ZoC is dead. Long life Zemeroth.

Soo, yeah, Zone of Control project is officially discontinued. Sorry, friends.

^ "ZoC's dead, baby. ZoC's dead."

Why have I killed it? The primary reason is classic: I've overestimated my resources/skills and got totally overwhelmed by the scope:

• I can't see the finish line and have no idea what exactly I can feature-cut. Strategic mode? Sane UI? Networking? Skeletal animations? Particles? Ships? Aircrafts? Tens of unit types? Oh-oh, I don't believe that ZoC could be really cool without any of these (and some others) features.

  This situation totally drained all my motivation to continue the project.

• Slot system (multiple units per tile with fixed positions) is a strange beast.

  1. No idea how to make some friendly user interface: two panels (for friends and enemies) solution is ugly, context menus are not cool either.

  2. Slots create problems with visual scale: infantry models are just too small, especially on phone’s screen.

• Maybe I should make an FPS? No, that's stupid. Ahem, just joking.

Another reason is that my views on what's important for strategic games have changed in the last several years. Now I prefer smaller single-player games with strong accent on emergent complexity.

So, some farewell screenshots:

...And that it.

Goodbye, my old friend Zone of Control.

Zemeroth

There’s one great article: "Finishing a Game". I have re-read it a dozen times in the last few years. In the context of ZoC’s fail the most important part of that article is:

Rule 14: IF YOU DO QUIT, SCALE DOWN, NOT UP

Okay, sometimes it is time to call it quits. Maybe there’s just no way you’ll ever finish, and what you have is too big a mess to cut anything out. Maybe the rest of your team has quit already. My hope in writing this list is to help people avoid this possibility, but hey, maybe you’re just coming off of such a project. And sometimes... shit just happens.

If there’s no salvaging it, at least make sure that you scale down your next project. It’s easy to set your sights higher and higher, even as your projects become less and less finished. “My SKILLS are improving! I’m learning from my failure,” is a common excuse. But I think this is why it’s important to treat finishing as a skill, too.

Sounds reasonable to me. So I need a new much less ambitious project which still shares some of the ZoC’s core values.

I’ve spent May and June - in the heavy existential crisis - ahem, resting and thinking about what can I make.

Here’s what I came up with:

• Random-based skirmish-level digital tabletop game;
• Single player only;
• 3-6 fighters under player’s control;
• Short game session (under an hour) and small unscrollable maps;
• Simple vector 2d graphics with just 3-5 sprites per unit;
• Reaction attacks and action’s interruption;
• Highly dynamic (lots of small unit moves as a side effect of other events);
• Intentionally stupid and predictable AI;

Something in between of Banner Saga, Hoplite, Auro and Age of Decadence.

Initial svg mockup (based on my old experiments with 2d ZoC):

Ok, that was just the plan. What's actually done already?

Here's the code: https://github.com/ozkriff/zemeroth

Right now Zemeroth looks ~ like this:

Recent "gameplay" video:

What’s implemented:

• The cornerstone of the game: reaction attacks and movement interruptions;
• Basic infantry unit type;
• Hitpoints;
• Basic AI: move closer and attack;
• Some basic UI with text/image buttons and grouping.

Android is supported from the beginning of the development (as I’m reusing ZoC’s codebase):

Zemeroth’s architecture is mostly taken from ZoC (minus the networking and multiple game states):

Scene action system is based on cocos’s one and something I did in dead ZoC’s dev branch:

(btw, piston has something similar)

Häte2d

About reusing ZoC’s codebase...

I’m a fool who don’t learn anything and totally ignored the third rule from finishing-a-game article:

3. DON’T ROLL YOUR OWN TECH IF YOU DON’T HAVE TO

Say hello to yet another Rust 2d engine: Häte2d :-D

The name is a silly reference to LÖVE2D framework (just in case).

NOTE: Häte isn’t a general-purpose game engine (at least right now) and it’s not my goal. Just a simple 2d engine for Zemeroth’s needs.

Why haven't I used ggez.rs?

Quote from reddit:

@pwgen-n1024: have you seen this? its a löve2d clone in rust, it might allow you to save some work.

@ozkriff: Granted, I'm well aware of ggez! :-)

I'm too lazy to read the docs! NIH syndrome!111 :-D

Ahem... It's a cool engine and I recommend it whenever anybody asks me about 2d game engines, but I don't think that ggez's core values match my needs in Zemeroth project:

• Ggez tries to mirror Löve as closely as possible but I don't believe that what's good for highly dynamic Lua is equally good for Rust.
• It seems to me that ggez targets beginners and fast prototype-like projects but I'm going to invest a lot of time into this project.
• I want the engine to be much more opinionated about UI, scene, etc.
• Right now ggez uses SDL2 (and it's not easy to replace it with glutin) but I really want to use cargo-apk.

Maybe I was wrong and using geez would be a good idea, see Icefoxen’s answer. But so far working on Häte was fun and we’ll see what happens later.

That’s all for today :)

In case you're wondering, here's full Imgur-devlog which I'm trying to keep updated: http://imgur.com/a/SMVqO

Discussions: /r/rust, twitter.