LÖVE

A mini clone of Advance Wars 2 made in löve2D.



Plan is not to recreate the whole game, but to capture the core, fun gameplay.

Outline of things to come:

• Unit control + movement (with different tile costs, movement types)
• Combat (with tile defences and CO stat modifiers)
• Capture buildings and recruit units
• Include a handful of COs (likely with just a CO power)
• win the game by defeating all units or capturing HQ
• basic opponent Ai

About the project: I am obsessed with strategy/tactics games - particularly those from the mid to late 90s and early 2000s. IMO that was a real golden age for the genre. I recently picked up my old game boy advance SP and thought 'what if'.

The aim here is to use this as learning project that I will work on slowly over a long period in my spare time (and by using existing gfx/sounds I can focus on the coding). Further in the future I plan to develop my own strategy games.


First playable demo is in the works...




Disclaimer: I dont own the copyright to the graphics and sounds imported from the game!

Looks like a great start!

I notice your road building results in a lot of "road squares", where 4 tiles in a square are all road. I ran into that with my own pet project when I was using A* pathfinding to build roads between cities. I came up with 2 ways to fix it:
1 - Lower the pathing cost of an already build road so that any later roads prefer to travel over it (rather than build next to it)
2 - After road building is done, scan the map for "road squares" and remove any unnecessary corners

I didn't research it much, so it's not necessarily the best way to deal with that issue.

I loved this game but the bots where so stupid.

I have already seen a an attempt of cloning this in another forum but the guy gave up at the point of adding enemy AI.
Best of luck here.

milon wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 4:41 pm Looks like a great start!

I notice your road building results in a lot of "road squares", where 4 tiles in a square are all road. I ran into that with my own pet project when I was using A* pathfinding to build roads between cities. I came up with 2 ways to fix it:
1 - Lower the pathing cost of an already build road so that any later roads prefer to travel over it (rather than build next to it)
2 - After road building is done, scan the map for "road squares" and remove any unnecessary corners

I didn't research it much, so it's not necessarily the best way to deal with that issue.

That's a useful tip for when I get to work on the random map generation, thanks! Will look a lot realistic without those squares haha.

BrotSagtMist wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 5:34 pm I loved this game but the bots where so stupid.

I have already seen a an attempt of cloning this in another forum but the guy gave up at the point of adding enemy AI.
Best of luck here.

Thank you for commenting sir.
Yes the ai is usually the hardest part of making games like this. I think even big budget strategy games rarely succeed in making Ai opponents challenging. Usually the Ai has certain advantages (e.g. bonus resources, or ability to see through fog of war) to balance the odds a bit. I'm looking forward to experimenting with it when I get there.

I have NEVER seen a good enemy AI before in any strategy/tactics game.
But Advance wars AI was exceptionally low, probably due to hardware limits?
So youre not under a lot of pressure here.

BrotSagtMist wrote: ↑Wed Sep 29, 2021 5:34 pm I loved this game but the bots where so stupid.

I second that, The only way they made them "harder" was by putting them in advantageous positions.

I have already seen a an attempt of cloning this in another forum but the guy gave up at the point of adding enemy AI.

Which forum/game engine?

Good question, cant remember.
Searching the usual places only returned _Tanks of freedom_, not sure if its that what was in my head.
Goddod engine, ugly sideway view *shiver*

Animated shorelines, rivers and city buildings added in.

The classic Deer Island map in all its glory:



Very satisfying to see all the 100s of rom-hacked tiles come to life.

Now on to populating the maps with tanks and troops...

Nice progress...