiritual successor. Download on Itch.io:
https://bamboy.itch.io/asteroidians

Asteroidians Discord: https://discord.gg/Hk4Dsdq

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Bamboy360

Offline h3oCharles

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #13 on: March 26, 2016, 10:42 PM »
Well, the Worms Guild was discussing a topic regarding the "variety of weapons" so, here are them all. 37 of them. More will come (I think)

- Sheep with Jet Pack
- Sheep with a worms magnet: flies by worms, picks them up in it's magnet, flies them into the air and explodes them or takes them out to sea and drops
- Spy plane: You can see what happens in the buildings
- E.M.P, so all vehicles on the map become useless. Or you set one up in certain place and helis can't go there.
- Dynamic Environments: different liquid types, springs that constantly leak water, volcanoes that constantly spew out fire, unique terrain pieces like moving bridges, hospitals that heal per turn
- Railgun: does great long range sniper damage but its damage up close is crap and gets better the further away you are. this keeps skill involved and prevents noobs from using it at point blank range
- Revolver: like Handgun, give it a random chance that one of the six bullets will be a hollow tip and do extra damage or maybe even an explosive round
- Some kind of special weapon named after Andy Davidson... some goofy strike or something kinda like the MB bomb
- Acid Flasks: does light damage to a worm for maybe 3 rounds, but is extremely effective at melting through terrain. kinda like a Molotov only different. it should continuously burn through terrain until it hits water at the bottom.
- Mind Control: kinda like a lightning strike, but if a worm is under "X" hp, you can take the worm over and add it to your team, or it could even make that worm have AI control for the next round and it will target a worm on its own team with that crazy AI accuracy
- Split Personality: you can clone your worm. say you have a worm that has 100 hp. use split personality and now you have 2 worms at 50 hp.
- Increased Gravity: kinda like low grav, only in reverse, and instead of being functional during your turn, its active during the next turn.
- Oil Flasks: doesn't actually do any damage, but it spreads oil which can be ignited
- Freeze Ray: freezes any worm(s) for 1 round and makes them invincible while frozen <-- that's already a thing in Unlimited
- RPG-based leveling system or ELO system
- Magic Carpet: kinda like a jetpack, only it lasts for 2 turns and when the turn ends you stay floating in air
- Force Field: kinda like the current protective shield (from Worms 4 Mayhem), only larger and enemy worms can't enter it. it shouldn't last for long of course.
- Lightsaber: it should be a super melee weapon that does 100 damage.
- satellite with a laser coming out of it (It's one of the posters of Worms WMD)
- Alchemical Fire: kinda like Petrol Bomb, only purple fire and lasts forever.
- Slingshot: long range gun-type weapon that does damage and if done perfectly and over a long enough distance, can stun the worm for 1 round like a knockout
- The bowling ball from ProjectX: It's a physics based weapon that rolls and does moderate damage, but knocks worms pretty far
- Reinforcements: you can airlift in a worm with low hp anywhere on the map... but maybe make it difficult like Boggy B
- Boggy B from Worms Revolution
- Animal strike: a strike that drops animals... moles, ferrets, cows, sheep, skunks, pigeons, etc... just a random "wtf" strike
- Some sort of comms interceptor utility that lets you see private team messages for a couple of rounds
- Golf Club: like the baseball bat, only its arc is much higher and shorter.. used for launching a worm up and over terrain to their death
- Sticky mines from Hedgewars: you throw it and it sticks, and acts as a mine after that. proximity based
- The lightning strike can heal or hurt instead of resurrecting
- Worms charms: can have expanded modes in addition to lucky or unlucky
- Area of effect utility like the magnet which influences gravity instead of magnetism
- High or low gravity within the radius of the "wormhole"
- Make every weapon be over-customizable, like it was in Worms 2
- Homing Cluster Bomb from Worms 2
- Old Man: instead of the old woman, this weapon is just placed somewhere and is inert and acts senile until a worm comes within a certain proximity of it. it then starts shuffling towards the worm and has a fairly long timer, so it can be scary, like running from a zombie
 - Option to a health crate healing a worm that collected, but not remove poison or cure only the one who collected it
- Lightning Storm: Causes an outbreak of lightning strikes to occur
_ Booby Trapped Crates like in Worms 2

