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Athena is a turn-based strategy game about building cities and outposts, training armies and more builders, and defeating your opponents. Building your settlements plays a central role, and you are allowed great freedom in how you do so.

Instead of simply building a city center a fixed number of add-on buildings, you are given a set of road tiles which can be placed anywhere. All other buildings must be placed alongside these road tiles. This lets you build many small outposts, a single large city, or anything in between and in any shape you want.

The terrain is also highly dynamic. You may build structures such as causeways over water or bridges over rivers. This also means your enemies could be building their way across any body of water to execute a sneak attack at any time!

The game is written in ANSI C with a minimum of middleware, and has been ported to several OSes. It uses all original graphics and audio. It has a custom graphics renderer and image loading system supporting png and tga images, and uses the opus audio format.

A somewhat detailed description of gameplay can be found at https://github.com/FlyingJester/AthenaTBS/wiki

The engine and assets are open source. They can be found at https://github.com/FlyingJester/AthenaTBS

The current status of the source on github is:

Latest Blog

Many Bug Fixes, X11 Graphics Working

Current commit is:
58d7784


I've finished a number of new improvements to the game. I've removed the very complex sprite masking system and replaced it with simple colored bases for units, fixed the X11 graphics system, and in the process fixed a bunch of graphics system crashes that mainly appeared when using the Unix/X11 graphics system (but could occasionally happen under any platform).

The biggest difference between the game right now and before is that units no longer have masked areas drawn over them to display their team. Instead, a colored outline of the tile they are standing on is colored based on their team. This is a much simpler system, and while the idea of fully color masked sprites sounds much bettter, it simply did not look very good. Maybe my sprites just aren't the best for it.

I've finally fixed the X11 backend to properly work. As it turns out, the issue is that 24-bit color on X11 still uses 32-bits per pixel. The alpha channel is just ignored :/ In any case, using X11 directly that makes the Linux and FreeBSD builds run MUCH smoother. They can top out at almost 300 FPS where they used to barely get 100 FPS. It also makes the executable smaller, and cuts down on dependencies on Linux and FreeBSD.

In the process of fixing the X11 backend, a huge number of flaws in the graphics system were uncovered. Many of them had the capability to case crashes under any graphics backend, but always crashed under X11. Most of them related to unimplemented clipping functions, which were actually doing no clipping at all. As a result, we were drawing outside the actual framebuffer. Fortunately, this was easily fixed.

I've also fixed a number of issues where it is hard or impossible to select the unit you want to use to move or attack, and I still need to fix not being able to attack the unit you want to. In the first case, it simply required adding a selection menu to choose which unit you want to select when there are two on the same tile. Sounds simple, but I had to do a lot of work to the menu system to make that possible! The solution to the second issue will be to enforce proper attack priorities in the server. There can be a maximum of two units on a single tile: one or zero units and one or zero buildings. If there are both, you must attack the unit first. This is currently not enforced, and so any attack is directed at the newest unit on the tile.

At that point, the actual combat system will be mostly roughed in, and I can begin to shape up the building system.
  • Production
  • FlyingJester
  • Custom
  • Strategy
  • 10/21/2015 12:02 AM
  • 03/16/2016 09:27 PM
  • N/A
  • 11554
  • 11
  • 0

Posts

Pages: 1
Ratty524
The 524 is for 524 Stone Crabs
12986
Going to admit that the your game title makes me think of that abysmal SNK platformer with the bikini-clad heroine and the same name.

Yours looks interesting, though!
I'm looking forward to this game's release. I love strategy and simulation games.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
Just letting you know that I'm hoping to be able to play this. I'm one of your subscribers.
Pages: 1