Original Concept V0.0.2(Abandoned)
TL:DR
This is esentially a board game with top down 2D realtime strategy elements in the style of Pikmin. I wanted to design a game that differed from standard RTS games in three main ways. First, you play on the ground as a unit, not an omniscient overlord, second, your attention is a literally finite resource in the form of Pikmin inspired Spirits, and third, units have to be carried to move via the aforementioned Spirits. This is what I came up with.
Your character is a Commander that is able to command Lesser Spirits but you are in service to your Faction’s Leader who is attempting to defeat a rival team. Your Leader and the Heroes with unique abilities available to them are unable to traverse the map on their own and it is your job to take charge and use your Spirits to carry them, literally, to victory. Not in a test of speed but rather a mastery of strategy. After all, the deadweight you’re carrying is not all that fast but that doesn’t mean you have time to be idle.
In essence, the main hook of the gameloop is that you are in charge of everything but are not physically able to be everywhere at once so you need to assign and manage orders to units while doing your own recon while attempting to outplay your opponent doing the same. An odd half baked way of explaining the ‘gamefeel’ of it diferently would be like if FNAF was 2 player and each player had to defend against the animatronics while simultaneously sending their own at the opponent. I was aiming for that sorta level/type of ‘attention management’ of always checking on things individually and gaining an instinctive understanding of what needs to be done and what can be set aside for the moment. Except scaled a bit down, not horror focused, and in RTS format with grid based movement for simplicity sake. I tried to give everything an ‘attention cost’ that isn’t much on its own but as the game starts hitting late stage and more and more pieces are on the board, the chance for both you AND your opponent to forget something or issue a wrong order allows for a weakness to exploit.
End TL:DR
Quick and Dirty Breakdown of Overall Mechanics
Each team chooses a Faction that each consist of a Main Base, Attack Units, Defense Units, Harvest Units, Support Units, and the player character Commander. There are 2 main gathered resources, Energy and Food which are used for Upgrades and Unit Maintenance/Empowerment in varrying degrees. Energy is a limited map resource that requires a Harvest Unit to acquire but Food is a more abundant resource and can be obtained casually. To use common RTS terms, Energy would be similar to a Gold Mine and Food sorta like Lumber. Units are moved by assigning Spirits to them. Units require a minimum amount to move and going over that by a certain amount (planning for 1.5x or 2x base cost) leads to a speed increase. Units also require a Marker to designate the destination. Players have ~4 Markers able to be placed at once. Markers must be placed and retrieved manually on the map by the Commander. Units are bound to grid based movement but traverse through them in realtime. Units when not being carried by Spirits are Immobile and occupy a grid space. Defensive Units are uniquely able to completely block off the square from other Units basically acting as a portable wall. Commanders are very fast, are not bound to the grid, and have free reign over the map (barring map boundaries) but have a limited field of view around them.
Commanders
This is the only character you directly control. Commanders do not take any form of damage, are not bound to the grid and as such are able to basically go anywhere with impunity. They are very fast relative to the Units in order to be able to prepare the necessary orders to give without having to, for instance, chase down a Unit you just mixed up an order on and not being able to catch them. The speed is also an important factor because the Maps will be relatively large to allow strategies to actually take place and being able to traverse the map and not feel like a slog, is I feel, crucial. A balancing aspect for this though was the concept of a limited field of view via a capped zoom out limit. In order to get a player to traverse the Map I figured needing to check on things themselves might work. It could also allow for a ‘4D chess’ type play with a player not needing to traverse as much because they could predict outcomes and therefore save a trip to allow better use of their time. Or so I hope anyway.
Spirits(Faction colors and Lesser and Greater versions)
Spirits act as a finite resource of where your attention is placed. Current plans have an estimate of something like 60 being the maximum you can have in use at a time. I’m trying to hit a sweet spot of not so many that you can just spam them on everything without thought but not so few that you limit the potential for interesting strategy. This is likely to change as balance demands while development progresses.
Spirits are primarily designed to be assigned to the Commander (to be able to be assigned elsewhere), assigned to Units or carrying Food (for transportation), and assigned to assist in Upgrade progression (part of the temporary ‘cost’ to upgrade). Being assigned to the Commander is a default state of sorts and simply represents how many Spirits you have available to be assigned to the other tasks. Each Unit has a minimum cost needed to be carried and the Spirits assigned to them is, well, how many Spirits are currently doing that. If a Unit is defeated by an opponent, the assigned Spirits will flee in terror and be unavailable for use but after a set time they will manage to return back at the Main Base to await further orders. Spirits assigned for assistance with Upgrades are temporarily removed from the available pool for the duration needed in order to complete the upgrade and when it is finished, they are spat right back out at the Main Base.
