Tutorial: Flanking and Cover

The main strategy in the game is to use cover and flanking. Soldiers sitting behind a tree or a rock will get less damage than soldiers without cover. This can be a problem if enemy has a good position and good cover.

The way to overcome enemy cover is to use flanking. This means attacking from multiple directions at the same time. Cover is most effective only towards the direction that the soldier is facing. So two soldiers facing each other will get full cover, where as attacking from behind will negate any cover.

In picture above, soldier with green arrow is least effective,  soldier with red arrow most effective and soldier with orange arrow in between. In practice you will need to pin the enemy with one soldier and then move other soldiers to the enemy flank.

Tutorial: Basic Controls

The basic controls are very simple: select a soldier from the badge and and click on a tile to move the unit there. Units will automatically attack enemies in range so there is no need to do anything. 

Clicking on an enemy will order the soldier to attack that enemy. This can be used to focus fire and kill enemies more quickly.   

Only other commands are for using Grenades and Bazookas. Click on the icon and select a target. Grenades are best used on large groups and Bazookas on heavy machinegun spots.

It's a trilogy!

My third game in the theme is ready: Tank Invasion. In addition to introducing tanks as units, it takes inspiration (read copies shamelessly) from the classical Rock-Paper-Scissors. Each of the units will have an advantage over another type of unit and you will have to attack the enemy where they are the weakest and watch your back :)

Besides, anything is better with Tanks, so head on over to Tank Invasion!

v1.5 update

Finally managed to get myself to port the enhancements done for Tactical Invasion back to Infantry Invasion.

The enhancements include

• Improved performance.
  While performance was OK in Infantry Invasion for most devices, things really became a crawl in Tactical Invasion. Galaxy Nexus which still represented pretty highend hardware, it barely ran at 15fps. So I really had to do some more optimizations to get it running sensibly. Taking optimization back should make Infantry Invasion running in even pretty low end devices.
  
• Improved UI feedback
  I've tried to add a blink to all "clickable" UI components. Also I've tried to make disabled components fade out.
  
• Bug in perk Haste
  I had a long running bug in that I was not able to nail down. It happened rarely and manifested so that  grenades and bazookas seemed to "bounce". I.e. instead of exploding at the target, they fired again traveled to a new target. Also it meant that soldiers with Haste did damage only rarely with machine gun.
  
  Finally with some luck I made the connection that the bug happens through the perk Haste, which causes the time that it takes to reload be reduced. Because this reduction was not considered in the weapon code (just player code) it was possible to fire the weapon again before reload was complete. This caused the final step of dealing damage and resetting the weapon to not happen
   
• Improved AI
  The AI works OK most of the time, but there are some cases where it does stupid things. For example if the entire unit was wiped out, they kept running back to fight. Also soldiers remembered the previous target even after respawning, which caused them to attack immediatelly without order when getting the enemy in sight. Multiple changes were done to improve the AI.

As usual, Android users get it now and iOS users have to wait for Apple to approve my work

A Sister is born!

There is now a sister game for Infantry Invasion: Tactical Invasion! It's essentially a zoomed out version of the same game where you command units instead of individual soldiers.

Even though it sounds like minor change, it actually changes the game a bit. In Infantry Invasion the goal of the game is to give your soldiers an advantage by using rocks for cover or focusing fire on a single target to more quickly eliminate enemies. In Tactical Invasion you can't control the place of the soldiers properly but you have to gain an edge by using better tactics to overpower the enemy.

In practice you have to attack from more than one direction. The mechanic introduced here is that cover from rocks and barricades is only good for attackers in front of you. If the enemy can flank you while you are tied to a fire fight, they can shoot past the cover. This means that when you find an enemy, you should always try to find an alternate route to them and attack from two or three directions.

In any case, check it out, play them both, let me know what you think.

iPads rule!

In addition to iOS taking a rocket start compared to Android, also iPads have become the number one device! Right now about 60% of all games are from iPads, which is pretty nice.

As to why, on thing is that the game is just much nicer to play in a tablet. Touch areas are much more humane and it's easier to control stuff. Another factor is that there are probably less competition in iPad optimized free games.

iOS vs Android

A lot has been said about iOS vs Android in game developer value. I wanted to share my two cents on the topic of "organic growth", i.e. how easy it is to get discovered in in Appstore vs Google Play. Measured in games played, iOS achieved in 24 hours what Android achieved in 10 days! From a developer perspective that is a pretty brutal difference..

So for both platforms I had the same idea: in order to learn the basics, I just put it there and not take any promotion actions. Both had same descriptions and assets.

Now there can be lot's of things to explain this difference:

• Appstore weights new apps more, i.e. trying to promote new comers to get started
• Google weighs apps with low install numbers low, it is expected you will start with some promotion (remember that "advertise this app"-button in developer console) to "get in the game"
• Apple search is better in finding stuff! This is pretty outrageous, but with developer picked keywords in the realm of possibility. I.e. the simplistic Apple approach might be good for indie developers that does not weigh in two dozen external "clout functions" to measure your impact