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[MrTedders]

Hi, it's been a long time since I've posted on here. The last thing I did was my attempt at 70 games in 70 days.......only made it halfway and then ran away embarrassed.

I've been working on a new game longer than I normally do which I generally work on for about a week of work then release. I've been on this for 4ish months now

Updated art :

I'm calling this game......Inter : (dependant\connected\action\twined\related) Multiple name choices that all fit. I'll figure it out later

Game

This is a small yet ambitious game that is about the 4 elements. Basically it is a 1v1 game where each player takes the embodiment of an element and tries to get one hit on the other person to win. That is done through the usage of the abilities of the elements, which all break the game in certain ways. Earth spawns boulders, wind creates air currents, water messes with the tiles, fire create roaring infernos that breathe. This game has a sense of fluidity about it that I am absolutely in love with, the battles take on an improvisational air, until everything is set up to where it comes to a point where one wrong move leads to death. I love this flow. I love this game.

hopefully I can communicate my love for this game

Goals With Devlog

I'm looking to update this devlog with a lot of the choices I've been making about this game. It's a very expansive game, in terms of how many different ways things can go. I've already played for hours with random people and I've never seen the same situation twice. I'm hoping through this devlog I'll not only learn more about the game through builds I give out but also learn how to best explain this game, it's not easy to parse through images alone. Which is a problem for me and trying to show it online.

Enjoy! I'm not sure how these devlogs should go but I'll be working it out as I go along. If anyone can tell me how to upload gifs I'll be happy to show a better idea of what this game is about

[mosseljongen]

Mmm this definitely piqued my interest!

For one, I love the art style, there is a special place in my heart for anti-aliasing and low poly work put together. One gripe that comes with this way of rendering might be the legibility of the text.

The game mechanic looks fun, at first glance it seems small but I can understand that this rabbit hole goes way deeper than that. I'm wondering, is this turn based and if so, do you take turns or have it play out at the same time? Looking forward to some moving content to get a grip on how it plays!

btw: https://gfycat.com/faq is a nice way to upload moving images

[MrTedders]

@mosseljongen : Thank you very much for the tip, thats exactly what I was looking for. The game is turn based and each player does their move individually. There's nothing that happens at the same time.

I'll be spending a little bit of time taking gifs and explaining a bit of this game. I'll be a bit slow with it, but I'll get it done

Better gif - > https://gfycat.com/QuickRightIrrawaddydolphin


Movement

Movement works very simply with a couple wrinkles. Each turn you can move once (you can only use any move once). Movement also prevents you from using any other move. There's 2 special things about movement in this game.

1) You can not move onto another persons tile (their color), in order to do so you can attack tiles to change their color.
2) there are neutral tiles in the game (meditate does this), that both players can walk on.

Another thing about how abilities work, I'll get into this later, is that every time they are used, their cost goes up by 1. The cost resets after not using it for one turn. I mention this with movement because something I like about this game is how you can chase people down to exhaust their mana and freeze them up.

[MrTedders]

Better gif -> https://gfycat.com/ShadyShamefulAntelopegroundsquirrel


Better gif -> https://gfycat.com/GrippingMeaslyEagle


Basic Attack

Basic attacks all have different names (Rippling strike, knuckle fist, blazing kick, jab) just to spice things up but they all do.....essentially the same thing. There's a few wrinkles based on the character but they all work from the same foundation. You can attack up, down, left, right. It will change the tile you attack (as long as its not neutral) to your side so you can move onto it.

Essence\Mana\Some name I'll figure out

In the gif you'll notice two orb things come up. Those are how much power you have to spend on your moves per turn. There's only a max of 5 you can store. You can get them one of two ways.

1) Meditate on a tile. This turns the tile white and that tile, while white, will give you one mana. It also turns the tile into a neutral tile that both players can move onto. If you meditate on a meditated tile........well I'll get into that later.

You'll see in the second gif that the while mana goes away. That's because another function of the while tile is that if protects against one attack, but then goes black and loses its power until you meditate on it again. Very important for this one hit game. It stays neutral however. There's no way to turn a neutral tile back into a non neutral one.

2) Unbalancing the tile balance. The color mana orb comes from the fact that as you see, from attacking, the perfect divide of the tiles becomes unbalanced in earths favor. For every tile that is unbalanced in a particular sides favor earns them that many mana.

[MrTedders]

Better gif -> https://gfycat.com/MilkyUltimateHylaeosaurus


Earth

One of earths abilities is the power to raise boulders out of the earth and shove em around to try and damage the other player. Everything about the earths strategies hinge on the movement and positioning of these boulders to cut off escape routes and defend yourself from the advancement of the enemy

[MrTedders]

Better gif -> https://gfycat.com/LightLargeDwarfrabbit


Water

Water is very much about controlling the flow of battle through rearranging tiles. Water is a very trap based element. Luring the enemy into situations where they feel as though they have the advantage, and snapping your jaws around their throat by moving tiles around to destroy all their plans.

This particular power you see above swaps two tiles, and if one of them is one of your controlled tiles, it will kill the opponent if they are hit.

