“You Are The Villain.”  That’s a tough one – I know it was in the top of the most-voted list throughout the week, but I really expected that it wasn’t going to be the selected theme.  I didn’t have anything nice planned out for it beforehand (the one idea I had wasn’t fleshed out enough to really work, and it was just an inversion of one of the themes that I wanted to do, anyways).  I was away from the computer last night so I had time to think it over and work out a plan, and now that I’ve slept on it I’m ready to get started.

I owe a lot to games like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics (and now the excellent XCOM) for their excellent atmosphere and art style as well as what they brought to the strategy/RPG genre.  But I also love games like Valkyria Chronicles and some ideas from tabletop miniatures that aren’t constrained to a grid but instead allow for free-form movement around a space, where the unit of measure is distances rather than “squares”.  I’d like to try and flesh out a single scenario from a game using some of these concepts, and I’ll be pulling some other influences in along the way.  I’ll be taking my tone and style form Glen Cook’s The Black Company books, with it’s matter-of-fact treatment of the magical alongside the grim realities of military tactics.  I’ll also be co-opting the general theme that good guys and bad guys in a setting like this aren’t all that different from each other, and you’ll be playing as the “bad guys” in order to apply everything to the theme.  I’ll be taking some visual cues from another favorite, the wonderful Vagrant Story (which shares a lineage with Final Fantasy Tactics, even if it’s not strictly the same genre).

The biggest risk going forward is that I’ll be going 3D, and I’ve never actually done any real honest-to-god not-a-tutorial 3D (so this is a big one).  I’m going to try and mitigate this by boxing out the environment and characters first and skipping the texturing and animating until I’m finished.

Here’s an overhead sketch I did of the intended environment last night before I went to bed, and I’ll be keeping it very simple to start with.  You’ll be defending the tower entrance.

An overhead layout of the intended environment for the scenario.

General checklist for the day:

1. Greybox out the environment
2. Box up a simple person model to use for now
3. Get a simple background music loop up and running (before I write any code!)
4. Get all these assets into Unity
5. Get the basic turn structure and game loop up and running
6. Implement character movement
7. Implement character attacking, character status, death
8. Victory condition when all of one team has been eliminated

This should give me the core of a simple strategy game (albeit without any real strategy).  After these are done:

1. Implement some basic strategic concepts like:
   1. height advantage
   2. flanking and unit direction affecting damage or dodge
2. Implement a simple automated dialogue system where characters will shout at each other in between turns or in different contextual situations (barks as well as back-and-forth dialogue between two characters if they’re still alive).  I loved the flavor this added to a scenario in the Tactics games and even though it’s non-relevant to the actual gameplay, I think it would add a lot to the atmosphere I’m trying to go for, and it would be fun to implement.
3. Work on skinning and animating the whole thing

In the end, this is a love letter to these games, and most of all to Glen Cook’s wonderful fiction.

Tags: gamejams, ld25