EDIT1: I told you there's more to come! Sudden Death twists! 15 of them
- Water rise from left and right
- an Air Strike will fall, somewhere randomly on the map, each time all the turns have ended
- Ebola outbreak: worms die and their health doesn't stay at 1
- Random donkey fall
- Null gravity
- Theme depenant events: for e.g. hawain style, a vulcano would errupt; Mexican style, a gaint boulder a la indiana jones style; City like style, a car would run over worms, followed by a police chase; or Windows 2000 where it would suddenly crash to blue screen xD
- Earth Quake after each turn
- The gravity gets weaker and weaker so you're mortality rate is becoming less while trying to kill the other worms at zero gravity
- Mass crate shower of Super Weapons
- Armageddon each time all the turns have ended
- Full Wormage: All weapons become available in unlimited quantity
- Remaining team slots will be filled with full AI 5 teams
- When crates appear, there is 25% chance that an oil drum will appear instead of a crate that will explode on terrain contact
- One single random meteorite of the Armageddon every turn.
- Rain: water still rises but you also have a steady stream of drops that cause worms to slide towards low spots. Then random lightning strikes can go off as well between rounds.
« Last Edit: March 27, 2016, 09:43 AM by TheMadCharles »

Offline Bamboy

Re: A Spiritual Successor to W:A
« Reply #14 on: March 27, 2016, 09:55 AM »
Thanks for the reply Charles! Here are a few of my thoughts...
  • Unfortunately anything having to do with liquids is going to require a decent amount of programming. If liquids happen it will be a later on feature once most other major features have been implemented.
  • Gravity being used offensively would be really annoying I would think, and there would not be good counterplay against it. I will play with this idea.
  • Magnets - I'm in favor of implementing magnets such as was done in Reloaded. Having magnets interact with worms directly is a bit much, I would think.
  • Being able to create new worms, change team alliances and related things sounds cool, if used in moderation.
  • ELO/Ranking system - Yes! Absolutely! I want to integrate what the W:A community already does into the game as much as possible. However I do not possess the knowledge to implement such a system into the out of game dedicated server that would be required to hold the player rankings...
  • Sticky mines are already an idea I had. (I swear, I didn't know that Hedgewars had them!)
  • Hospital - I had an idea of a destroyable, placeable object that healed all worms at the end of every turn within a radius.
  • Alchemical Fire - Would be cool but this weapon would have to be limited so as to not cover the entire map in flame.
  • Lightsaber - Melee super weapon that instantly kills any worm? Yes please.
  • Health crate poison removal - Adding to my scheme settings list...
  • Golf club - Can't you just aim the bat upwards?
  • Harmful Physics - Already planned to some extent.
  • Vehicles - I would think that vehicles would be so powerful that they would distract from the actual game, much like the smash ball in Brawl. Vehicles would also limit the strategic choices of any occupant. It sounds like a dumb idea overall. We will see how WMD does.
  • Buildings - I didn't understand why they were a thing in WMD until you mentioned the spy plane giving visibility. I think that buildings individually would be more or less pointless due to their limited size. I would be in favor of an overall RTS style fog of war for the map rather than only having visibility limited in small areas.
  • Force field - I would be in favor of a destroyable, placeable object that only blocks incoming projectiles and bullets, but still allowed you to shoot outward from inside of it.
  • Sniper Rife - Yeah! I also want to vastly increase the utility of Laser Sight to show arcs of launcables and throwables. Maybe even give multiple "levels" of laser sight so at level 1 you could see arcs, level 2 you could see impact points and explosion radiuses, and so on. Use all your laser sights in a single turn to be super accurate or spread them out using only one a turn.
  • Weapon Customizability - I am all for this however I am planning on having certain limits to how much you can customize each weapon. For the sake of weapon reliability for players who are new to a scheme, I want the basic functionality of a weapon to remain a constant. TNT will always explode, cluster bombs will always create clusters, Bazooka is always effected by gravity and wind, Sheep is always super unreliable, exc.

    In order to grant users additional flexibility to create entirely new weapons with different strategies, I am thinking of having a separate category of scheme weapons that are 100% user defined. This would allow newer players to know what to expect. How exactly I am going to implement these is something I have yet to figure out.
  • Booby trapped crates is something I've already written down.
  • Sudden death options - Oh man these are so varied... I like a lot of these ideas. Will think about how to possibly even include user defined sudden death events rather than code each one of these options individually.

I am going to try to get a following together on a website that is currently otherwise not being used. I will still post updates and discuss things here but everything will be much more manageable on its own forum. http://excelsion.org/forum/asteroidians-the-spiritual-successor-f48.html
Asteroidians, the spiritual successor. Download on Itch.io:
https://bamboy.itch.io/asteroidians

Asteroidians Discord: https://discord.gg/Hk4Dsdq

Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/Bamboy360