The arttificial inteligence of Xhelos is part of my thesis to obtain my bachelor degree. For those interested in the academic part of it, its about using influence maps with potential fields   to achieve a desired behaviour in my AI.

As a final part of it, I need to validate it by polls to human players. That is why I need your help to achieve success on this. I had update the old ingame tutorial and make improvements to the overall interface of the game to make your life easier playing this game.

Once you have finished playing it, please  fill this survey on Wuffo Online. At more survey filled, the validation of my game will get better. 

Thanks for your help.

Jeeba

PD: At this moment Im focus on finalizing my thesis. Once it is done i can continue to program the game full time for at least 2 more months. So the faster we do this, the better it will get Xhelos!!.

This was an update that make me wonder about was is fun in the game. So what does Resource and Mana Management has to do with fun? Well let me explain what was going on in the game.

The current update has to do with the management and grow of your resources. My first idea was that the colonies should  grow their own resource stock. So if you have two colonies, they will each have their own quantity of resources, like all other persistent web games around.

So what happen if you need resources in one of your colonies? Well you may have to send it from another   colony that you own ... like all other persistent web games around!.

¿If sendiing resources from one colony to another is fun? I think not, but they may be another reason to do that. In a strategic level, maybe other games needed this for calculating the looting and stealing. But I think there are better ways to calculate this.

So I decided that the resources will be globally available to all of your colonies instead of per colony. So we dont have to move resources between your colonuies, less micromamangement sound more fun time on battles!.

The games continue to grow and this time I bring you some of the last updates to bring the game to a Beta Stage. Today we are talking about team creations, and sending teams to other regions. Teams are just a group of units that go together to a region. 

So how does this works?

1) Easy, the first task i creating a team. To do this, select a region in the Planet Interface and then  click on the "Crear Equipo". You can only create a team if you have a colony in the region you select.

2) Now that you have created a team, just Drag&Drop you unit from yuor colony group to your group. You can grab units from group to group too!.

3) Allright, now continue to fill your group up to your desire. When youre ready, select the group and then press the "Atacar" button on any of the region available with that button. Now your team is going to move to that region!.

Stay tune for more updates on the game!.

Oh yeah, thanks to the second Alpha Testing, I have recopilated a list of improvement to the game. Also we have cleared a lot of bugs that were lurking around the playability of the game.

So  gentlemens and ladys, here are the new improvement on the game:

General Interface:

• We change all the general colors of the interface, from some mix of blue, black, white and ugly gray, we have change it to a more space theme game. Blue and Black it is. Beautiful isn't it?
• Global Colony Window: Now on every interface of the fgame you can go to each of your colonie s with one click. Although the colony manager view is not ready to be playable.

Battle Interface:

• We had made a mayor change here, all the panels and info has been change from position.
• The unit information panel now had a life bar that show the current level of life of all the army, instead of the old lifebar that only showd the current life of the current unit in that army.
• The unit information panel now had a mana bar if the unit has mana. The bar decrease as we use the mana from the unit.
• Camera panning when we select any unit. The camera is going to focus on the current selected unit with a soft movement, please try it and enjoy, you will never believe this is pure HTML.
• Redo of the action bar. Instead of those ugly semibuttons that showed the powe of the unit, now we have some beautiful icons showing us all the actions that the actual unit has. We only show this bar if the selected unit is the current unit.
• Tooltips on everything. From actions, to army turns, everthing on the battle view has a tooltip on it.

Battle Module:

• Now he mana to execute an actions, is taken from the army instead of the player. The player mana, will continue to exist for other battle mechanics.
• Battle feeling: This is a little hard to explain but , if you have tested the game before, now you can fell that the turns on the game are different for good.
• Atackning,Range Attack and Normal Movement doesnt cost mana anymore!.
• Fixing battle bugs, concerning the battle turn system.

Future Improvements

So we have advance a lot on usability and interface, I expect that this version show our improvement on the game.

We have a long road ahead but you can fell now that the game is improving little by litte. Please enjoy the battle system and dont forget to use the Cheats button while you can, because they are going to dissapear when the game enter a beta phase.

We have update a small preview of what will come to the game the next month. The construction of your own Xeno Colony!. The colony is your main base of operation.

Now all the players control a main colony. To navigate to your colony you just need to click on your colony name (at the botton of your avatar). 

Additionaly, if you were to have more colonies, then you can change the actual colony clicking on the selector button, It will appear a colony menu selector, choose our colony and then if you want to travel to that colony, click in his name as well. 

Once inside your colony, you are going to see a screen like the one in the botton.There you may be capable of building and update your colony at pleasure.

Every time you update or construct a new building, your resources decline according to the price of the construcion.

The next step would be programming all the resource management part, how your resources increase, and where do you build your farms and mines.This is going to come the next week.. 

To know the prices of the updates/ constructions, you just need to put the mouse over the construction or on top of the update button. The building time also appear on the bottom.

So enjoy this new changes until two more week where we are going to improve this more!.

After 2 months of hard work, I can say with a lot of pride that version 0.4 Alpha is done. this version relly shine as a version on his own. Will all the novelties and small improvements done to it, this can be the start point from where te game stand as a full playable version of the game.Lets see the new improvements here.

Artificial Inteligence 

Although this is a multiplayer game, with battles between humans players, you have the  choice to confront your strategy with Artificial Players controlled by the computer, well more exactly my web server.

Rest assure that those AI Player are going to give you a good match, trust me, they are more that ready in the bussiness of troop elimination. they just look like real players!.

Bigger Regions

Now the regions are 3 times bigger than before. Thankzs to the dinamic creation of natural looking battle maps. Also to navegate between those big maps now we have the minimap, that show us the terrain and the location of all units in the region.  

Every planet also have between 9 and 16 regions  to play. thats a lot of game right there!.

Initial Planet for every  new player

Now, for every new player that register to the game, we are going to create a new planet filled with 9 to 16 regions. He is going to start with 3 Fighters Units, 2 Archers and one Artillery unit.

Also we will put a random AI player with the same kind of troops in the same region so he can try they new troop. Both player start the battle in different sides of the battle.

Improved Usability

From tooltips to new icons, in this new version we are taking into account a lot of the little detail that make this game great. Now all the cheats button has a tooltip explaining what does they do. We have out 5 cheats button to better test the  game (remember this is an Alpha Version)

All this novelties ready to be tested on the game, so go ahead and taste this new version of the game for free!