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[Bishop]

Hey everyone,



I've been playing around with a bunch of prototypes and this one is looking promising enough to share.

So the idea is for a real time tactics game where you control 3-6 units onboard an enemy ship teeming with hostiles. Generally your men/women won't be straight out strong enough to kill the 20+ onboard the enemy vessel, instead focus your efforts on capturing key locations. For instance, the control room could be used to open all the airlocks and flush out the enemy, or destroy the shield generator and cut the ship clean in two.

General thoughts on features to have.

Real time with pause.
Plan and queue orders while paused.
Capture rooms to gain powerful new abilities.
Elite few vs many.
Destructible environments
Capture equipment intact to progress.
Fog of war on unless in the CCTV room.
Proc gen for ship layout.
No defending your own ship.

Here's my incredibly early efforts so far, only a week in. Currently enemies don't fire back but lets pretend it was a well bought laser fight. There is the chance of a stray RPG breaching the hull and suffocating everyone.



Also check out the attack pods! You fire them straight through the enemy hull! (gif skips the impact frame D:)



At the moment everything is heading down more of a simulated route, bullets leave the barrel with a random deviation and hit what they hit, this means cover bonuses can't be easily controlled and I'm not sure how good/bad this is.

As for the surrounding game, progressing from ship to ship, etc, I'd love it to be procedurally generated, although at the moment I'm focusing on core gameplay. Perhaps a structured campaign. At the moment I don't have the funds to complete this project unless my other game (Trash TV) sells well whenever that comes out (it's finished and greenlit!).

tl;dr. Imagine FTL but with a focus on infantry battles onboard enemy ships instead.

[xrm0]

I like the idea of the game. I'll be watching this thread to see how it evolves. Any idea when there'll be a demo available for playing it?

[Bishop]

I'm really trying to rush gameplay/demo first this time around, unlikely Trash TV where I was trying to make final artwork in the first week, etc, so hopefully I could have a very rough demo soon.

Here's a video that makes it look like you could jump in a play but I play around the few known bugs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5WAfIWnlcc&feature=youtu.be

Added shield generator and CCTV control room.
Enemies now shoot back (still don't move)
Units can now suffocate
Doors now seal rooms
Added a laser beam that tears rooms apart if the sheild gen is down

[Sorsy]

Really cool idea. I love tactic games. Looking forward to something playable.

[RatPatrol]

looks interesting,

a cross between FTL and KillHouse Games - Door Kickers


 

[Bishop]

Door Kickers is definitely a big influence, stacking up outside a room and placing waypoints is something I hope to add really soon.

Enemies now move if you start to destroy a component, although currently it summons every enemy to that location and it's a little overwhelming. Was thinking perhaps I'd make different types of enemies and only certain ones would respond, or perhaps just limit the number that respond to an attack.

Also added a 'no oxygen' indicator and finished off the laser placeholder asset.

http://gfycat.com/HarmfulMammothFrogmouth

[Kytin]

What are your thoughts on having a strategic layer to the game? I recently got the Enemy Within expansion for the latest Xcom game, and Boarding Party looks like it could fit that kind of structure really well. I love the idea of being able to pick your own way to complete the mission, and that kind of openness works really well with being able to customize you crew between missions with the spoils from previous missions.

[Bishop]

In 'Eador masters of the broken world' the game world is divided up into floating islands, each mission you conquer and incorporate the island into your own landmass and each island unlocks a new unit. You normally get the choice of 3 islands and you're told up front what you'll unlock before hand. I'd like to do a system like that. Especially if I could work in different weaknesses, like if you could see a Clone Vats on an enemy ship and also see that they'll surrender if they leader dies. Maybe you could see another upgrade would make assassinating a VIP early easy and then you end up forming a plan 4-5 raids/unlocks long. If I could pull that off I think it'd be amazing.

[Kytin]

That sounds really cool.

Any thoughts on what kind of faction you would be playing as? Space Pirates/Privateers? Nascent Rebellion? Personal quest of vengeance?

[Bishop]

I hadn't thought about that part actually. The only part I'd really considered story wise was maybe telling the player they're the first people to have a cloaking device or something similar, to justify never having to defend your own ship. I'd try to frame it as part of a never ending arms race that we've seen throughout history, e.g. we get tanks before we get anti tank weapons and now we've invented anti anti-tank systems. There are brief periods in time that a technology top trumps almost everything else. I lean more towards space pirates, I've always liked small groups of outsiders acting on their own.