[MrTedders]

Better gif -> https://gfycat.com/BetterOddballKob


Totems

This game is purely 1 unit vs 1 unit. However, each player has the power to summon these things I call totems from their meditated tiles by meditating on them while they are white. What this does is create a Totem and turns the tile black (removing the mana that it gave)

Totems are stationary units that you control that have one elemental ability that can be cast in a very small area around the totem. These are very good for controlling space. However, if they are destroyed, the players max mana gets reduced by one.

To prevent this from happening, the player has the ability to meditate on the tile again to remove the totem, and turn the tile white again.

[MrTedders]

Better Gif -> https://gfycat.com/PassionateMadeupBarnowl


I made a minor change to the game that has a big impact. Before you could target the same tile with multiple abilities on the same turn, I've removed that. Now each tile allows on ability on it per turn, so space management becomes more important

[MrTedders]

Higher Quality -> https://gfycat.com/BrownRequiredCanvasback

Made some art and started to put it into the game.

Madea few tweaks to each of the elements abilities to allow for more creative usages of their moves

[MrTedders]

Higher Quality - > https://gfycat.com/RectangularAridAmericanbittern


Higher quality - > https://gfycat.com/HomelyCornyAtlanticspadefish

Fixed  A BUNCH of bugs and played for a couple hours with some friends. I'm really liking how this is taking shape. Made adjustments to all the moves.

The thing I'm loving most about this game is the creativity I'm seeing happen with it. The moment someone else understood the rules, they started making moves I've never thought of  yet.

[MrTedders]

Let me know if more explanation is needed for the rules. This game is hard to get across just through gifs alone

[MrTedders]

Higher Quality - > https://gfycat.com/AchingOrnateBlueandgoldmackaw

I created the moon for the water element. There was one move that had a lot of aspects to it, in trying to replicate the ocean tides. It wasn't working, but i still wanted tides because the ocean is a huge body of water and it only seemed fitting. So I made the moon to manage the tides. This game is weird.

[tankorsmash]

I don't at all understand the rules, but I think it looks very neat, from the gifs alone. Good work man!

[MrTedders]

Higher Quality -> https://gfycat.com/HeavyDazzlingAfricangoldencat

@tankorsmash hmmm, I'll have to figure out the best way to explain it. Till then hopefully gifs will be entertaining enough.

One of the things I wasn't quite sure about was how to handle first move advantage. My first solution was just to place the players asymmetrically to give the second player more options to respond to the first play move, but I felt like that was off for some reason. I came up with a solution to divide the two sides with one extra row. Now the players have more time to set up a defense and makes the first engagement much more interesting and considered.

The static tiles also help me with an aspect of the game which is mana management. One way players get extra mana is by unbalancing the board in their favor (having more tiles of your color). Now that I added the middle row, there is now an odd amount of tiles. This causes the board to always be unbalanced once all the static tiles are gone. I like this.

[MrTedders]

Something I've been thinking about is visuals designed for first time viewing. I know this game isn't very easy to understand, and there's still a lot of ui work I need to do. However, An issue I have is making this understandable without understanding the mechanics. I don't know if thats possible, nor do I think I want to do that. I want the visuals to support the game and atmosphere that comes from playing the game. I've shown random gifs to people who have played the game before and they instantly know whats happening, its just hard to convey that without knowing the rules -.-

Anyone deal with the problem of rules being hard to convey, thus making screenshots kinda fall flat?

[MrTedders]

Higher Quality - > https://gfycat.com/OptimisticImpassionedBlobfish

I'm really liking how the abilities are contrasting each other. Nothing plays the same, and each feels closely related to their element in a representational way. Now I need to work on transitions between different states.

[MrTedders]

Okay, So I need to put a loooooot of work into the visuals. This game isn't that understandable with the current visuals and I need to figure out what to do about them.

On the plus side the mechanics are still fun. I love the dynamics of each matchup. The earth vs fire matchup is fun. I mean they all are, but its frantic with earth and fire. Earth wants to block out fire, while fire wants to spread their fire as far as they can so they can't be smothered out. Each matchup sort of has a different goal of how to overwhelm the opposing element. Its not just a pure one type of style for an element, which I'm liking a lot


Higher Quality - > https://gfycat.com/AridEthicalAsianconstablebutterfly


Higher Quality - > https://gfycat.com/HotHappyAustraliancattledog

[afender7]

This looks very cool, but I don't want to read too much because I feel like a large part of the enjoyment would be figuring out how everything works and interacts through playing the game!

[Sustrato]

Bruh, I'm all about elemental interactions and especially entwining them with electronic landscapes - but I feel like your tiles lack a certain 'rawness' to be considered elemental. If I can't look at them and immediately pick out fire, water, etc., they aren't really pure enough to be called elemental, imho. It would be really cool to see you pull off that vibe, inside of a purposefully digital interface, inside the game. I hope you can.

[MrTedders]

Higher Quality Gif - > https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/DelectableBlackCaribou

I haven't stopped working on this game, however the mechanics and rules are as reduced as I could make them, my next step is settling all the possible edges on how I want these mechanics to work. My main goal being to make some unifying grounding for the for elements because their mechanics are as varied as I could make them