Just out of curiosity...

[Cyrus]

I think Templar Assault is awesome. It's actually the first game I decided was worth paying for. Love the turnbased stuff and the constant stream of xenos in those cramped corridors. In fact's it's made me wonder if I could make a game like this (in a parallel universe where I'd actually have the time for it).

So I'm wondering what tools are used to make Templar Assault and the other Trese brothers games. Do you write all the tools/editors yourself or do you use something like Unity for the basics?

Btw, please just let me know if you don't want to share that information, I respect that too.

Cyrus

[slayernz]

The great thing is that Cory and Andrew (the creators of all of this digital crack) are really supportive of would-be developers like yourself. I'll leave them to respond to your thread, but I'm sure when they do, it'll be enlightening

[Lt. Hathaway]

I'm interested in Android games design as well, looking forward to their answers. We know from the forum they use the "Tiled Map Editor" for TA.

[Cory Trese]

Andrew and I build most of the tools ourselves.

Critical components of Templar Assault development ...

- Eclipse (www.eclipse.org)
- TileEd (www.mapeditor.org)

Many of our editors and tools are written in Java or C#.

We use a lot of Excel and Google Docs Spreadsheets to generate game data.

The interface is built in Eclipse, and I do all of my coding there or in VI.

[johndramey]

Built the tools yourselves, huh? That's pretty crazy. I always thought about toying with android app development because, well, how hard could it be? But since I have 0 coding knowledge it will forever be beyond me.

[Cyrus]

Yeah, that's really impressive, doing everything yourself. And so many games at the same time. I'm pretty amazed you keep churning out updates for all those games and still manage to create new ones too!

I can code a bit, though it's mostly simple applications where business logic is key. Graphics and realtime stuff always does me in when I try something more than the prefab Windows libraries deliver in Visual Studio. I took a look at Eclipse and the Android SDK and it was immediately clear to me I'd have to do like a zillion tutorials to get up to speed with all that's going on in even a simple game.

[Cory Trese]

Jul 6, 2013 5:59:41 GMT -5 Cyrus said:

Yeah, that's really impressive, doing everything yourself. And so many games at the same time. I'm pretty amazed you keep churning out updates for all those games and still manage to create new ones too!

I can code a bit, though it's mostly simple applications where business logic is key. Graphics and realtime stuff always does me in when I try something more than the prefab Windows libraries deliver in Visual Studio. I took a look at Eclipse and the Android SDK and it was immediately clear to me I'd have to do like a zillion tutorials to get up to speed with all that's going on in even a simple game.

Most of StarTraders RPG is built on something similar to the prefab Windows Libraries, the Android OS UI SDK ... buttons, menus, screens, etc.

The tutorials you would be doing are drawing GL Surfaces with maps and graphics -- that's the hard part.

The cool thing about Android is that it is all free, tons of open source and lots of people posting tutorials and code / libraries.

However ... we are in the process of some major changes and may be making major changes to our product development process.

Stay tuned.

[Cyrus]

Having discovered you and your games only recently, I missed the Kickstarter for Heroes of Steel. I was just reading through it because I wondered what this game was you kept mentioning. Now I'm really really curious what new engine you might be switching to.

Heroes of Steel looks like it'll raise the bar even higher and I'm amazed you put in so much work on Age of Pirates, still update the older games and somehow also work on a brand new game!

[fallen]

Cyrus - we are now working with a variant of Cocos2D called Cocos2DX. We are really excited to be using a 2D animation toolkit that we found and backed on KickStarter, called Spine. You can see our other backed projects here.
www.kickstarter.com/profile/tresebrothers

If you missed the Heroes of Steel party and still want to get in on any of the gifts, you can via PayPal, including joining the Alpha Access team.
www.tresebrothers.com/blog/heroes-of-steel-kickstarter-paypal/