Oxtongue Heroes

Before I started working on this game, I'd had about half a dozen projects that started with a clear gameplay idea. In every case, within about two months of starting I had a demo out, something people could play and understand what the game was. If I continued with it, of course details got tweaked, but the basics were all there.

Though I'm busier now, I'm still sometimes boggled by the length of time it's been taking to get this together to the point where I feel all the interlocking bits are there enough to really start getting feedback on it as an actual game.


About two years ago, when I started actual coding on this, I had a clear idea of a lot of the features that I thought would make a workable, interesting turn-by-turn tactics RPG:

- AI that determined what to do based on what several units could accomplish together, not just what would be good for each unit;
- A varied group of ~15-25 characters, from which the player got to pick basically any group for each battle, aiming for ~3-10 per battle for a good player;
- A system for tying together the groups used in battles to produce a score, so as to encourage the player not to focus on a single unit or combination of units, and in general to use as few units as possible;
- To go with the above point, no leveling;
- Deterministic damage and combat results, which has a bunch of benefits (undoability, possibly cheating protection for the above scores, the AI can do more);
- A pretty good sense of how I wanted movement, territory control, and ability ranges to work, and the basic mechanisms I'd accomplish that with;

This is still what I'm aiming for. Certainly details have been filled in: I dumped my first try at a deterministic damage mechanic for another, I had to work up what sorts of unit abilities might be interesting and get them to work right with the AI, lots of other stuff (a lot of that over the last year, even though I thought a year ago most of what was left was frontend work); but it's not like I've been overhauling the entire game concept every few months.

Heading in I tried to think of this as an experimental game, because I knew working up a game with the sort of AI I had in mind would be tricky. I didn't appreciate how much of the game it would make tricky, because at some level a lot of my problems come back to getting that right. But once this stuff is done it's much easier to reuse, and I'm still plugging away.



Stuff to do before projected demo release

- Finish enemy deploys in the third map and test for balance
- Create and finish the fourth planned map
-- write AI modules that take advantage of NPC mages
- Create a tutorial map
-- Let status effects be loaded from the map file that can show message boxes
- Show battle objectives from the end-turn menu
- Tie the battle maps together with a hub and scoring
- Other problems as they come up (most dangerous point, heh)