Onward!
Sorry for the dearth of updates, been a little busy. Happily, it’s because I’ve started work on a turn-based tactics engine for what should be our first proper project (hurrah!).
Today’s moral: Don’t be afraid to get back to the drawing board when you need to.
Yeah, I know, same old folly. Upstart indie dev wannabe on their first project, dives in feet first and ends up arse over tit. I was so taken with my concept that I figured I’d just batter out a quick engine while I worked on graphics, special rules and everything. Bad idea. I got about this far…
…Before realising how obvious a shambles things were in already. That’s after two days’ work on a complete mishmash of ideas. The JRPG-style ’squashed perspective’ wasn’t helping simplify things much either. Obviously, a rethink was in order.
Which led to this prototype, bashed out in the last two days:
Now we’re getting somewhere. Cleaner code, abstract graphics (time enough for the proper ones later) and a flexible, much more moddable ruleset. It’s all wrapped up in a vastly more functional engine, and all in the same time it took to half-write shonky engine v1.
Current status
Just need to polish the base engine a little more, then maybe I’ll begin implementing some of the special game-specific stuff, specifically the card system. I’m currently thinking of a three-card system, with one fate and two skill cards for each unit, with maybe a special extra card for squad leaders. Or maybe not, I’m constantly hovering on that one.
As for the engine itself, It’ll probably get some extra special tweaking for project 1. Gone is the old pixel-art concept for now, I decided I should probably play more to my strengths. I’ve been thinking of giant, hand-drawn sprites mixed with a panning, zooming camera (to hit that detail) and a little parallax for flavour. The simple, solid nature of the ruleset should let me go a little wild on the fancy stuff like that, without worrying about other little things coming undone. And I’ll probably go back to the forced perspective style, it should keep things fairly pretty without the headache of isometric animation in the mix.
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