To Liberation
It's a turn-based strategy game featuring squad combat and varied character classes, weapons, and abilities.
The player leads a 4-man squad, moves by tiles, and eliminates enemies with some smart allocation of action points for different actions each turn.
The player needs to utilize the environment, covers, and character-unique abilities to reduce casualties.
I've experimented with many new things in this big project, such as improving project structure through code restructuring, using Plastic SCM as a version control tool for better collaborative efficiency, and many others. There was also much research into the genre, gameplay, UI interactions, theme, and art.
Lead Designer & Project Manager: Puhan Sun
Level & Audio Designer: Zining Wang
Artist: Jerome Tieh
Gameplay Demo Video
Design Thoughts
For this senior project, I took the lead designer and also project manager role, focused on creating and improving the core part of the game. Here are the thoughts I had during the development.
Genre and Gameplay
What's the focus on gameplay?
The project started with a clear focus, to create a turn-based strategy game that features small-scale combat. There should be some level of variety in character abilities and choices for the players to strategically maneuver around the battlefield and eliminate the enemies while keeping their own units alive.
The game also referenced games like XCOM 2, Wasteland 3, Atom RPG, and a few others on different levels, I did research on many of the games in the genre, tried to avoid some defects in those games while absorbing the well-received elements and make them with my own ideas work together at my best.
Key Features
What are those and why I chose them
Action point system along with the per-bullet accuracy system are two of the first things we decided to use. While this game was most influenced by XCOM series, the action and weapon system is what we aren't agreed on implementing.
Having action points instead of two-step movement gives more freedom to the unit's movement for more flexible strategies.
Covers, but also destructive covers. While staying behind covers certainly grants the unit protection, I implemented health system to prevent abusive use of them. The enemies are also coded to be able to use covers, too.
Collaboration Experience
Scheduling and delivering
Version control is so beneficial to the online collaboration development as I can merge my teammate's work into the main branch. We get to work on different perspectives of the game simultaneously with less conflicts.
It's also my first time working with an artist in a consistent workflow. Setting up weekly objectives, meetings and reflecting on the deliverd progress, having these well managed makes the project move forward steadily.
Development Process
Challenging, but also rewarding
I had no experience in developing turn-based and grid-based games before, neither on designing and coding side, so the prototyping stage of the game was really rough. But week after week, I took on the challenge and improved a lot while being able to follow the smaller objectives towards a better iteration.
Facilitating questions for specific problems that I want to address in the future after playtests is a very beneficial practice that I learnt to do when working on this project.
Narrative
What about the story?
The background of the game is about a group of rebels escaping from their country that got controlled by A.I., they have to fight and survive along the journey to the other side where the humans formed an alliance against the A.I.s.
Actually, the project started with a clearer idea in gameplay than story, and what we realized is that tweaking the gameplay is more important than adding dialogues (at least for this project, a fully functional game prototype is better than a long story with little gameplay value in it). So, we decided to minimize the time on developing the story and instead to reflect some of it through the other details of the game later on, such as drones and robotic soldiers as enemies.
Scope
Future development
I have designed a few more classes and weapons than the current four we have, so implementing them and a character selection system is one future goal.
The game still lacks the feel when a unit eliminates enemies, such as the visual effects of bullets and explosives, the kill slow-motion camera trick and etc. these really improves the players' experience even in strategy games like this.
A train/hangar system is what we've imagined to expand on the depth and replayability of the game. Having places for crafting, shopping and squad management that interconnects with each battle would provide opportunities of introducing progression element to the game.