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A barebones strategy prototype with potential


ASCII hexagons approximating what I can only imagine is the "Battle of Helm's Deep".


MinSt is a minimalist turn-based strategy/tactic game on a hexagon grid map. It is written in C, and executed as purely white ASCII text on a black background. The game uses the Insert/Home/PageUp/Delete/End/PageDown block of keys to control in hexagonal directions. I can imagine how difficult it might be for people who don't have those keys clustered. The terminal used to create the graphics is a bit awkward. It's the standard terminal, and thus, graphics are printed on the fly. So each time you move the cursor, the entire map scrolls before your eyes. It is a dizzying effect.

Each team has cavalry and soldiers. Cavalry have more action points (AP), thus more liberal movement, yet less hit points (HP). The way you attack in this game is to move your unit adjacent to an enemy's unit, and to move in the direction of the enemy unit. Their HP will be reduced, and yours will not be affected, so the strategy here is to attack the enemy as many times as you can.

At the moment, the dizzying effect of the terminal printing itself is extremely irritating and detracts from the experience. For the developer to have made the game in a different engine, such as Game Maker, would have been extremely beneficial to the overall experience. Even if there were no animations between turns, it would have been less nauseating due to the lack of scrolling that happens due to printing a whole new game map screen to the terminal each and every time a cursor is moved.

The board also suffers from lack of readability at a glance. It's hard to see quickly which units belong to whom, and how much HP/AP they have, and what type of unit they are, at a glance. Colour coding could help with this.

However, the systems behind the game are solidly implemented, and it's an interesting concept that would be much better implemented in a different engine. A total of 6 maps exist, and you are able to play hotseat with a friend. The game reminds me of an ASCII Mancala board game I once made in Java. It's fun to implement, and requires some skill, but generally using engines where a lot of the graphical boilerplate code is done for you benefits the presentation of the game in the long haul. But as a lean prototype of a greater game that could be made, MinST succeeds. Unfortunately, prototypes are generally proof of concept deals, and should be polished more to increase ease of use and playability.

I give MinST a 2/5. The game has potential to succeed, if implemented with graphics that give the player to better convey what's going on, and if the scrolling required between each frame of the game state is eliminated. This barebones prototype has potential, but in order for this to be fully realized, both complexity needs to be added to gameplay mechanics to increase the number of strategies allowed, and ease of use needs to be improved.

Posts

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Thanks a lot CashmereCat for your review. You made a very detailed analysis of the game and pointed out issues I was not aware of.

For the display flickering (don't worry, I was aware of that huge one), I need to find and learn to use a graphical library. Do you know any free C graphical display library with good tutorials and examples?
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
I actually don't, sorry. I don't know C that well. I hope you find a good graphical library or perhaps try an existing engine and alter it to your needs.
SDL2 is a very nice graphics library for C. It's one of the more straightforward graphics libraries (I learned C while learning how to use it), but it's also one of the most capable.

You may want to look into the "Control Codes" for the terminal/console. They are small sequences of bytes you can write out that will change the color or style of the characters. You could use them, for instance, to make units for each side a different color to help differentiate them.

Alternatively, if you wanted to keep using the terminal, you may want to look into the termcap or ncurses libraries. They are primarily for Linux/Unix, but I believe there are ports to Windows as well. They definitely work under Cygwin for Windows, at the very least.
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
Yeah, it's actually a very interesting idea for a game, one I'd rate much more highly if it were just polished a bit. I like the concept very much.
Sated, I confirm that you can create your own maps. Actually, I've built the maps using the map editor.


Flying Jester, your suggestions are very helpfully. You seem to be knowledgeable on the matter. I'll certainly come back to you with technical questions and code example requests.

There is now 2 paths for MinST:
1) improve console display
2) abandon console display and move to graphics display

Path 1 is definitely more reachable from my current skill level... and path 2 will definitely bring better output. I'll go with 1 first to keep delay between releases acceptable.
Path 2 was more appealing... Now, the game download has a graphical interface based on SDL2.

The review above refers to the initial ASCII version of the game. Its constructive critiques helped to improve the game. So I make the reviewed game version available at http://rpgmaker.net/users/Irog/locker/MinST_ascii.zip to show what a good review from a game is.
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
Cheers, Irog. As a result of releasing a new version with significant changes, I have made the score of this review N/A, which I think is fair because a lot of the issues I had with this game were actually due to the interface. I should play the new version at some point.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
This game is very different these days. I feel like it really needs an updated review.
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