Today we received a letter from Mr. Stephen Donaldson’s representatives who showed us green light for our request to use UR-vile in our game! We are very pleased to hear these great news and are truly grateful to Mr. Donaldson for his understanding in this matter.
UR-Vile’s sinister plans cannot be explained in detail – no spoilers here! But I can promise that he has a plot of his own which might intervene in Voudland’s King’s endeavors.
Following description is direct quote from Voudland lore:
“UR-Vile is sinister and mystical creature of whom very little is known about. There was a story told by a wandering rogue, which gave some light to his dark past. The rogue dropped a hint that UR-Vile might have escaped the maze of Yendor and could be one of Yendor’s creations, but in fact the matter might the opposite. UR-Vile might be even older than Yendor and might have something to do with the very existence of Dungeons of Doom. Very few have encountered him and lived to tell about it. UR-Vile is able to cast necromantic spells and has black flesh that no light can gleam off.”
Juha wanted animated burning VOUDS logo for the teaser video. He asked if we could pre-render it on top of static background, which would have worked, but was way too limiting for my taste. So, I started to play around with Cocos2D-x RenderTexture. It works fine for rendering, but is way too slow for recording images at 60 fps. By using RenderTexture and saving each frame immediately to PNG file my MacBook Pro (2013) achieved 10 – 15 fps speed. Needless to say it did not look good enough for 60 fps video.
Next I created simple threaded consumer – producer system and added my own CustomCommand to the rendering queue. Threading allowed me to save frames into list and process them out of the Cocos main thread, keeping rendering at steady 60 fps. I also integrated lodepng – open source PNG encoder/decoder – with which I encoded and saved the frames as fast as possible in the consumer thread.
With these simple arrangements I managed to capture PNG images with alpha channel (for transparency) in good resolution and at constant 60 frames per second speed. The end result was 600 PNG images consuming almost 400 Mega bytes of space for ten seconds video. Below, one frame from the final image set. Looks great, doesn’t it? (Click the image to see it in full resolution).
Please, watch teaser video and see how good it looks in live action.
Official Teaser Movie Released and Some Afterthoughts of NGDC2017
I am proud to introduce the official VOUDS – The Bloody Wars Teaser Movie and The Theme Song: King Frog! The tune rocks like beast. Also introducing the dance moves of three of the main characters King Frog, King Wolf and King Moon. Just can’t beat those steps!
The Nordic Game Discovery Contest is now behind and it was a blast, literally. Pitching the game in short notice was almost unbearably exciting, but the audience responded well and we got lots of valuable feedback from the judges. But not all of it was that easy to reconcile one self to. It was quite a roast =D
The judges pointed out that our business model needed clarification, which was true and we have been working on that quite hard. VOUDS being a remake carries all of the design features of the past with it and it is not that easy to adopt the new microtransaction policies to it. One thing that got some of the judges quite upset was our planned target group of gamers. Of course we are planning to direct VOUDS to everybody but mainly to retro gamers who have warm feelings of the Amiga era. One particular notion kept on echoing in my head when a judge said that “It is pointless to target 40+ people since they are going to die soon!” Well, eventually we are all going to die, so why not die playing VOUDS – The Bloody Wars with a happy smile on Your face!
Our design philosophy has always been to make games that we love to play and to our point of view our games have to stand out for their own greatness, playability and entertaining values. We do not believe in designing games in order to maximize the profits. That said, a some reasonable compensation for our 25-year efforts is expected, but we try to keep the price tag low and offer a fair deal to gamers who love to play for the sake of playing.