[deab]

Very interesting! And gotta love Unity for rapid prototyping.

[Playaction]

This looks like a promising and cool0 idea.
I'd say (from playing xcom and door kickers and frozen synapse), that it's important to know if you're in cover when moving slightly behind a wall. Also important to know your own and enemys vision/shooting range, to be able to make strategic decisions.

Keeping an eye on this for sure

[Netsu]

At the moment everything is heading down more of a simulated route, bullets leave the barrel with a random deviation and hit what they hit, this means cover bonuses can't be easily controlled and I'm not sure how good/bad this is.

It's very good! I long wanted to make a tactical game (but turn based) where everything is simulated instead of doing a board-game-like random chance system. Character skill, movement speed and other factors determine the random bullet spread, then cover and distance to target do it's own thing naturally without any randomness. I say keep at it

[Bishop]

Originally I was going to make this turn based so I started coding it real time with the intention of separating it into turns but real time's really grown on me now.

I'm hoping the simulated nature will lead to some really cool stories about how a single stray bullet shattered some glass and sucked everyone out into space or how you accidentally destroyed the only space suits when you called in an attack pod for reinforcements and now you've doomed twice as many men.

Anyway. Last few days I made some good head way, big broad strokes implementing some key features.




New stuff:

Room objects

• Laser cannon - Starts to charge when alarm is raised, have to finish the mission before it fires or destroy it. Explodes when destroyed, unlocks the Laser Strike ability when captured. Takes longer to charge based on your shield generator level
• Escape Pods - Holds a number of escape pods, usable by both sides so if you know the whole ship is going to go, it's your only escape. Enemies will flee when there's only a few left on the map.
• Armoury - Enemies don't all carry guns now and unarmed enemies will run to the armoury to gear up. Can be destroyed to prevent arming but then can't be captured to unlock new guns for your own units.

Abilities

• Scan - Reveals enemies and room equipment in an area, lasts 5 seconds.

Added a new ship to attack and some handling of in between mission stuff. You don't start out with the Laser Strike ability any more, instead you unlock it after you've salvaged a whole Laser Cannon, if you damage one 10% you'll salvage 90% of a cannon at the moment. I'm sure this will need tweaking but I like the idea that you can build towards one. Maybe salvaging two will give you two strikes, etc. Shield generator can be upgraded by not destroying one, the higher the shield gen level the longer it takes a laser cannon to destroy your ship (end the mission).

Other than that I've improved the AI abit (respond, flee, arm) and I had to change the way levels are imported, now works in standalone builds so a demo is a little bit closer.

[Bishop]

Hey everyone,

I've been watching a ton of war documentaries lately, mainly on the Iraq conflict, PTSD and Osama Bin Laden's assassination. So there's a ton of really interesting things but the largest influence is the stark contrast of footage shown. You have your classic commander's view with a paper map and icons placed to represent whole squads and platoons. How an entire battles outcome is represented by someone lifting off an icon representing 20 lives and announcing they no longer control that area. Then this is cut with live helmet footage of people being shot close range. For commanders in some places the level of abstraction is really getting reduced but then for some soliders it's being increased, sitting inside a Humvee using a laptop to control the machine gun on top. 

So how does this affect the design? I really want to try and push the distance, the juxtaposition, between being the commander telling someone to kill and being the person to kill.

So here's my concept art using a screen grab from ShadowRun. The idea is the commanders view is this very tron-esk very minimalist art style with icons to represent soliders and events. Then we project the soldiers view onto this map.



And here's my current implementation in Unity. It's definitely lacking the higher resolution of the concept art but I really like how when the soliders view isn't covering a battle there's just some little crosses to represent dead soliders, but then as the view passes over an area it's covered in blood. On top of this if move the camera off the map you can see the computer console you're using to command the battle. Soldiers become more experienced with each battle, but over a really long time the stress reduces their performance and negates their battle experience. I plan on the player/commander being deaf to all the gun shots too, except when the radio channel opens to issue a move or attack order.



What do you think of these new ideas? I'm not sure if having all of this stuff is wasted without a proper story.

