Dr. West (casual turn-based strategy)

[starinfidel]

Wow, 78 turns, winning the game and NO conflicts with the police? You're good, you're real good Mine usually involve heavy street fighting with variable success.

Thanks for the screens

[qubodup]

I was very confused by no police as well. Perhaps a bug?

What is supposed to cause a person to panic? seeing a corpse? (I always removed them when they appeared) or witnessing a murder as well? (in that case this might have been a bug.. I'll report if police activity is suspiciously low again.

PS: here's the link so you don't have to go to the first page http://starinfidel.co.cc/drwest/

[qubodup]

It happened again. http://ompldr.org/vODIzaQ

It might be the layout which made only few people be close to the lab.

Note: I was spending 30 or so rounds trying to have many corpses in the graveyard at once for a good start.

[starinfidel]

Humans are alerted when they witness fighting or murder - they have to be in 2 tiles radius. I lowered that from 3 in v2 so the game might become much easier in the process.

Oh yeah, and I also raised the radius of no-humans-zone to 2 from 1 on the initial human spawning. And made it so that the laboratory is always near the edge of the screen. So I think it all probably worked to making the game more easy and reliable.

[MCMic]

I had the same bug first time I played, no police.

[qubodup]

this probably shouldn't happen

[starinfidel]

yeah, i know about this one the game can occasionally generate a map with places like that. technically there's even a very small chance of completely unplayable map, but i can't do much about it.

[TheAncientGoat]

Ever thought about packaging your games for Android/iOS and making some bux out of it? ;P

[starinfidel]

You bet I did The main problem is that I don't own either of Android or iOS devices so I can't tweak the gameplay and UI to those. And I can't really imagine any of my games playable on smartphones. Tablets should be okay, though.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, and I tend to make heavy use of tooltips for some help and useful information. And I've no idea how to make that work on touchscreen devices.

[TheAncientGoat]

Well, they ported Angbad to Android Tooltips could be done by making the cursor controllable by an onscreen keypad, which should have the same hover behavior. You don't need an android device to make apps for it, the SDK includes an emulator (use Andriod Scripting Environment to make native Javascript+HTML apps). You could use http://www.appcelerator.com/products/ to port it as well, I think it provides emulators for both iOS and Android environments.

I could help test the Android build, but I don't think I'd have enough time to help actually port anything. But maybe!

[starinfidel]

> Well, they ported Angbad to Android

I have to see it to believe it's actually as playable and fun as it's desktop version

> Tooltips could be done by making the cursor controllable by an onscreen keypad, which should have the same hover behavior.

Could you explain that?

Also, shouldn't it work in the browser there already? I tried Android SDK before, sure, but it just wasn't the same thing

P.S. I vaguely recall having a conversation over email with some guy who played Evil Cult on iOS. And he actually managed to complete it though of course without node tooltips and having to scroll to see status etc it was pretty ugly.

[starinfidel]

Okay, I've done all the things I've wanted for v3, so it's up at the usual location: http://starinfidel.co.cc/drwest/

The main changes are:
* Quests support - I've built basic framework to make hard-coded quests into the game. Green ? appearing on the map should be the quest start markers. Keep in mind, that they will disappear after some time executing failure conditions.
* Random Events - from time to time a green ? will appear in the laboratory. It will probably be a random event with a chance of success and failure.
* Finite Police and Police Ending - the amount of police available at the police station is now finite (around 20 or so officers). This amount is displayed on the station itself and each time an officer dies, it goes lower. When all officers are dead, the game ends with victory - the town is now under the terror of the reanimated and no one can stop the doctor from his work.
* Town Panic - now when there is less than 30% or so of townspeople alive, the authorities will order the police on patrol. The police is a bit scared at that point and will only patrol areas close to the station. Incidentally this also solves the rare situation when theory is still lower than 10 but all townspeople are dead and player has to resort to waiting until fresh bodies are available at the cemetery.
* Image support - now all tiles and objects are stored in images making eventual graphics version possible.
* Smarter movement around obstacles - Small improvement but your reanimated are now less likely to stop unable to move around the corner.

Now I haven't found a solution to one problem - that is sometimes there are people too close to the lab (I generate them some distance away but it's sometimes not enough), so when reanimated kills one of them, others panic, call for help, police arrives and boom, game over. I wonder, what could I do to lure police away or make it go away or something else. Give me any ideas, folks.

There's also a different request - can anyone make some video playthroughs of the game? I need these to meditate upon My own playthroughs tend to be fairly the same - I build up some strength, then make an epic battle with the police and it usually ends there after some time with victory or defeat. Also it's hard to meditate while playing

EDIT: Oh, yeah, and I also wrote a blog post with some ramblings about these things. Feel free to check it out it if you're interested: http://starinfidel.blogspot.com/2011/04/dr-west-v3-is-here.html

[TheAncientGoat]

> Well, they ported Angbad to Android

I have to see it to believe it's actually as playable and fun as it's desktop version

It is! Esp. if you have a phone with a hardware keyboard

> Tooltips could be done by making the cursor controllable by an onscreen keypad, which should have the same hover behavior.

Could you explain that?

Overlay something like this, which moves a "cursor" over the tiles, instead of relying on having people click on specific tiles with their fingers.

Also, shouldn't it work in the browser there already? I tried Android SDK before, sure, but it just wasn't the same thing

P.S. I vaguely recall having a conversation over email with some guy who played Evil Cult on iOS. And he actually managed to complete it though of course without node tooltips and having to scroll to see status etc it was pretty ugly.

It does render, but input is impossible for Doctor West, at least on Android.

[starinfidel]

> Well, they ported Angbad to Android

I have to see it to believe it's actually as playable and fun as it's desktop version

It is! Esp. if you have a phone with a hardware keyboard

Overlay something like this, which moves a "cursor" over the tiles, instead of relying on having people click on specific tiles with their fingers.

Oh, now I see what you mean. That won't do that well in either BO or DW. That's good when you control a player moving around the world, but in both of these cases it would be clumsy like playing Civilization or Red Alert with a joypad (ever tried that on PS1 or SNES?)

Also, shouldn't it work in the browser there already? I tried Android SDK before, sure, but it just wasn't the same thing

P.S. I vaguely recall having a conversation over email with some guy who played Evil Cult on iOS. And he actually managed to complete it though of course without node tooltips and having to scroll to see status etc it was pretty ugly.

It does render, but input is impossible for Doctor West, at least on Android.

Hmm, must be some incompatibility with between the browsers.

[oberhamsi]

I like the new end screen! I did a silly play through were I kept space down for a few seconds every now and then :)

see attached

[starinfidel]

While I'm feeling nostalgic, I'm gonna necro this one, too

A couple of months ago Dr. West has had a new release which was mostly maintenance, changing code from Haxe 2 to Haxe 3, but it also added the special quest which triggers the Aggression flag in the game which changes the game significantly. When the reanimated are aggressive, they can be guided to enter the police station and kill the police officers inside. They also better attack the police outside but will often fight between themselves.

You can play the game on my current website here: https://www.in-fi-del.net/static/drwest/index.html.

[GunChleoc]

I gave this a quick spin and it is working nicely