Special thanks goes to John Romero. It was a great privilege to receive constructive feedback from him as well as from all the other judges too, but Romero kindly gave some suggestions for our release options. He also introduced us to Spiderweb Software which many of you may already know as being dedicated to making terrific games but also for their customer support and money-back guarantee. Maybe their approach would suit us too…
Other important notice considered the UI. One of the judges was clearly with us (thanks for the slogan: Play until You die), but he pointed out that text based buttons in UI were maybe a little too old school. This remark led to some very constructive discussion later between I and Make resulting a decision the make a TOTAL REWORK FOR THE WHOLE UI! We have now re-designed all of the UI buttons to work with icons instead of text. Also the whole graphic scheme has been changed to a some what more appealing and theme oriented look. Please take a look at the mockup below and decided if it is for the better. Any comments and feedback would be very welcome. Stay in touch!
We have been busy implementing new interesting special events to the game. Without spoiling the excitement, I just wanted to mention that scripted quest engine bends really well to all kind of twists and turns which Juha has scripted. We also revamped encounter user interface to support richer story telling that the new events contain.
Stay tuned, I guarantee you will love these changes.
WE are happy (and also terrified) to announce that VOUDS: The Bloody Wars was selected as a heat finalist in Nordic Game Discovery Contest at the Northern Game Summit 2017. We will be presenting the game concept to a live audience 5 October at 11:20-12:20 – at the Bio Rex room at the venue (Kauppakatu 38, 87100 Kajaani). And now off to work with our keynote presentation… no hurry, just sheer PANIC!
We added some screenshots and a game play movie of the development version. Things have been been moving on lately at a steady pace. We have also been busy with some new animation. So now introducing – King Wolf’s dance moves!
More animation is under way. Hopefully soon King Frog and King Moon will too step on the stage. We are currently familiarizing ourselves with new software, so some patience is still needed.
And what would be dancing without music? The title track – King Frog – is just about to be published. Just a few tweaks to the mix and we will have a rocking time! Stay tuned!
Bloodwars: Part one – The Vouds was a turn based fantasy strategy game on the Amiga platform. It saw first light in the beginning of 1990’s and was last distributed as a public domain beta in the Aminet in 1997. Before that the game had got some attention around the world by downloaders. However, the development was halted and original authors left the project.
Now Bloodwars is coming back with the original developers and this time on mobile! During the years the authors had received positive feedback and even offers for volunteers to continue the project for them. Latest fan gameplay movie was uploaded to interwebs in 2016! Somehow the game just kept on living. This encouraged the team to re-group and start creating a up-to-date version of the game.
Mockup of the VOUDS: The Bloody Wars animated main menu.
Let’s hear the news from Jumahake Games programmer Make Turunen and pixel artist Jussi Valonen who are now finalizing the new version.
How did the Bloodwars project begin?
Screenshot of the latest version
– I remember that one day at school, we were in college back then, Make told that he had something to show to us, says Valonen. Pete Määttä and I went to his home and he had coded a simple demo that had two castles where one could buy an army unit and move to attack the other castle. It was mind blowing! We were into all kinds of fantasy strategy games, table tops, RPG’s and 4x strategy games like Civilization and Master of Orion, but none of us had made any games by ourselves. The most played game in our gang or should I say a cult…
– Cthulhu Freaks, adds Turunen!
–Yes a cult you could call it, agrees Valonen.
– We played that hard, says Turunen with a weird grin on his face. But the biggest hit with us was Warlords. It was simple enough for everybody to learn and had multilayer that was essential to us.
– And man, did we play that game. I remember a session that lasted 18 hours with no breaks, Valonen sighs. Warlords was great but it had some really annoying features like the pace. It was so slow and the graphics were terrible.
– So when I got more experienced with coding we decided to make a game of our own, Turunen adds.
Where did the name Bloodwars came from? Why was it changed in the new version?
– I can’t recall for sure, but I think the letters B and W came from the idea to make Better Warlords. Naturally we could not use that so the name evolved to Bloodwars. Since we abandoned the project there have been at least three similar named games so we decided to avoid any hassle, states Turunen.
– And we did have blood on the field, says Valonen. When you lost a combat a puddle of blood was left behind.
