next »

[11clock]

A tactical party game where you doodle your own characters!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/11clocky

Summary
Draw your army and take them to battle. Destroy your friends with planning and skill. Utilize various weapons and tools. Be the last one standing!

Design Goals

• Easy to pick up for people who don't typically play tactics games
• Mix of both in-depth tactics and traditional board game luck
• Fun to play with close friends and family members from around the world
• Players should be emotionally attached to their characters, reason to strangle their friends
• Many options to cater the experience, "house rules"
• The "Mario Kart" of Turn-Based Tactics!

Gameplay

• Players draw their own teams of characters and engage with custom-drawn teams from other players.
• Players take turns moving their characters around the board and collecting weapons and utilities.
• Weapons and utilities can be used in later turns to blow up the opposition.
• Weapons can range from swords and pistols to frying pans and bowling balls.
• Utilities provide extra options such as teleportation and planting bushes to block attacks.
• Last team standing wins!

Theme & Visuals

• Arts and crafts style to fit the "draw your own characters" thing.
• Goofy and non-serious, promotes a casual yet competitive nature between players.
• Appropriate for all ages! (Except for the obligatory "poorly drawn dick" teams from some players. Perhaps the game will need parental settings...)

Platforms
Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, maybe Switch?

Inspiration
  This is based on a board game I made during my childhood that ended up being surprisingly good, which led to me making more and more versions of the game all the way up to my early teenager years. It was heavily inspired by Worms and Mario Kart.
  I have been meaning to get into making tactics games, and I think that converting an old board game of mine to a digital format would be a good start for me. It also gives me an excuse to finally get into networking.

[11clock]

The board does some basic generation with some placeholder graphics. Do you guys think I should go with a 2D arts & crafts look, or make it 3D with a physical board game look? In terms of the latter, the doodle characters would be on cardboard cutouts slid into stands that make them upright, like the ones shown below.

[11clock]

I have a basic state machine working to keep code organized and practice separation of concerns. You can move units now and it iterates between teams. Units are drawn on tiles that match their team color. I believe that this will make more sense in context when the game starts to transition from basic vector doodles to an "arts and crafts" look.



Next goal is to make an "arrow graph" (points where units will move/attack), then the attack system.

Attacking will be much more complex to program, requiring a working inventory and many different weapons. Weapons will fall into 3 basic categories: Melee, Ranged, and Explosive.

Melee: Can only target cardinally adjacent units, but deal heavy damage or inflict nasty status effects.

Ranged: Deal damage from a certain distance away. Can only aim in cardinal directions unless specified otherwise.

Explosive: Deal splash damage. Most are ranged but a few can be up close. The strongest weapon class, but also the most dangerous to use thanks to friendly fire.

Of course there will be some special types of weapons, but we will get into those later.

One of my biggest concerns is balancing AoE weapons, such as the Explosive class and piercing Ranged weapons. The natural way to balance them is to have them deal weak damage, but from past experience with the physical version of this game this led to such weapons feeling very underwhelming. The problem is that AoE is naturally either overpowered or underpowered.

My current plan to balance AoE weapons is to make them friendly fire. This means that while they are powerful, they can be tricky to use without damaging your own team. After all, blasting someone to pieces with a rocket launcher may not be the best idea when you are standing right next to the target.

[11clock]

Just some fooling around with weapon configurations.

[michaelplzno]

I would love to see some kind of computer vision that analyzes the characters players draw to give them stats based on the drawing. IE pointier characters have different stats than round ones. Just a thought, keep it up!

[11clock]

I would love to see some kind of computer vision that analyzes the characters players draw to give them stats based on the drawing. IE pointier characters have different stats than round ones. Just a thought, keep it up!

No plans for that right now. Drawn characters are purely cosmetic. It’s supposed to give you a personal attachment to them so that you get mad when other players blow them up. It’s kind of like naming your characters and team in Worms.

EDIT: Since characters are static doodles I was thinking making it so that you can add googly eyes on them, which would animate based on what is currently happening.

[11clock]

I am considering moving my devlog over to itch.io after I start to have more impressive screenshots and gifs, but will probably continue posting here as well.

New update soon. The weapon attacking system is a pretty major project and will probably be another week or two before it is ready. But I will try to share WiP images.

[11clock]

Work in progress weapon inventory and attack system.



EDIT: Added my Twitter link to the OP.

[11clock]

I started to get a little drained by the amount of coding I was doing, so I decided to take a break from it this week to focus on experimenting with the game's visuals. Here are my results so far.



Let me know any thoughts and suggestions. A step up from the low quality vector doodles, at least?

(Although I have literally only done the board and background so far.)

[11clock]

Here is the final result of graphics week.



I am liking where this is going. Unfortunately the style still needs a number of assets before it's ready for the game. Next week I am going back to coding the game, with the focus being on the attack system. Once that is done I will probably do another graphics week.

Please give me thoughts and feedback so far in the meantime.

[11clock]

Sorry for lack of updates. My health has been very poor as of lately, so I am putting it on a brief hiatus until it improves. Poor sleep, bad mix of medication, seen a doctor and currently working to escape the downwards death spiral. Also starting an exercise routine next week (if you want to call Ring Fit Adventure an exercise routine).

[11clock]

Good news. The Ring Fit Adventure exercising routine has been going smoothly (well as smoothly as starting an exercising routine can get). The game is no joke, after the first day I could barely walk and had to call my manager to work from home.

My sleeping is still a bit spotty, but I am definitely seeing improvements.

Of course you aren't following my devlog to hear about my personal health, so I bring you an update on the actual game!


(I know, it's the placeholder art again. The 3D graphics stuff isn't nearly ready yet to be fully implemented.)

Health bars, you can actually attack now, and it properly switches turns to the next player. Currently only the Pistol weapon works properly right now. I want to try tackling the ranged weapons before the others, since they are pretty simple and provide good groundwork.

[11clock]

Knockback system is in play. This will probably end up being the hardest status effect to program, so good to get it out of the way first.



Steal is next.

[11clock]

I decided to highlight spaces in range of your weapon but don't have a valid target, for clarity.



BTW let me know if you want me to post less often but with more meaningful updates. Admittedly, nothing has been all that exciting since I am still laying the basic groundworks for the game, and this is my first tactics game so I am learning as I go.

[11clock]

Hopefully my game is more pleasant to look at now. UI is still missing a few things. (I decided to ditch the 3D look from earlier screenshots.)

[11clock]

Getting closer and closer. The UI is just missing one thing now. Hint: Has to do with the left side.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/380407519115214851/657071046473678853/dJas2r9yNj.mp4

(Anyone know how to embed MP4 files? Gif file sizes are becoming way too large.)

[11clock]

I would call the UI more-or-less complete now.





I guess this about wraps it up for this year. Happy holidays!

[11clock]

Just kidding here is another update.

[michaelplzno]

I kind of like the default characters, do you have to draw your own?

[11clock]

I kind of like the default characters, do you have to draw your own?

I plan on providing default teams. I am actually making some for prototyping purposes until I make the character creator.