We've been working on a sci-fi, dice-based, tabletop-style rpg that will be launching on iOS (coming to other platforms later). It's been a long time in the making and has run through several different incarnations...but the version we're working on now is shaping up nicely!
The world is a sandbox. We didn't think that this would be the case at the beginning of development, we thought it would be more 'follow a story as you travel through dungeon-like maps', but as the game has developed it has become much more of an open world. There are certainly story moments, and a narrative but you have to discover it. We aren't leading you by the hand through the story.
You begin by choosing a character from a variety of different species with different special abilities and weapons. You roll that character, adding a die to each attribute and placing a skill point. Then you are off on your first mission: you move on the map by rolling a move distance. You collect loot and battle enemies.
Once your movement is done (you can end your turn at any time) your turn ends and the enemy turn begins. They go about their business (whatever that may be), hunting, guarding, searching for you etc. and soon their turn ends and yours begins again.
Battle is turn based too: select an enemy on an occupied tile and you can fight them (in the same way, enemies fight you). On each turn you can attack (using your weapon), block (heal a bit and reduce the next attack against you), use a special skill (a limited but more powerful attack, usually with a lasting effect) or use an item (to heal, flee, or cause damage). A d10 is added to you strength and weapon for your attack. There is a critHit and critFail system that adds variety to the outcomes of the rolls!
We have put a lot of work into the enemy AI. On the map, enemies move about in a 'realistic' way that is editable for each enemy. They hunt, chase, flee, have a vision radius and engage in territory guarding. In battle, enemies will attack in a strategic way that is dependent on their intelligence, strength and health. The will use an attack or 'special' attack, healing and will block in a logical way (depending how smart, strong and healthy they are). Tricky!
The game is harsh. You die a lot and we haven’t completely resolved ‘death’ yet. Originally, in true rogue-like fashion, we wanted death to be permanent. We were going to give the player a group of characters to choose from who could get killed off (forever) one by one. Like the lives in a coin-op, once all your characters were dead the game was over.
What we're thinking now is a bit more complicated: When your character dies, you can go back into the map with another character and take their loot. By finding their dead body, you can also extract a sample from which you can re-gen the character (after a time...maybe immediately). This seems more fun to me, your original character you rolled is dead, you will never get them back, but the things you/they collected are not forever lost.
When we started out, Galactic Keep was very much like a board game...to a fault! The simplicity made it quick and shallow. It is much deeper now, there is a lot of strategy involved. The more items we add, the more complicated and varied the game becomes...and we're adding new items daily.
We are almost at a point where we could release an alpha to a 'public' group of testers. That should happen very soon.
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