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gravitas-game-and-book-dev-blog · 2 years ago

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Dev Diary 3: Battles

In this weeks dev diary I want to discuss the implementation I am working on for the turn based battles. I've pitched this game as a cross between Fire Emblem and Grand Strategy Games, so today I want to dive into the battles which will feel familiar to Fire Emblem, with several big alterations to the formula, the first of which is the distinction between Phases and Turns. Before I go into that, let's just describe the flow of a battle and army composition.

Battles will be initiated either by an Event or when 2 hostile parties meet on the map. Unlike in Fire Emblem, your armies will be composed of Troops, which represent a whole battalion of soldiers. Some Troops, like your Generals, will be named characters and some Troops are unique and lead by a Unique Captain Character, however the bulk of your armies will be made up of more, shall we say disposable, cadets. One Troop will usually represent 1,000 men and an Army can have up to 20 units in it, so that they have somewhat realistic numbers. Once a battle begins one party is designated as the attacker and the other as the defender and each side is given a deployment zone where they can freely arrange their troops before the battle starts. Once a battle begins, the Maneuver Phase begins.

Maneuver Phase

The attacker always gets to move first and during this phase they get to move 1 Troop of their choosing, but they cannot attack during this phase. Then, the turn passes to the defender who can likewise move a single Troop before passing it back to the attacker. Neither side can move the same Troop twice until all Troops have moved, which will end the Maneuver Phase and Start the Combat Phase.

Combat Phase

This phase progresses much like the Maneuver Phase, each side issuing one order and passing to the other until all Troops have their orders, except during this Phase Troops can't move and instead are told who they can attack within their range. Melee units can only attack adjacent enemies while ranged troops can attack between 2 and 4 spaces away or engage in a melee attack, though their melee stats are quite bad. Once all orders are set, Troops deliver their attacks in succession and we return to the Maneuver Phase repeating the process until the battle ends.

So why not just do things the way it works in Fire Emblem or other Tactics games? My reasoning for structuring turns like this is to encourage more aggressive play, which might not be immediately obvious. If you've ever tried or seen multiplayer Fire Emblem, it just doesn't work. Whoever is able to have a longer threat range via movement or other ranged attacks has such a significant advantage as they will be able to attack when they can inflict enough damage to kill something, forcing the other player to come forward and respond with potentially fewer units dragging them into a usually devastating follow up which ends the match. They revolve around turtling and there are limited options for handling the fact that the enemy will be able to move and attack with all of their units before you can respond. Structuring turns this way makes it so with each move, the opposing player is able to respond like a game of chess and not only that, by cleverly positioning your Troops, you can essentially force them into making certain moves, limiting their options if you're brain is wrinkly enough.

There are a few additional rules that add some layers to this, such as zone of control, which makes it so that if a unit moves adjacent to an enemy that will use up all of their movement. If a unit starts in an enemy's ZoC they can disengage and freely move away, but they will suffer an opportunity attack(1/2 normal damage) for doing so. This rewards aggression, as plunging into the enemy first can force them to get stuck into the fight, or suffer free damage for trying to pull away. On top of that, if a unit moves at least 2 spaces on the Maneuver Phase, they will deal additional Charge Damage on their turn which can be very significant. In practice this means, if you rush your opponent, they might not have the space to mount a counter charge, which might be enough to swing things in your favor.

The fact that everyone gets to move before attacking also limits kiting with ranged units as after they attack, they will frequently be within movement range of many Troops, meaning there might be an opportunity for your opponent to close the distance and get them stuck in melee or force an opportunity attack.

There are additional things like flank attacks, but rather than getting stuck in with details I want to take a step back and look at one of the other big changes, morale. Most battles throughout history have been decided by the ability of one side to crack the resolve of the other and seeing as we're representing full scale battles, we'll do the same. Morale effectively serves as a secondary health bar for a unit. When Morale reaches 0, a unit will become uncontrollable and will automatically begin fleeing to the edge of the battlefield. Once it reaches the edge, after a turn they will 'rout' fleeing the map. This gives you a chance to run down enemies as in history this is actually where the bulk of casualties are inflicted. Morale will take damage from attacks, but certain things increase morale damage, the number of nearby enemies vs allies, proximity to your General's Troop, flanking and more. Concentrating fire and focusing on breaking unit's morale will be key to secure victories you might otherwise not win.