Spirits only get a single kind of unlock that is tied to when the Main Base is Upgraded. For every tier, after the initial start stage, the Player unlocks a single Greater Spirit. A Greater Spirit is special in that they are able to be controlled remotely through simple singular commands (via some sort of ui option) as well as able to manage the Lesser Spirits in its immediate vicinity. Commands would be something like “Set current Unit as Immobile”, “Take 4 Spirits to Marker 2”, “Assign all Spirits to Unit at current position”, “Return to Commander” and things like that. I realized that the scale of the game was getting too large to not have another means of managing things but I still didn’t want omniscient control so I settled on this and I think it has a lot of potential here.
Units (WIP)
Upgrade Tree (WIP)
Main Base Tier 0: Main Base, Harvest Unit, Attack/OR/Defense Unit T1 (Faction Dependant)
Main Base Tier 1: Tier0 Unit T2, Attack/OR/Defense Unit T1 (Faction Dependant), 1 Greater Spirit
Main Base Tier 2: Tier1 Unit T2, Support Unit, +1 Greater Spirit
Main Base Tier 3: Ultimate, +1 Greater Spirit
Harvest Units
Delivery Dude (Empty/Full)
Harvest Units are probably the simplest of them all with a singular purpose that only they are capable of. They have 2 stages, Empty and Full. A Harvest Unit is transported to a Energy Node on the Map and if they are set as Immobile they will begin to gather the Energy within themselves. When they reach max capacity they will stop gathering and become Full. At that point they need to be transported back to Main Base in order to deposit the goods. After which they revert back to Empty and are able to repeat the cycle again.
The goal in this design was to have a simple harvest/deposit system that was easy to do but potentially easy to forget about in the heat of battle. Another aspect was a symbiotic relationship with a Greater Spirit in order for an easy automation of it if desired at the cost of a useful resource that could be used elsewhere.
Main Base
Cow(Tier0)
Cow(Tier 1 and 3)
Main Base is the foundation your Faction is built from and if it is destroyed the game is won/lost. Just like all the other Units it too is able to be Carried and repositioned but needs to be set down in its Immobile state in order to do most of it’s main functions. A Main Base is where Energy is deposited into with Harvest Units which is in turn used to fuel the Upgrades that allow for more Units and greater options to use. When an Upgrade is ready, the base needs to be Immobile, have enough Energy collected, and a temporary amount of Spirits needs to be supplied to help facilitate the process. After an amount of time the Upgrade is completed, the Energy is used up and the Spirits are returned to the pool to await further orders. Main Base is also the default return point for lost Spirits when a Unit is defeated. It is the means by which new Units are spawned into the game as well.
Each Tier of the Main Base reached through Upgrades also changes the Main Base itself. It starts initially as a relatively light weight in order to allow potential clever positioning but with each upgrade the weight increases until at max rank, it reaches the heighest weight class and a decision to move it at that point is probably not wise.
Attack Units
Imp (T1)
Witch (T2)
Attack Units come in two types. Type 1 (T1) is a suicide Unit that once fed and rammed into an Enemy Unit, deals damage and dissapears. They are relatively light, cheap, but not overly powerful. Type 2 (T2) Attack Units are Ranged ones that when fed can fire a shot and do decent damage but are able to be ‘reloaded’ by giving them more Food. I’m currently toying with a concept of being able to link them to a Marker to ‘aim’ them in a direction but its not quite coming together.
This Unit’s main function is to be a means of taking out Enemy Units and ultimately the Enemy Base but I’m falling a bit short on figuring out a way of making them more interesting than essentially a chess pawn while not allowing them to overwhelm the other Units.
Defense Units
Bull Stock (T2)
Defense Units come in two types as well. Type 1 (T1) is a mobile wall that once fed increases the weight significantly and if set as Immobile will block off that square on the Grid from future pathfinding until it is taken out or moved elsewhere. I say future pathfinding because if an Enemy Unit is already moving along a path that goes through the square occupied by the Defense Unit, they will continue to do so until they are given new orders before then or they will collide. Upon collision, if they are not an Attack T1 Unit which would simply bomb the Defense Unit and die, their path is interrupted and they return to the previous square to await further orders. Type 2 (T2) Units have the ability that once Fed are able to either share or mitigate damage around them to a limited extent.
The goal here was to have Defense be more than ‘a unit able to take a lot of hits’ because in most cases the answer to such a thing is to go around them which negates the point. From the beginning I wanted a Unit that was able to block of a traversible route as I felt that opened up a neat opportunity for strategic placement and usage. It has had the consequence of forcing the entire game to revolve around this single ability but I think its working out. The T2 option was a means of attempting to provide the functionality of ‘big HP unit’ in a more useful way.
