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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DRaSc.png)
INTRODUCTION:
Hello TeamLiquid! I work with a team of four programmers known as qMopey, and we're developing a free casual-style RTS called Ancient Forest and Grumpy Monsters (AFGM). In AFGM the players plays as a forest that fights a faction known as the Grumpy Monsters. The Grumpy Monsters are corrupting the land, and it's up to the player to prevent the spread of this corruption by expanding the forest!
I figure since most all of you enjoy RTS games that you'd enjoy playing our RTS as well 
ABOUT qMopey:
qMopey is a team of four programmers that are currently attending DigiPen IT that are developing the game Ancient Forest and Grumpy Monsters. This game is our second semester project. The game was coded in C using a DigiPen in-house DirectX library. The only functionality used from this library was loading images into memory, and displaying them on screen -even mesh creation is handled by our team. The team consists of:
- Anh Do
- Kevin Giang
- Colton DeGraw
- Randy Gaul (CecilSunkure)
+ Show Spoiler [Dev Details : Credits] +
Anh Do - Graphics programming; art assets; Team Manager (Producer)
Colton DeGraw - Tools programming; Programmer
Kevin Giang - Designer; level/unit roster design; Programmer
Randy Gaul - Tech Lead; Programmer
THE GAME:
The whole idea of the game is to play as an ancient magical forest to fight off a faction of Grumpy Monsters! Placing down tree structures is the main mechanic. These structures act as defensive towers, spawn creatures of the forest, and spread purification on the land to counteract the corruption from the Grumpy Monsters.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/ZcWcP.png) Gameplay screenshot of corruption and purified land.
In order to gather resources you must place down tree structures underneath the rays of the sun. Each tree placed on a tile with a cute little sun gives the player an income boost.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/5kaUB.gif) Aren't the sunrays absolutely adorable?
As the player progresses through the campaign levels new Monsters are introduced, and new tech available for the Forest to equip against the Monsters becomes apart of the player's toolset. Here are some images of various units and sprite art from within the game!
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/8qArG.png) ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/XUOj1.png) A couple previews of Grumpy Monsters!
Seeing as this game is an RTS I'm sure all of you TLers are ganna love playing it :D Do come back to the thread and let us know what you thought! Go ahead and create your own custom scenarios with the map editor and share them in this this thread. Create your own CA files to run during your custom scenarios too!
MAP EDITOR
Our game comes with a built-in map editor. The awesome thing about our map editor is how easily it allows us to create new levels. The best thing however, is that the user can create and play their own levels very easily. You could even modify the scenario levels that come with the game and play them to your own liking!
To load, edit, and play a map:
- Click on Load and choose a file.
- Edit the map to your liking!
- Click on Play and save your modified file over the one you originally loaded.
Features of the editor include:
- Place unit
- Place Structure
- Set tile settings
- Right click for tile coordinate
- Save and load map files
- Launch loaded map file into gameplay for a Custom Match
- Easy resize of map dimensions
Map files (aka scenario files) have the file extension .afs. afs stands for Ancient Forest Scenario. A more detailed explanation of the Map Editor and its features is in your readme folder of your installation.
NOTE: You can even modify the campaign scenarios! You can also create/modify CA files for the scenarios too 
SCRIPTING EVENTS
Ancient Forest and Grumpy Monsters employs a scripting language called Condition Action (CA) developed by qMopey that allows for simple event based actions to be implemented during the running of a map file. The idea is that you can create multiple events with the scripting language in a text file. Then the game will load this text file and parse the contents into actions to take while the game is running.
An event in CA is a list of conditions and a list of actions. The conditions of an event are a list of checks the game makes during gameplay, if all of these checks pass then the actions are fired.
For example say you want to destroy the Grumpy Monsters Castle if the player builds 15 trees. Perhaps the idea of your level is that the player rushes to build many trees before dieing. This is very easy with CA. You create an event that holds one condition and one action. This condition checks to see if the player has at least 15 trees at any given time, and when this condition is met your action of destroying the Grumpy Monsters is then fired!