That ends it for the day. Tune in Wednesday where I'm hoping to have a really rough prototype ready to demonstrate some of these things.

#gamedev #indie games #game design

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gravitas-game-and-book-dev-blog · 2 years ago

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Just a quick thing for today where I'm working on setting up pre-battle deployment.

#gamedev #indie games

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gravitas-game-and-book-dev-blog · 2 years ago

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Dev Diary 2: Pillar - Information

In this weeks dev diary I want to discuss one of the pillars for the game that is most core to the design, and that is how information is treated in game. A strategy game challenges the player by presenting them difficult decisions and I want this to be core to the experience. What I don't want decisions to boil down to, is pulling out a calculator to see which one is best, or simply taking a glance and knowing from past experience a 'correct' answer. All decisions should have some risk to them and as a big nerd, this has led me to pulling from concepts in information theory and specifically the concept of Uncertainty. Essentially its a way of measuring how difficult it is to predict an outcome. Rather than do some math, let me just mention what situations increase uncertainty.

Firstly, increase the number of possible outcomes.

Secondly, making it so that each possible outcome is equally likely.

So then that's it. Making challenging and interesting decisions is a solved problem! We just need to make lots of equally good decisions! Why didn't anyone think of that before?! Oh right. Because it's hard. Really hard. Fortunately, I'm willing to cheat. So how do we go about cheating without anyone knowing?

Step 1: Restrict Player Information

As opposed to our lovely spreadsheet simulators, also known as strategy games, the real world doesn't have every statistic recorded for us to see at all times for free. That requires Bureaucracy, time and money. So let's model this in game by making it so that in order to keep records, the player will need to invest resources to perform that task, be them gold, time or actions. This is how Intelligence Agencies work in the real world so it even adds an element of immersion into the game. Let's also make sure they never has enough resources to see everything. If the player doesn't have perfect visibility, they are going to have to make more decisions without complete information, which naturally increases uncertainty. Through experience the player will be able get a general knack for how things generally play out and develop some form of mastery, but I want things to stay interesting and risky for the veterans as well, which leads to step 2.

Step 2: Stark Variation

Over time players will learn what strategies generally play out well in most circumstances. Unless we change the 'meta' every playthrough. What? This is an indie and as such it has a quota of roguelike design elements it must steal and this is where we're meeting that quota. Essentially, if certain settings in the world are randomized each playthrough without the player knowing, then they'll need to discover what the 'meta' is for their particular world setup and campaign. These setting might be change what certain buildings produce or what input needs they might have, they might vary the prices for resources or change what things create or reduce unrest. By doing this, optimal build choices change between playthroughs. If Iron was abundant in your previous one and you developed you military around it, you're going to need to shake it up if the new campaign has Iron shortages, but plentiful Horses. Maybe cultural buildings that are focused arts now produce research in addition to their normal benefits. One of the fun elements to doing this, is that it can be done game wide, per city, per unit or any other way you want to slice it. By changing the rules each time there might still be a 'meta' but only for that game and strategies will likely be less consistent, forcing the player to seek out what's working in this new campaign and develop a new strategy each playthrough. In order for this to be effective these variations need to be stark enough to force a player to respect them. These can't just be "Happy cities provide +10% money" or some minor change. They need to be things like, "This type of building now consumes a ton of wood. You will never have enough wood. Adapt or die bitch." Intoxicated by this idea, I think we can take it another step further with step 3 before my hubris enacts my karmic downfall.

Step 3: Force Pivots

In a given playthrough, the player might find a strategy that works really well and they'll see it through the to the end. Unless, we keep routinely introducing new rules as the game goes on. Oh, you were relying on your lucrative silk trade? Well guess what, fuck you, now bandits are going crazy all along your trade route and you're gonna have to police the heck out it from now on, but you will get loot from the bandits in return. Things like that.

All this together should make the process of figuring out and devising a strategy the main gameplay loop, which I think will be immensely satisfying.

That's it for this week's dev diary. I will be reducing how often I post on Friday and Saturday to only be one of those each week and alternate going forward.

