jovial-thunder

[jovial-thunder]

SSC + HORUS frames done!

Lancer Tactics v0.3.3 is live — we've finished off implementation for all SSC and HORUS mechs. Almost there!

Also ft. a second blog post that I broke off of the update bc it ended up being longer and more technical than I expected. Titled BRING YOUR BALOR TO WORK DAY; my lab notes as I implement the Balor frame traits.

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Spotter III madness

Goblin locks on to Archer.

Spotter III triggers, allows Deaths Head to make a quick action.

DH puppet systems the archer, consuming the lock.

Archer moves, proccing Overwatch from the Everest but NOT the DH because it now spends its reaction at the right time (when the puppet system confirms).

Everest overwatches.

Goblin's Autopod triggers from the DH having consumed the lock.

Autopod+walking armory knockback.

Getting all this working in the correct order and spending action points at the right times was very tricky; we can't spend the Spotter 3 quick + rxn until we've confirmed the target of whatever the resulting action was — they might cancel & pick something else. I'm proud of this one working as cleanly as it does.

Only six talent trees left 💪

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hi, I saw a post you made about your character creator menu a while back and I thought it was really neat how you had adjusted the standard picrew-style menu to give better previews. I want to build something similar (just as a picrew, not as part of something bigger), and I've got a basic idea of how I'd code it, but figured I'd ask, did you follow a tutorial at all to help code yours? and/or would you be willing to share some of your backend for it?

I'm very curious if my idea of how to achieve the same result is roughly the same backend as you've got, or something wildly different!

Sure! Here's the architecture diagram:

I know the diagram is probably not useful on its own... we were a little cute and call an entire portrait a "sandwich" which is made of of different "slices" (the eye slice, the outer_clothes slice). It follows the 3-layer system that I describe in this talk. The basic idea is something I call "the cycle between heaven and earth":

The lowest layer is all the nodes in Godot's scene tree. They're basically a browser DOM that don't store any data we want to keep; they're mortal and ephemeral. E.g. buttons, stuff drawn on the screen.

The middle "cores" layer are resources with almost no functionality; they're just data repositories meant to be serialized/deserialized.

The top layer has no state and its resources represents game content: collections of possible noses, hats, etc.

When data changes, I have "rerender" functions on most of my nodes that can be called to update themselves to whatever the current data is (rather than updating themselves piecemeal as specific things change). Similar to how React does it, if you're familiar.

To get that preview effect where everything is the same besides one thing, on every change I rerender all the buttons in that category with a copy of the current "main" core and then replace the one slice that particular button changes.

The cores serialize to JSON, and I store the slices as "slice_type: chosen_slice", the keys of which match up to the resources I defined in the top layer.

To define all the assets, we set up a file parser that goes through and automatically collects & sorts image files into different categories and with their front/back and big/small variations by file name:

I use this organization for both the portrait maker and the main game, so it's not specialized for doing picrews... I hope this is useful to you! Happy to answer any other questions you have about it.

[jovial-thunder]

Amazing bug report from itch where the goblin's Symbiosis+Metahook results in an infinite self-heat loop:

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Lancer Tactics, by Olive Perry, is an unofficial still in development mech tactic video game conversion of Lancer TTRPG by Massif Press, a simulationist game designed to let one play out Lancer against computer controlled opponents.

[jovial-thunder]

zen and the art of playing napoleon

or: how I learned to stop worrying and lose the sitrep

Meditate on the Napoleon. Approach it from all angles; theorycraft; you will not find purchase. Know this: all Napoleon builds would be better on a different frame. It is a smooth black river rock that defeats all attempts to play optimally.

"There's lots of bad meme-y builds in Lancer!", you say, "try making a melee Sherman!" — but no — attempt to do so, and you'll find synergies — you'll get something workable — you'll come to a satisfaction, and in that moment cease to play Lancer. One who dedicates themself to contemplating the Napoleon will play Lancer forever.

Fear not the Lancer who has spent a thousand years making ten thousand builds. Fear the Lancer who has spent a thousand years failing to make a single Napoleon.

[jovial-thunder]

PNG export for making VTT battlemaps will be coming in the next Lancer Tactics update! I'm still not happy with the elevation overlay, but it was satisfying to put in a relatively small amount of work to enable an exciting new use for the game.

[jovial-thunder]

🦴☠️ Lancer Tactics "bones" done! ☠️🦴

The first fully public early access build for Lancer Tactics is live! We got 2 mechs per manufacturer, 2 sitreps, a handful of NPCs, and a tutorial. I'm still tweaking the new itch page, but you can get it here:

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New Lancer Tactics backer update is up, ft a new public build, estimated production timeline, and new narrative director.

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Important Bird Area

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tests go brrrrr

I started (somewhat dangerously) using a persistent 5x5 world for my automated tests instead of tearing it down and creating a new one for each test. This has literally halved the time it takes to run the whole suite and has the added bonus of making the run infinitely more fun to watch.

[jovial-thunder]

Terrain autotiling ~

Lookat this neat voxel shader I got working! It pulls textures across voxel boundaries to break up the minecraftyness of the maps & gives all the terrain types free autotiling.

I'm pretty proud of figuring it out; each voxel only has two colors you can pass in as unique information, so I packed as much information into those 192 bits as possible.

For reference, a single number between 0-1023 takes up 10 bits, so I had space to send in only about 16 numbers — 19 if I really pushed it by breaking up a number across multiple color channels. The surface, edge, mask, and 8 surrounding textures took up 11 of those, and the rest were things like mask rotation and "am I a top/bottom block" flags.

(I was working with only one color that I could pass in until I discovered that I could hijack a second which doubled my bandwidth. 'twas a christmas miracle 😌).

Preemptive-optimization-wise, the shader also only has two texture reads (the mask & the texture) and no if statements. Very happy with how this turned out both technically and artistically.

[jovial-thunder]

Lancer Tactics monthly update!

Big update this month, including an new public build (0.2.0). Here are some images from it with no context:

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Working on the instant action screen. There's something nostalgic about a floating slowly spinning 3D map in a menu.

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i think i could be trusted with The Book That Kills People from the classic manga series "No One Can Be Trusted With Power Of The Book That Kills People" imho

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"This is a land of monsters and you are one of them." Announcing a TTRPG project, "Monster Egg" which takes place in a world like PMD with rules on how to generate playable monsters to delve dungeons and settle the restless dreams of the God of creation

Demo coming soon to my itch.io It'll use an OSR-like system close to Mausritter or Cairn

[jovial-thunder]

mechs go spinny

@gentrigger's mech sprites continue to be the beating heart of the game, so I'm excited to have a new license picker that'll highlight them!