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[Bishop]

Hey everyone,

I took the prototype to show some friends and I'm not sure if we laughed a lot about the ideas in it because it's funny or because that's the environment we were in but to be honest there's such a thin line between a dark comedy and a serious story anyway it's hard to seperate. I thought I might try a little nudge more towards humor. Now whenever one of your soldiers die in-between missions you have a bunch of paperwork to get through about how they died, some health and safety stuff about preventing future losses and a finance report to make sure you don't go over your quarterly recruit budget. All you have to do is stamp your signature and select one or two words in each the document.



You also pick up your payslip which avoids the normal gamey performance bonus and failure penalties in favor of reinforcing the overall 'just a job' feeling and lack of risk by the commander.

The actual combat is really lacking and I think having it real time with the micromanagement feels more like you're directly controlling them and I think swapping to turn based will hopefully feel more like you give them a plan and they try to pull it off. Gives more freedom for soldiers to not follow orders and improvise. It'll be a fairly large gutting of what I've already made but hopefully the change to turn based works out.

[Kytin]

So now it's becoming Papers Please crossed with XCOM? :D
Black comedy is, I think, actually something of a staple of games featuring permadeath. If not in the game itself, then certainly amongst the players.

The text of those documents is just a quick mockup I assume, but there are some significant errors there that bug me.

[Bishop]

Yea it is just a quick mock up. Errors like spelling and grammar? I typed it in photoshop so I didn't have the benefit of a good checker.

[Bishop]

Played around more with the visuals. Still struggling to sell the idea that it's a camera feed I think. Now I've added a film grain effect, a little outline on the boarder of the two styles and some overlay above both the abstract/tron and the photo-real layer. Also swapped back to the older colours.

[Bishop]

I started over from scratch. The AI was a big mess and the goal I was aiming for was just unachievable. No matter how many new cases I threw in the AI was still easily exploitable and it never really forced you to change tactics which is probably the biggest strategy/tactics game sin possible.

So now I'm going for a much more streamlined combat system that's derived from Darkest Dungeons and has abit of a pokemon feel at the moment.

So version 2 has been in the works for around 3 weeks and it's already far more playable than V1 ever got to.

I even added in little helmet cameras that face inwards and when your units 'die' they stay alive for the rest of the mission pleading with you until you turn off their helmet feed.

Here's a vid



Let me know what you think!

[Sorsy]

I really like your earlier idea with the camera feed and I also like helmet cameras. What I get from it is that you as commander are a bit of an a-hole. Like the soldiers you are controling are just mercenaries and you don't care about them all that much. I must say I like that approach of expendable soldiers. Who in the end aren't that expendable 'cause the ones for hire aren't maybe as good as the dead ones were.

I'm not sure about the combat though. It doesn't seem like you can get much use of your surrounding. I liked one of your first videos where you chose where you want to crash your landing pod and it maybe had some effect on how AI reacted, if you had some cover nearby. Now it doesn't seem that way as it just grabs every enemy in sight and puts them in a line where you click on them. Not sure about it. Doesn't seem all that engaging but maybe you will prove me wrong.

Keep it up, I'm really interested where this goes.

[Bishop]

I've kept the insertion point but it's cut off in this video. I think might add back the camera feed when I get better art work. I was thinking I could instead of ripping off Darkest Dungeons and their straight line set up go for a small grid kinda like in Megaman Battle Network.

This would allow me to add cover pieces back make it less of a straight up dice roll for fights and put tactics back in. I think this more confined abstracted view of the combat is needed to cut back the AI work though.