Here's a small example CA file used in the past for testing, this CA file creates a main tree when the game starts:
START NUM_EVENTS: 1
# CREATES MAIN TREE AT GAME START #
EVENT PRESERVE 1
NUM_CONDITIONS: 1
CONDITION ELAPSED_TIME
AT_LEAST 0
NUM_ACTIONS: 1
ACTION CREATE_UNIT_AT
PLAYER_MAINTREE_OBJ 0 0
END
This CA language allows for interesting levels to be created very easily! A more detailed explanation of the CA language can be found in the readme in your installation. CA files have the .CA file extension.
FEEDBACK:
We would absolutely love to hear any feedback from anyone who plays the game! Be it about art, programming, gameplay, whatever! Post up here in this forum Feel free to share map files with one another, CA scripts, anything!
Please also take a moment to complete our survey: LINK
This survey helps our team gather valuable information about the game!
FAQ:
- Will this work on my MAC?
- Windows only
- Hitting the ESC key closes (or breaks, or w/e) my game!
- The ESC key is required by DP (I think) to exit the game for game projects. Don't press it!
- Will there by multiplayer?
- I don't know anything about networking, I'm a second semester student
- My resolution is really bad. It's all fuzzy and hard to read anything.
- This seems to be an issue with the DirectX library I was given for this project. The problem is likely GPU related, and I actually have rasterization warping in my images a little bit as well, despite having a high end GPU.
TRIVIA
- 21786 lines of code
- 220 source files
- 1 million hours of work
- All art was created by programmers on the team who actually get no class credit for the art
- Anh Do is terrible at the game Lol
DOWNLOAD:
LINK
CHANGELOG:
4/22/2012 V1.01
-Can now load a map properly.
-Attempted to fix spawning bug.
-Fixed issue with saving a map and overwriting without confirmation of destructive action.
-Map editor now displays mouse position X and Y coordinates in tiles. This is really useful for making a CA file as it's hard to know what tile to do what action at without the new display.
-Fixed a bug when launching a custom game. Monster AI[balanced] was always turned on. This should be off so the user can use CA properly.
-Can now see version in the bottom left of main menu.
 
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.... i can't even beat the tutorials.
rofl nvm i figured out how to make trees. so much easier now. :D
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first response is awesome xD Haven't played it yet but it was just hilarious to read :D
thanks for work on the game :D
You gonna be doing full time video game progamming then? (and i assume if you can make it you'll still try to go for progaming :D)
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Hrm. just played around with it some time. After beating level 2 (Yeah, I´m THAT awesome) I thought to myself :"Hey, this is way to easy, lets look at the last level". Wether I would have beaten it (probably not :D ) will never be known, because the game closed without any warning when I pressed ESC. Thinking to myself : "Hey, he wants me to test around a little, perhaps this is intended". So I loaded up level 3 , started planting a few trees, pressed ESC.... and the game stopped reacting (responding ? Don´t know how that Windows error is worded in the english version". As I can be stubborn if I´m not to lazy to be stubborn (rather rare though), I tried again, and again : The game stops working for me when I hit the ESC key :D
Otherwise its kind of funny. And with a lot "small games" with rather simple graphics probably frustratingly hard in the later levels, hehe.
Will probably try to play a little bit more tonight, have to leave for now
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Fun game. The dark tower on level 6 is so hard to kill TT. Also, flying owls ftw.
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Just downloaded, looks fun i might only play it for a little but it looks like a game where ill come back right away and play it more!
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I enjoy this games simplicity very much, only at level 3 but i am going to beat this sooner or later. also it looks hard thanks for this awesome game!
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I'm at work so i can't check it out atm, but from your description it sounds like a Tower Defense, not an RTS. Would be nice if you could clarify that. Are you building units or just trees to defend?
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So far my plan has just been:
EOH_DD
D_O_DD
EOH_DD
X _O_DD
EOH_DD
D_O_DD
EOH_DD
with X being main tree, O being Flying Owls, H being healers, _ being blank space, and D being upgraded turrets. Just defend and wait for the flying owls to kill them eventually. :D
On April 19 2012 17:25 Morfildur wrote:
I'm at work so i can't check it out atm, but from your description it sounds like a Tower Defense, not an RTS. Would be nice if you could clarify that. Are you building units or just trees to defend?
It's a passive RTS in the same vein as Majesty
You control the building of structures, and they passively create units and/or do other things. The units act of their own accord, though you have slight control over what happens. Yes, it feels very much like tower defense, but it's more strategic and there's lots more than just defensive turrets. so... it's a combination of RTS and sim games (like zoo tycoon?)
