Blog - Player Thoughts - Hillside Conquest

10th September 2019

As the insane number of games increases, so does the mailbag!

This week, let's take a look back at Hillside Conquest.
You can Play Hillside Conquest in the Browsercade.

@RSKGames

I have played Gorilla game in raylib games example, so I had an idea what to expect. Still I was surprised by the polish in ''Hillside Conquest'' implementation.

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Graphics:
The graphics rendering the grass over a very hilly terrain and clear separation of sky color between the player and the enemy is done very well. I liked the tank turret increasing or decreasing in size when the velocity is varied.

I needed a way to quickly tell the "power" of a shot. The turret's size seemed the easiest way to do this, and wasn't replaced for quite a while!!
The little dotted line wasn't actually added until the very last minute, and ... You'll probably notice it's not quite lined up properly with the turret!
I need to dig deep and figure out why that is!

Sometimes some patches of green and brown remain when the bullet takes a chunk out of the hillside.

Yeah, I tried my best to fix that, but.. grr...
The issue is being caused by Javascript/Canvas's odd quirk with Antialiasing.
Maybe there's a new method to shut off Antialiasing when drawing lines, but so far I haven't stumbled upon it.
I tried my best to reduce the "mess" that was being left behind, but..
.. Yeah, still happening.. :/

Gameplay:
The scoring system has made the game to last longer and more fun.

I'm quite happy with how the scoring worked out. I imagine that if I expand the game, with more players and the like, that I'll have to go back to a standard "Last Man Standing" style.
For now, though, I do like the scores.

The very first shot taken by the enemy tank mostly seems to be on the spot. If the player flies and falls on the same spot again and again then the enemy tank mostly wins. But when the player tank falls in a different place then the win odds are even.

I think I might have to tone down the AI a little. But given the game's score-based mechanic, rather than "win/lose", I thought it was a little more interesting to have the AI be a bit more powerful.
*shrugs*

Still the gameplay was fun. The tanks falling and settling correctly with good collision detection is something to learn from.
Only one time the player tank became totally upside down and the turret was unable to aim at the enemy tank.

I tried my best not to let the tanks stand inverted, but ... yeah, it does do that, sometimes!!
I might add a limit to the rotation of the tanks. That'll probably help, but then it might not always look as good on the landscape.

The death animation is very good. Can the message player won or lost be displayed on game over. Right now only when High score is achieved a special message is displayed.

Oh, yeah, forgot that!!
I'll add it in, in a jiffy.

Overall a technically sound and well polished game.

Glad you enjoyed it.

As I've said, I'd like to expand the game a little more in future, but for now, I'm happy with the way it turned out.

You can Play Hillside Conquest in the Browsercade.

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Player Thoughts , Browsercade

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