– Bloodwars was ment to be the first part of a longer series of fantasy strategy games. We have had several attempts to claim that promise during the past two decades with no success. The new name VOUDS: The Bloody Wars revives that promise. There might be more to come…
What was it that made Bloodwars better fantasy strategy game than Warlords?
– Well, all the credit to Warlords, but it was too limited, says Valonen. Since we had no experience in video game design we used Warlords as an inspiration and tried to build on that. Luckily we had Pete who is a regular wizard-of-oz when it comes to gaming mathematics. He was able to tell us how the combat calculations were made in games by just playing them. So we started out with a few simple formulas from which Make build the algorithms. At the first stages we added a lots of different units and tried to balance the game. Very soon Make coded a map maker software that I used to create more maps to choose from. More features started to creep in. Players could make alliances with each other and hire mages that could cast spells…
– And scripted events, says Turunen. Warlords did have ruins to explore, but we added some background story to them. There were multiple choice questions by which players could react to an encounter. Basically every choice had several weighed random outcomes so the player couldn’t be sure which reaction was the best. Events had more replay value this way.
– Main reason for adding scripted events was that in Warlords or any other fantasy strategy game where players conquer land or castles the game is actually over when one player gets a lead. Resources get stockpiled. We wanted a game that everyone wants to play until the end. So we called for Balrog, Valonen smiles. I remember a game, where I had all the castles and there was only one event left to explore. Pete rushed for it and of course Balrog joined him. With that one army he started to raze and burn my keeps to the ground and eventually I lost the game.
What about this new version, is it a faithful remake?
– It has been over 20 years and the game was still remembered, wonders Turunen! It was about time that we did something about it. I thought that Bloodwars would adapt nicely to touch screen.
– We were already running the first tests when we made a search for games of this genre and found them almost non-existent nowadays, says Valonen. Naturally we found that there was a Warlords remake. Personally I think It did capture the authentic feel of the original, In good and in bad. What we wanted to do was to maintain the feel of the original Amiga game but add some modern features to it.
Valonen continues – It was clear that we would scale up the original graphics without any blending so that the look and feel would stay exactly the same. We are using only 16×16 pixel sprites, which is the same as it was in the original. One might think that this is pure madness these days! I personally love the challenge of minimalism. Let’s see how players will respond.
Entering The Cave Of Wonders
– Scripted events are still there, Turunen moves on. But the event engine got totally rewritten and is now more sophisticated. We found some fan made maps that were added to the game and some visual treat were created to give more boost to dragons.
– The original did not have any female characters so we added Amazons to fill the gap, Valonen explains. Well there were some hidden beauties for the most determined, but I am not too proud of them anymore. With this in mind, it might be wise to explain that we were hardly just eighteen when we created Bloodwars and some of the content came out a bit controversial. Times were also different. There was no graphic Internet back then and we had no idea that our game could survive this long. So some of the events and dialogue in the old version got self-censored in the new one. But the weird dialogue is still there. The game is still fun and as funny as the original was.
– All the old stuff is there, adds Turunen. And some very tasty new ones like The HYDRA. If you though that Balrog was the baddest you were so wrong…
– Not to mention the sound, Valonen points out. In Bloodwars there was only few sounds that we produced ourselves, the rest we really just borrowed somewhere. There wasn’t any background sound either. Now we have improved the quality of samples, re-recorded all of the old ones and added lots of new effects and sound schemes from quality freeware makers. I even composed and produced a title track King Frog, which rocks with heavy riffed beat that must be a huge hit among players, chuckles Valonen.
– Rocks like a Beast, laughs Turunen.
When VOUDS: The Bloody Wars fantasy strategy game coming out?
Game Developers Make Turunen and Jussi Valonen at a barbecue in the Finnish spring.
– Currently we are working on Windows, OS X, iOS and Android versions, tells Turunen. There might be more coming in the future, but these are now on the table. Single player and hot seat game types are almost finished and planning for the multiplayer mode has started. Hopefully we will see VOUDS: The Bloody Wars in AppStore and in GooglePlay at the end of the year 2017.