#indiedev #gamedev #indie games

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gravitas-game-and-book-dev-blog · 2 years ago

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The Cursed Problem of Sandbox Strategy Games

One of the best GDC talks I’ve ever heard is called, "Cursed Problems in Game Design" by Alex Jaffe. In this talk he goes over a common situation where a designer has two different goals that end up conflicting with one another. Trying to fulfill one ends up costing the other and vice versa. For years now I have been playing Sandbox Strategy games, be them Paradox Interactive’s library of Grand Strategy titles or Creative Assemblies Total War series and while these games are fun and enjoyable in the beginning, the flaws become more apparent as you sink additional time into them and I think we can explore why this is using the ‘Cursed Problem’ as a framework for why that is and discuss some of the techniques proposed in the talk on how to compromise with the conflict, because you can’t solve a cursed problem, only mitigate its effect on the intended experience.

So what is the conflict between a sandbox game and a strategy game? Let’s start by identifying what each genre promises to the players. For the sake of keeping an air of academic pretentiousness, let’s use the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework for identifying what aesthetics players are after in each of these genres. For a sandbox game that’s primarily going to be Expression as the player helps to craft the experience on their own terms and Discovery as the player tinkers with the mechanics and systems to see how they work. For a strategy game the appeal is going to lie more with challenge. Challenge and discovery actually compliment each other very well, as by exploring the mechanics and playspace new options become apparent to the player and as they begin to learn, they are rewarded with a feeling of mastery as they overcome the obstacles in the way of their goal. The conflict is between a desire to allow the player to express themself, while challenging them. The more the player is permitted to express themself, naturally means there are more viable solutions to a given problem. Since strategy games are tests of decision making ability and do not typically rely on skill checks, whether or not you succeed is dependent on whether or not you made the right decisions in the time you were given. Essentially, the more the player is allowed to express themself, the more decisions are viable, which typically reduces the challenge of the game. If every strategy/build/deck/etc can work, then the appeal of challenge is lost. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the game might not be designed as an overly challenging one, but it has various negative impacts on the game's design.

Firstly, if the player realizes they’ll be able to win regardless of their decision, then those decisions hold no weight. The player might start to skip reading events or decisions because why should they care? If a choice is inconsequential, why waste my time? Anytime the player starts ignoring the decisions they are presented with and just opts for the fastest option, like clicking something random or setting a unit to auto, we see that the appeal of challenge has been lost and if the decisions don’t matter, expressing one’s self through a chosen strategy no longer feels rewarding. I didn’t come up with a clever synergy or build, the game’s just easy. With that, strategist fantasy is lost.

We could also swing the other way and try increasing the difficulty and limiting the number of viable options, but this problem is probably more obvious and takes the form of META gaming. For those unaware META is an acronym that stands for Most Effective Tactic Available. As dominant strategies become known they beg the question, ‘Why pick anything else?’ and if there was an antagonist for the ideal of self expression, it would probably be that statement.

Despite this we can see games combining these genres succeed regularly at a commercial level. Paradox Interactive being the giant within this space, so let’s examine one of their successes with Crusader Kings. It’s fairly clear the secret ingredient is role-playing. A natural complement to expression and a justification to actively not take a META option, but we can still see the conflict depending on the player. If a player goes into a Crusader Kings campaign with the mindset that it is a strategy game, their experience will likely follow a path similar to this:

“What is this and how does this even work?” (First 100 hours, the onboarding issues in their genre are another essay on their own)

Possibly drops the game instead of continuing

“How do I kill my oldest son?”

“Oh, that’s how this all works! Wait, I can get claims from doing this?”

*Giddy excitement at breaking the game

*Proceeds to get bored and potentially stops playing

*Either obscenely heinous shit for the thrill of it, or the nerdiest roleplaying you’ve ever seen where they begin to complain on the forums about the lack of crop rotation mechanics and how poorly represented X region is in game, citing primary and secondary sources from the twelfth century, except they’re wrong actually because that was only for Catalonia and the practice did not extend to the whole of Spain you troglodytes.

Ultimately, Crusader Kings is able to mitigate the problem when it is able to communicate to the player they should role-play instead of min-max. The poison for the experience is the desire to play it like a strategy game, which leads me to the following hot take:

Crusader Kings isn’t a strategy game, but it delivers a strategist fantasy.

