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[David Pittman]

TKtics is a turn-based strategy game for two players. You'll need a friend, as there's no online play.

More details in the readme.

Download:
TKtics (Windows, 511KB)

[Melly]

An idea I like to make the pace of a turn-based game more frenetic is to make the turns not only timed, but ending whenever the player does an action. The faster he ends, the higher the effect of the action (within reason). This encourages fast, furious play, but it's a risk-reward juggle where going too fast may make you do soemthing stupid your opponent can exploit.

[David Pittman]

An idea I like to make the pace of a turn-based game more frenetic is to make the turns not only timed, but ending whenever the player does an action. The faster he ends, the higher the effect of the action (within reason). This encourages fast, furious play, but it's a risk-reward juggle where going too fast may make you do soemthing stupid your opponent can exploit.

Ooh, I like that! I was thinking about a kind of speed chess thing where each player has a large pool of time available for all their moves (in addition to a short per-turn timer). But tying the speed of a single turn to the strength of that turn's action is more immediate, and there's no degenerate case where a player loses by completely running out of time.

[pakoito]

I like the mechanics enough to get into the team, what kind of engine/library/language are you thinking of?

[David Pittman]

Thanks for the interest, but I'm actually not looking to collaborate on coding... I might request art and audio help later, but I personally prefer solo projects. (I work on big commercial games for my day job, so indie development is more of a personal hobby for me.)

[Melly]

Be aware though, I'm probably going to implement that on my game too.

What I'm saying is that you can totally do it, but I'll do it better. <3

[pakoito]

Thanks for the interest, but I'm actually not looking to collaborate on coding... I might request art and audio help later, but I personally prefer solo projects. (I work on big commercial games for my day job, so indie development is more of a personal hobby for me.)

Ok, I'll stick around for some game design ideas

[David Pittman]

Be aware though, I'm probably going to implement that on my game too.

What I'm saying is that you can totally do it, but I'll do it better. <3

Oh, it's on!

But seriously, feel free to share more ideas and I will steal them too.

[David Pittman]

Well, this isn't progressing as fast as I'd hoped. I decided to write a TGA loader tonight. Never mind that I could have used any existing image library to do it, or that I've already written support for other file types--no, I wanted to write a TGA loader.

Also, I'm discovering that the half-baked 2D image library I wrote almost four years ago and never used on a large project is kind of poor quality. Shocking!

But in any case, I've got this project off the ground and I'm ready to start making some isometric terrain!

[Daniel Eddeland]

I sense the rivalry is strong in this thread! 

Really nice style in the isometric screen posted, is it the actual style or placeholder graphics? I quite like the minimalistic style myself. Is it in-game tile-rendering or a mockup?

[Sos]

Iso-tetris block?

Also, I like where this is going.

[Inanimate]

This sounds mighty interesting. Any ideas for unique mechanics yet? "Destructible terrain" sounds like it could make something great...

[David Pittman]

Really nice style in the isometric screen posted, is it the actual style or placeholder graphics? I quite like the minimalistic style myself. Is it in-game tile-rendering or a mockup?

It's placeholder, but the actual art may end up being equally minimalist (albeit with a better palette). I'm still completely undecided on theme and art direction.

This sounds mighty interesting. Any ideas for unique mechanics yet? "Destructible terrain" sounds like it could make something great...

I'm planning to use some RTS tropes, namely resource gathering and base building. Base building will be done in a very hands-on block-by-block fashion (to complement the destructible terrain). Minecraft is an obvious influence on that, and I've also been thinking about the building phase in Rampart. Plus, I'm not aware of too many head-to-head turn-based strategy/tactics games, even though it seems like a perfect genre for competitive play.

I've since cleaned up some of my first post, but part of what I originally wrote was: I expect the tricky part of making this game is going to be keeping it fast and punchy. I want to capture the tense, frenetic experience of a fighting game match and not let players get bogged down with a myriad of decisions and unwieldy menus. This is especially important in a turn-based game, and I'm considering ways to keep each player involved during the other player's turn (perhaps a split-screen mode, so you can continue to view the map and even schedule future moves while your opponent takes his turn).

[David Pittman]

Bump!

I didn't keep a regular journal of this game's development like I usually do for compos. But I didn't abandon it, either. I've updated the first post with the link, but here it is again: http://www.dphrygian.com/bin/TKtics-Beta.zip

I'll be testing more over the next few days and possibly adding some effects, as it's rather spartan at the moment.

[mike_st]

I like the graphic style, reminds me of Xcom