[Low_Chance]

Personally I think the abstraction vs. reality idea is a really good one. Not only does it make a powerful statement about the differing experiences of the commander vs. the actual frontline troops, but it's also a useful and intuitive way to convey information to the player about the fog of war.

Imagine the experience of a first-time player when they go from planning a path through the abstract grid of the enemy ship, flanking a room full of red dots... and then witness the horror and carnage as their squad kills a room full of terrified enemy crewmen.

[Sustrato]

Yeah, I think those ideas sound really cool, but I'm not sure how much players will "get" your intent or the message behind it without a story or some kind of emphasis on it. I'm sure it will be cool regardless, but I don't think a lot of people will jump to "Hey, this is a visual device emphasizing the stark contrast between being a trigger puller and the leader!" vs "Hey, this looks rad!"

[Kytin]

Soldiers become more experienced with each battle, but over a really long time the stress reduces their performance and negates their battle experience.

Sounds like an interesting idea. XCOM (the latest one) had something kind of similar where if a soldier took a near-fatal wound but survived they would get a permanent penalty to their Will, which would make them more likely to panic the next time a combat situation got scary. Is this the sort of effect that you are planning?

The Long War mod for XCOM added an extra mechanic called fatigue which made it so that after a battle a soldier would have to wait a day or so before they could be sent into combat again. The main result was that the player had to have a largeish number of soldiers all leveling up roughly equally instead of one super squad. This in turn meant that you could have an absolute disaster of a mission where you lose the entire force sent but still have sufficient reserves to continue playing.
You could combine the two mechanics so that soldiers soldiers lose stress slowly in the time between missions. The higher their stress level is, the more likely they are to acquire a permanent penalty and/or do something badly during a mission.

Of course, if you want to see how complex a system for managing the stress levels of characters can get, you can always check out Darkest Dungeon.

I plan on the player/commander being deaf to all the gun shots too, except when the radio channel opens to issue a move or attack order.

This aspect might not work so well, since the player will be able to see the shots (since soldiers will always be shooting into their own field of vision) they will expect to be able to hear them too. Maybe consider using some sort of abstract chiming sound as a substitute instead.

What do you think of these new ideas? I'm not sure if having all of this stuff is wasted without a proper story.

Depends on what you mean by story. I don't think you need a lot of cutscenes, voice acting or tons of text to create a powerful narrative. The game I am working on at the moment doesn't have any of those, and I would consider the story to be the focus of that game.
I think you can do a lot with reoccurring elements across missions. Whether it's a character, a piece of technology or the type of mission objective. I'm assuming you have some sort of end state in mind for the campaign, so presumably you have some level of storytelling you intend to do. The important thing is to ask yourself how you want the player to feel once they have concluded the game, and then build the experience that will lead to that conclusion.

[Bishop]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Thinking about what emotion I want the player to feel I think has helped crystallize some of my thoughts. Now I'm thinking not gamify the stress system in such an explicit way so when a soldier does break on you it's a surprise, but not without being foreboded to. I want to try and get a sense of shock, loss and maybe even of regret. I'll try to ramp up the disconnect between the soldiers and commander over time.

So in between missions you now walk around the command room. On the left we have some CCTV monitors that keep track of your soldiers during their down time. At first you'll usually see them all together in the mess hall. As their stress builds they become more recluse and eventually you'll see that psychologically they're really troubled, rocking back and forth on their own. In the middle I've got the command table and the menus overlaying the window with a Doom 3 style FPS mouse cursor. When viewing any soldier rather than a big break down of all these different stats it'll simply give a 'combat effectiveness' to try and reinforce the idea that we the commander/army only care about if they can still pull the trigger.



Eventually soldiers can commit suicide in this between mission area too and it should hopefully be a very powerful moment. If players can redo missions attempting to keep all their soldiers alive only to have them eventually end it themselves it should at least cause a moment of reflection. Since it'll happen in this inbetween state the game would progress only when the player chooses too it hopefully won't be marred by an emotional moment being instantly followed up by shooting people. Players could even give a minutes silence if they wanted.

Other than that I tarted up the art abit.



Also blood!

[Bishop]

I changed the tron-esk colour scheme from a half arsed attempt at 1980's neon to more of a blue print. Removes that feeling that projected helmet cam view was just a torch in a pitch black ship.