next »

[Tim Conkling]

Antihero - 4X multiplayer strategy with an (Oliver) Twist

Antihero about running a thieves' guild in a Dickensian city overrun by corruption and greed. Mechanically, it's a fast-paced multiplayer strategy game in the 4X tradition. It's being developed for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android.

Rambling, Navel-Gazing Genesis Story

I played the *hell* out of Hero Academy (async multiplayer tactics battler) - like, probably hundreds of hours over a couple years. I love multiplayer games, but logistically it's hard to play them when you and your friends are all late 20s/early 30s and blah blah blah growing up is hard -- and so I was excitedly assuming that Hero Academy marked the beginning of an async multiplayer rennaissance.

Around the time that I was getting excited about async multiplayer, the company I worked for, Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates, Spiral Knights), got acquired by SEGA. There was some frustrating negotiation around the business model of the game project I was leading, the project was ultimately canceled, and I left shortly afterwards to do the indie thing.

It's been two years since I left my job and began working full-time on my own projects and the async renaissance has sadly not happened, but I'm working hard on my own little contribution! I spent my first 6 indie months working on a cooperative async multiplayer dungeon crawler-y thing that I'm still really interested in - I don't think I've seen anybody do async co-op before - but it was too ambitious for my one-person team, at least as a first project, so I put it on ice.

But I was able to salvage a lot of the underlying client/server stuff I'd developed for the dungeon crawler, and so about 18 months ago I started on "Civilization with Friends", which eventually became Antihero.

Very Incomplete Gameplay Overview

In Antihero's multiplayer mode, you and your opponent are both running Thieves' Guilds, and you're competing against each other and against the powerful ne'er-do-wells that are in control of The City (the unnamed 19th century London-ish metropolis that the game is set in).

Your primary unit is your Master Thief, who evolves over the course of each match. In the early game, you use him to scout the map, give your economy a boost by burgling mansions, and fend off Thugs (low-level baddies that harrass you). In the mid- and late-game, you specialize the Master Thief by advancing him along a tech tree (like a hero character in DOTA or Warcraft 3).

So the Master Thief combines a handful of abilities that would normally be found in different unit types in your typical 4X game, which is emblematic of the game's overall approach: (far) fewer moving parts than a game like Civ, so that you can actually have multiple matches against multiple opponents - some of who will be slow in taking their turns - and not lose your mind.

The Urchin is your secondary unit - he's kind of like a Worker in Civ, but more swiss-army-knife as well. If you've read Oliver Twist, think of the Master Thief as Fagin, and the Urchin as the Artful Dodger. Among other things, Urchins infiltrate buildings for your Guild. An infiltrated building gives you an ongoing benefit - some buildings produce resources each turn; some buildings pump out baddies, and infiltration lets you recruit those baddies yourself; and you can also infiltrate Orphanages, which let you recruit Urchins for free.

And of course there's lots more - I'll continue updating this devblog with more details over the coming weeks & months.

When

I'm hoping to do a Mac/PC early access release sometime in early 2015, in order to begin building a multiplayer community around the game and to work out bugs and usability issues, etc. The phone/tablet versions of the game will follow within a couple months of that. I'm doing a lot of playtesting on tablets now, but shipping an early-access game on the App Store or Google Play just seems like a bad idea; I'm going to wait till the game is as polished as possible before buying a ticket to the ridiculous lottery that is mobile game distribution.

(Of course, the game could use your Greenlight vote, if it looks interesting to you!)

[LuisAnton]

Looks pretty awesome. I also keep hopes for the 'async renaissance', exactly for the same reasons: mid thirties, small kid, not mucht time... I played the async version of Scrabble a lot, multiple games at the same time. And we currently have five students on internship creating a squad-based strategy game (small board, quick gameplay) and the server-side logic required for it. All of it will be released as open source by the end of this year.

The problem with creating these games is server costs, I guess. Maintaining servers is not cheap if the game is successful! Have you considered that?

[Tim Conkling]

Thanks!

Yeah, server costs are certainly a consideration, though my feeling is that if there are enough Antihero players that the servers are becoming expensive, that's a nice problem to have

(The server component is pretty light-weight, since this is an async game -- it's a stateless http server, and mostly just has to handle matchmaking, receiving turn submissions, and sending out push notifications/emails. Things would be a bit more worrisome if this were a synchronous game that had to maintain a socket connection for each active player, but that's definitely not the case here.)

I'm working on single-player content right now -- a story-driven campaign, and a vs. AI mode -- so when it (eventually) releases, it won't be all multiplayer all the time.

(Also: open-sourcing your game code is awesome!)