Crusader Kings wants you to feel smart and cunning, but it also wants you to pick the stupid option because it’s more fun.

Similarly,

Victoria isn’t a strategy game, it’s a simulation where you pilot a nation down a path.

Victoria wants you to feel like your ideology can work, is the best one and the game relies on its systems and economic model to make you buy into it. Just like Crusader Kings the real aesthetic the game is capitalizing on is fantasy and expression instead of challenge. When you play these games with the goal of min-maxing, and awkwardly enough, strategizing, you spoil the experience for yourself. Doing what you feel like instead of the ‘smartest’ play, is how to have fun with them.

Games like Europa Universalis(my personal favorite), Hearts of Iron and Total War are much more firmly strategy games, but they all suffer from the problem where they tend to fall off after the early game because they have to be easy enough to accommodate a multitude of strategies for the sake of player expression. This is the sole reason for a drop in difficulty in these games, things like the snowball problem and limitations with AI play a role, but because these games are strategy games, when the player pulls ahead you run into the same problem you have in a Civilization game where you know you’ve won, but you still have to wait to actually see the victory screen. So players just abandon the campaign and start a new one chasing a high they can no longer get because the game can't challenge them without setting additional challenges for themself or going for a specific and often pun inspired achievement.

As we can see these are not death knells for these games, but it is where a lot of dissatisfaction from long time players comes from and as games whose monetization models rely much more heavily on fewer loyal high spending customers through DLCs, expansions and so on, it would be a great boon to keep them satisfied and continuing to evangelize their games to others. So let’s examine some techniques to help further mitigate the conflict.

The talk on Cursed Problems discusses 4 means of dealing with these conflicts. The first is to create ‘barriers,’ which serve as a sort of blocker that keeps the player from spoiling the experience for themself and roguelikes offer some inspiration for solving the dilemma we have between expression and challenge. If the player simply doesn’t get to choose which bonuses/build/cards/tools/etc they get to work with, they are forced to work with what they have and strategize around that. In these situations, the build can still feel like their own and I think a saving perfectly encapsulates this idea and the strategist fantasy we are often after.

“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” -Donald Rumsfeld

This type of barrier does create a situation where sometimes the player might want to play a certain way but can’t. Maybe they want to be aggressive and go to war but they get more bonuses to diplomacy or their build might just be plain terrible. I say lows help to make highs higher, but you’ll need to decide if this is a desirable trade off to you.

Another technique is the use of ‘carrots.’ These serve as things that encourage the player to make the decisions that won’t spoil the experience for themself. A perfect example of this is the stress system in Crusader Kings 3, where the player is encouraged to make decisions that are in line with their character’s personality, rather than always picking the one that seems the best every time. Sometimes the player would still rather take the stress hit, but it helps keep the player in the role-play state of mind.

Next up is the opposite of a ‘carrot,’ which is a ‘smore.’ A ‘smore’ is used when the designer acknowledges a promise is being broken, but plays into that. Stress is actually both a carrot and a smore because, when the player accumulates a certain amount of stress they suffer a mental breakdown which can sometimes be entertaining despite it being a negative, like becoming a lunatic. I think of a ‘smore’ in the same way I think of rolling a nat 1 in DnD. If we can make a strategy game where it’s fun to be bad or unlucky, then we don’t need to worry as much about making more playstyles viable options. When people play Ganondorf in Super Smash Bros. Melee, they aren’t usually playing to win. They’re trying to send a message and are expressing themself by depressing their opponent. Or they eat shit while trying. Either way, you won't see them bend to the will of a META game or tierlist, the honorable fools that they are.

‘Gates’ are another technique and serve to make it more difficult, but not impossible for the player to highlight the conflict. I find it difficult to spot examples of this in sandbox games as player freedom is usually core to the design and I’m tired now so someone else find a good example of this for me please. Thanks.

In summary, while player expression and challenge often come at the cost of one another, I believe the longevity or ‘honeymoon’ period of a sandbox strategy game can be extended by seeking to minimize the impact it has on the game’s design, or to acknowledge that a game is about achieving a strategist fantasy rather than centralizing the gameplay around strategic decision making.