Cecil, is there a multiplayer for this in the works? :D
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On April 19 2012 17:27 Fishgle wrote:So far my plan has just been: EOH_DD D_O_DD EOH_DD X _O_DD EOH_DD D_O_DD EOH_DD with X being main tree, O being Flying Owls, H being healers, _ being blank space, and D being upgraded turrets. Just defend and wait for the flying owls to kill them eventually. :D Show nested quote +On April 19 2012 17:25 Morfildur wrote:
I'm at work so i can't check it out atm, but from your description it sounds like a Tower Defense, not an RTS. Would be nice if you could clarify that. Are you building units or just trees to defend? It's a passive RTS in the same vein as MajestyYou control the building of structures, and they passively create units and/or do other things. The units act of their own accord, though you have slight control over what happens. Yes, it feels very much like tower defense, but it's more strategic and there's lots more than just defensive turrets. so... it's a combination of RTS and sim games (like zoo tycoon?) Cecil, is there a multiplayer for this in the works? :D
Sounds to me like a tug of war game, similar to the Nexus Wars map in SC2.
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really fun game awesome
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pretty fun game, wish it had more building choices though
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Updated the DL link with a new version. Various bugfixes and small tweaks based on user-feedback.
On April 20 2012 01:17 Endymion wrote:
pretty fun game, wish it had more building choices though
Like what? If you tell me about them they might make their ways in.
On April 19 2012 16:30 Yoshi Kirishima wrote:
first response is awesome xD Haven't played it yet but it was just hilarious to read :D
thanks for work on the game :D
You gonna be doing full time video game progamming then? (and i assume if you can make it you'll still try to go for progaming :D)
Haha yeah I'll be programming for quite a few years
Progaming.. We'll see, for now I'm chillin top of masters as GM shut me out I'll be more active though now that school ending for summer semester!
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Rawrr! Glad to see everyone is liking it <- Colton DeGraw
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Okay, back to testing : I get this one when I click on mission 11 :
+ Show Spoiler +
Any idea what could cause it ?
I also had the problem (in the version I downloaded 10 hours ago) that pausing and clicking on "restart" would often break the game (no reaction anymore). Dunno if that was fixed or not already, or if you know it already. Worked around it with just going to the main menu from the pause screen and starting the mission from there.
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On April 20 2012 03:55 Espelz wrote:Okay, back to testing : I get this one when I click on mission 11 : + Show Spoiler +Any idea what could cause it ? I also had the problem (in the version I downloaded 10 hours ago) that pausing and clicking on "restart" would often break the game (no reaction anymore). Dunno if that was fixed or not already, or if you know it already. Worked around it with just going to the main menu from the pause screen and starting the mission from there.
Ah thanks for the post. I'm fixing up both crash cases
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Great game! I really like the mechanics... even though you dont really control the units it can be rather hectic! :D I came to report the lvl 11 bug but seems like someone else already did!
Edit: When uninstalling it doesn't delete the desctop icon created. Not a big deal but should be done.
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On April 20 2012 04:09 Dirkzor wrote:
Great game! I really like the mechanics... even though you dont really control the units it can be rather hectic! :D I came to report the lvl 11 bug but seems like someone else already did!
Edit: When uninstalling it doesn't delete the desctop icon created. Not a big deal but should be done.
Thanks for the post! I'll look into the icon thing.
New version is up with those crashfixes! Seems a simple error between a couple new updates that weren't foreseen. Crashes related to the issue should now be resolved
+ Show Spoiler [Tech info on crash] +The crash was caused by statements that send output to stdout. However the stdout stream was directed towards a console that is only used in debug, and this debug console had recently been disabled for release but not properly tested. Thus when a statement was sent to stdout during the release, in odd cases a crash would occur. These output statements have been placed within compile switches now.
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I've just reinstalled (after my last post) and then I completed lvl 11. After completion it crashed. Ill try again and come back to you =)
I'm still loving the game, so just trying to help out =)
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On April 20 2012 04:22 Dirkzor wrote:
I've just reinstalled (after my last post) and then I completed lvl 11. After completion it crashed. Ill try again and come back to you =)
I'm still loving the game, so just trying to help out =)
Try dling and installing again, I kinda jumped the gun saying I updated the OP. New link is up now though!
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WCS![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/soqJv.jpg)
