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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

[Destral]

I like the graphic style, reminds me of Xcom

Yeah, looks like an interesting game.

[David Pittman]

It's done! Download it!

Quick postmortem on this project, since I neglected to do a dev journal:

I was initially hesitant to enter this compo, as I'm not a huge fan of multiplayer games and I didn't have any idas that I felt were especially strong. But I haven't done much hobby/indie development the last few months, and I was hoping for a creative spark like I experienced working on Guitarguy last summer. I ended up convincing myself that it would be fun to work on an isometric game (something I'd never done before) and to focus more on design than tech. I wrote up a page of design notes the first night, focusing on the pillars (Approachable, Frenetic, and Deep). I had no ideas for the theme and decided to punt on that, assuming that some brilliant idea would strike me later.

Progress was slow at first. Dealing with isometric tiles was a new challenge for me, but it turned out to be less fun than I'd hoped. My first major goal was to define and render a volumetric tile map. At the core of the game's initial design was a dynamic world. Lots of strategy games offer destructible terrain, but I also wanted to support construction. It was satisfying to see randomly generated volumetric worlds being rendered after a couple of short days of work, but it also revealed that I hadn't fully considered how I would handle occluded visibility of sprites.

Dealing with visibility ended up being a key problem throughout development. I experimented with transparent overlays of varying opacity and complexity and ultimately settled on a continuously fading overlaid render of the layer just above the focused tile, with all higher layers completely absent. It was the only solution I tried which was remotely readable in noisy random environments, and it ended up working just fine in the simpler, neater map I later designed.

Many of the deeper features I'd originally envisioned were cut, due more to apathy than difficulty or time. (After all, I'm calling this done with two weeks left on the clock.) I had conceived of a game with a strong base-building and resource-gathering component, but by the time I had some rudimentary combat gameplay working, those aspects had become less interesting to me. I still wanted to support terraforming as a core feature, but I was finding that it didn't provide the sort of tactical options I'd hoped it would. Changing the order of the phases (action, then move), or introducing X-Com-style Time Units might have made such choices more interesting, but those and other approaches I considered tended to conflict with the Approachable or Frenetic design pillars.

At that point, I almost wanted to abandon the game. I'd been less than enthusiastic about the project from the start, the gameplay wasn't as engrossing as I'd hoped, and I still had not discovered a good theme. Furthermore, I suspected that the fact that I was making a hotseat game meant that this game was far less likely to be played than any other compo entry I've worked on. But I'm stubborn and I hate to fail. I soldiered on, adding a few missing features and doing a quick art and sound pass. Although I knew the game wasn't great, I wanted to finish it properly. Having never picked a theme for the game (largely because I'd never spent any time trying), I drew up with some rather generic and colorful sci-fi units with no weapons. I'd had a very vague idea of a battle fought in the mind, maybe with the soldiers representing something abstract, like thoughts or ideas. Although I didn't pursue that thread, it led me to the idea of a war fought with telekinesis, which led to the horrible title TKtics (pronounced tick-ticks, if that wasn't clear).

So, there it is. Not my favorite of my games by a long shot, but I finished it and I'm proud of that, at least.

[Derek]

Added template for finished entries. Please update yours:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=17283.msg493412

[tzachs]

Well, we tried to play it, but it was so darn complicated, and there was no in-game help or something to guide us in the game (that we could see), so unfortunately we quickly gave up...