#gamedev #essay #grand strategy

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gravitas-game-and-book-dev-blog · 2 years ago

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Lore Day 1: The Sculptor

"With magma as his clay and quakes as his chisel, The Sculptor created this land. As one who sees with his hands instead of his eyeless face, he labors over the furnace of this world. Stained pitch by the soot and sulfur he is a living shadow with a single caveat, the hearth that is his core. The orange glow of his magnificent belly no less hot than the earthen forges that make up his workshop. Whether they be mountains, ravines, plains or lakes, The Sculptor can be seen smiling that pearly white display when looking over his works. A humble god, but a passionate one. He often looks out over the mighty sea he named after his wife, Meridian, to inspire himself before setting back to his toil."

Book Update: Currently in the book I'm 76K words in and I think I am well and truly into the thick of it now. All of the exposition about the plot has been firmly established and the characters all have their motivations where they need to be to pretty much drive the show from here on out. There's a handful of characters to introduce throughout the middle still, but from here on my focus is going to be on the scenario writing where I come with situations to challenge them and hammer in the lessons they need to learn for their arcs. Basically the set up is all done, now it's time to start reaping the payoff.

#writing #fantasy

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gravitas-game-and-book-dev-blog · 2 years ago

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Still borrowing sprites from Fire Emblem, but for this week's Screenshot/Demo day I'm showing somethings I've programmed for the Visual Novel style events. I recommend sound on if you can where you are!

For more updates follow the game blog!

#gamedev #indie games #rpg

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gravitas-game-and-book-dev-blog · 2 years ago

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[WIP] (just in case the placeholder for a missing texture didn't give that away)

Note: I am not an artist, but I am looking for one! The above video only serves to convey the general aesthetics I'm aiming for. Any pixel artists capable of creating tilesets or character sprites like the ones on the map can feel free to hit me up, I will be looking to commission($) assets in the near future. Share this post with any friends who might be interested too!

Gravitas Dev Diary #1: A First Look at the Overworld Map and Project Overview

Greetings! In today's first developer diary I wanted to give a nice visual to look at and help convey just what this whole thing is trying to be with my limited artistic talents, so here's the pitch:

"A Grand Strategy RPG taking tactical battles, fully flushed out characters in a rich world and a series of complex systems to master, set out to achieve one of two protagonists’ ambitions within their lifespan as you watch them grow, age, get married, have children and eventually die. Make sure they don’t have any regrets when they do in this dynamic narrative."

or simply:

"What if Fire Emblem was a Grand Strategy Game?"

I've been tinkering away for the past few years in my spare time developing different prototypes for this brain worm and in the past few months I've settled on a final design that achieves the experience I've been shooting for. That being the fantasy of administering a nation. There are other games that do this, but the thing that sets this one apart will be the combination of Overworld Kingdom Management and Turn-based Tactical Battles as well as how the game handles information and the logistics of intelligence gathering, but I'll talk more on that this Saturday in this blog's first Game Design Essay.

While playing you will bounce between 3 separate elements of gameplay. Those being:

Visual Novel Style story segments

Overworld Kingdom Management (Diplomacy, Economics, Politics and a unique one, Judiciary Duties)

Grid-based Tactical Battles (This will utilize distinct phases that discourages turtling strategies, but more on this in the coming weeks)

To wrap this week's dev diary I just wanted to add in a piece about who I am, as a sort of means to establish some degree of confidence that this isn't some indie project that'll be dropped and give reason for disappointment. I am a professional Data Scientist with a moderately unhealthy work ethic and a strong desire to express the creative side of my brain through this project. I have been steadily working on this and the book (tune in Friday for more on that) for multiple years and my motivation has only grown as I have more to show for it. I am financially secure and incredibly fortunate to be able to have a healthy enough work-life balance to not only work on my passion projects, but to also be able to put money into them. I can't promise rapid updates given I work full time, so don't bother asking for release dates or anything, but I will be aiming for a playable demo sometime next year.

Coming up: Visual Novel Scene and some light scripting this Wednesday!

#gamedev #indie games #rpg #strategy #fire emblem #gamemaker #gms2 #pixel art

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