Paper to Prototype

When I left off last time, I posted a tantalizingly teasing image of a piece of paper. That paper formed the backbone of my new game, which - for the sake of readability - I’m going to call TMF for the moment.

For any of you who happen to have read some of my older devblogs, you might recognize the concept of the split-grid from my work on Last Call and its predecessor. It’s an idea I really like, but which I felt like I hadn’t quite gotten right yet.

Starting fresh with my blank grids, I decided to revisit the concept more along the lines of thinking that each battle should be a little strategic puzzle, with a heavier focus on positioning and unit types rather than on a “party” of units. So with hex tokens and pen at the ready, I got to work.

Setting the Basics

With this new approach in mind, I began with the basic idea that victory in these battles would come not just from eliminating the other units, but from eliminating their commander. The commander, in this case, being a formless pile of HP existing just off the grid. As in games like The Dungeon Beneath or Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes, the primary goal of the player would be to prevent any enemy forces from having a direct line to their commander while at the same time trying to get their units in place to have a clear shot at the enemy’s commander. In this basic prototype, units would always attack directly ahead - if nothing got in their way, they scored a hit on the commander’s HP.

Additionally, to enhance the puzzle-esque aspects of the idea, I decided that new units would constantly be entering the battlefield from each sides’ reserves, but what those units were would be randomly decided each round. Furthermore, they would deploy into the rear column, meaning they’d need to be worked into position.

For starters, I decided on a few simple unit types: Melee units, Archers, and Cavalry. During each round, Archers would attack first on both sides, then any survivors would engage in a melee round. Cavalry would have the ability to hit two enemy units in a row with their “overrun” ability. After that, reinforcements would arrive and then units could reposition themselves.

After a few quick tests with these rules, a few things became immediately apparent: units needed more than one HP, and more variety was needed to make things more interesting. Neither of those things was a surprise: that’s exactly why we test and iterate.

The natural next step was to give every unit 2 HP, and add Shield Guys and Spear Guys into the mix. Shields were a hard counter to Archers, and Spears were a hard counter to Cavalry charges. Trying a few more rounds with these new units and the additional unit durability, things immediately felt more engrossing. Positioning became a lot more vital, as did what kind of forces showed up in your reinforcements.

Things were feeling pretty good! Satisfied the idea had some merit, I decided it was time to take things into the DIGITAL WORLD.

It’s Like Paper, But Electric

When I started using Unity years ago, I barely knew how to program, and the idea of putting together something even as simple as a Pong clone felt like a major undertaking.

Fortunately, I’ve gotten better.

Time and experience have put me in a place where taking a concept from paper to functional prototype is a pretty rapid process, at least at the most basic level. So with my paper ideas in place, I got to coding.

After a few hours, I had a more or less recreated what I had on paper:

The advantage of now having a digital prototype was that I could now create a lot more types of units and arrangements to test out, as well as be able to tweak numbers without having to be constantly redrawing a bunch of little cardboard hexes. (Also, chunky SFX always makes things better).

The disadvantage was I realized I was going to have to put some sort of basic enemy AI in place if I wanted this to be a single-player game. This was something I hadn’t really done before beyond the simple behaviors in Camp Keepalive, but thanks to the paper prototyping I knew the basics of what the enemy should want to do. Translating that into useful code did take some time, but not as long as I thought.

So now not only did I have a nice flexible prototype to iterate on, but I could also start to hand it off to other people to try out. That became my primary goal for next steps.

Building out a few more systems to make a self-contained prototype people could get their hands on and run through a few more small skirmishes took some more time, but in a day or two I had a fully functional version I could distribute for other folks to test.

Now, one of the bigger challenges in game dev (in my experience) is actually getting people to try out your prototype. Prototypes, by their very nature, are rough. They have placeholder graphics, no tutorials, and probably break a lot. Slapping that down in front of someone and expecting them to be excited to play it is… unlikely. You either need some dedicated friends or a community of people who are eager to subject themselves to that kind of thing. Either way, it’s become clear to me over time it’s one of the most important things you can do early on. Nothing clarifies faster whether an idea is good or not than having someone else try it out. In this case, one thing that became immediately clear was that beyond sliding units around, there needed to be a way to swap positions. Without that, players (and the AI for that matter) were too bottlenecked in trying to reposition. Adding that in immediately improved the strategic options as well as the fun.

So, that basically brings us to now. Early prototype testing and building out more systems. While the feedback comes in, iteration continues. The battles are the heart of the game, but there’s a whole lot more that needs to wrap around it to make it a full experience. I’ve already got plans as to where that’s going, but as I’ve learned over and over - don’t get too far ahead of yourself.

So that’s where things are at the moment - stay tuned as things continue to take shape, and I tease a little more about what the whole thing will look like!