| Submitted by , posted on 02 September 2002 |

Image Description, by This is a screenshot of Emoticon, an RTS I'm developing. The game itself is a fair bit more tactical than other RTSs. The army given to you at the beginning of a level will usually be the same army you finish with, I've taken out base building and resource management, which changes the way you play. I found a lot more focus was put on protecting individual units, and I think I like it that way.
Techically, it isn't feature rich, the pathfinding will navigate a group through a maze without any troubles, the game doesn't crash on this computer and runs at a nice frame rate on this computer. It uses DirectDraw7 for graphics, and this version doesn't have any sound or music. It was developed in VB, so if you want to test out the alpha, you'll need the VB runtimes (download link at my site)
What is planned:

> - Smarter enemy AI: the current AI is ok, but not great. It mainly acts on a stimulus response type system, and never has any initiative to attack the player out of the blue. It knows how to retreat, but it would rather die, so it never does :)
> - Smarter unit AI: I'm going to add in a few extra orders you can give the units (currently, they can move, attack, pick up and put down). I'm going to experiment with something so you can 'draw' a formation for the units to get in in realtime.
> - Music and sound: Sound adds a great deal to an RTS I've found, the feedback it gives is really useful. And I fancy a touch of music here and there :)
> - More units and weapon types. There are a couple of units in the game which you won't see in the alpha, because their special-ness hasn't been coded yet. I'd like to have some area effect weapons and maybe some less conventional weapons. I made the game in the graphical 'style' it was in so I didn't have to stick to realism, so I might as well use this opportunity :)

Anyway, the Public Alpha and more screenshots are available here:
emoticonvb.cjb.net

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