Support Units
This section is one that is still being workshopped. The idea here was for Units/Buildings that could help in management of things or provide a unique function that would help push towards a win condition. Couple examples being a drop off point for Resources, a gathering point for Spirits to return to other than Main Base, a forward position Units could spawn from, a place to generate Food from, a compass effect that points to the Enemy Base, and weird things like that. Essentially something more than generic stat increases that introduced interesting possibilities that allowed for deeper play into Faction Identity.
Other Thoughts and Promising Concepts
One aspect I’d really like to incorporate is the ability to pick up and move Enemy Units, to a limited extent at least. Spirits are already lifting everything so them being able to lift an Enemy Unit isn’t so far fetched. The problem arises in trying to balance around preventing abuse of griefing tactics and having to come up with mechanics for weird interactions because of that like picking up a T1 Attack Unit and moving into your own T1 Defense Unit.
I’ve also not given up on the concept of using Spirits to unlock map shortcuts or hidden resource areas but that is being put on the side for now until a more stable build is developed. Another odd concept was having double sized units that take up a 2x2 grid space that could potentially be an Ultimate Unit but this will introduce a LOT of work to even figure out how to incorporate it into the current system. Not even taking into account any balance issues. Its a cool concept though.
One of my concerns I had when figuring out designs is a turtle vs turtle match that stagnates/stalemates the game and a potential way around that was to introduce an “Ultimate Form” victory condition which is basically like a science victory from the Civ games. Essentially if a player is able to max out their Upgrade tree they unlock an Ultimate Unit, most likely gonna simply be the Main Base Unit transforming into the Faction Leader or going into a MEGA size or something appropriately ‘extra’, that initiates a Countdown Timer until that Faction wins if it isn’t taken out in time.
I also had ideas for the Ultimate Unit being useable for combat or having a Faction appropriate Ultimate Ability that did something cool like mapwide damage, every unit becomes a wall, or all your units get an extra tier, but miscelaneous game tweaks made those ideas not quite fit right. I’d like to still incorporate them somehow but I need to get a base framework up before I really delve into it.
And there was a secondary goals that crept up while I’ve been working on all this to allow room for more Factions and Units that others think would be cool that would be able to be added or modded into the game via a basic framework to work off of. The whole Attack/Defense and Tier system have been worked with this in mind. There is potential here for more than just my little corner of the internet who could be slotted in with some sort of unique spin for a Faction or two such as a Faction based around the WG mascots or one based around the Seeds of Destiny folk for instance.
Like I said at the start, I’ve been thinking of this on and off for months trying to make things interesting, balanced, and possible to implement. In my efforts to do this the game has had multiple identity crisises but eventually solidified into what it is now. I’ve tried to learn multiple game engines along the way and through much trial and error I’ve settled on Godot 4 as my engine of choice. Over the last month I wanted to prove I was more than just an ‘Idea Guy’ and I’ve managed to get a proof of concept of the current design up and running but I had to reinvent the wheel like three times over to get the basic movement functional because of the peculiar nature of what I have been trying to do.
If anyone is interested in my misadventures with coding:
I originally was hoping to just use Godot’s premade tilemap system coupled with aStar functionality but my needs of giving accurate pathfinding BETWEEN tiles opened a huge can of worms. I tried originally to make due by repurposing somebody’s premade tile setup for turn base movement but it just wouldn’t work. I then tried breaking up the tiles into quadrants through code to determine current direction, plotted direction, distance from the center, and other things and it almost worked except the pathfinding was still based on the origin point of the center tile so pathfinding would in certain situations take the LEAST efficient route to get to a place by not taking into account the interim distance traveled already by doubling back to move forward and that just wasn’t gonna fly. I ended up delving into graph theory in order to create an array of points using the tilemap as a baseline (which ultimately relegated the tilemap to a purely visual background and a means of determining wall collisions) in order to be able to add a temporary midway point between tiles for a Unit to determine pathfinding from THERE and that worked and is everything I have to show so far.
I currently have a basic framework for Unit movement that functions as it should (other than currently being hard coded to the specific test Units on the map but that can be swapped out eventually) but the second part of being able to assign Units to a Marker, and the reverse order functionality, is starting to give me the same amount of grief. If anyone wants to look at my project files I’m all for that but the only way I can figure out how to share em is to maybe .zip the whole project folder and hope that works? I feel like there should be a Project>Export Project Files option I’m missing somewhere though so if you could let me know I’ll do it.
Otherwise, here is a link to what I’ve got. Move with WASD. Left Click, Right Click, and Spacebar move the Blue, Red, or Green Units respectfully to your current position. It really doesn’t look like much but whats there is personally a massive accomplishment.
All this made me realize that I really need help to pull this off in any meaningful timeframe. I’m still going to be working on it but it takes me too long to accomplish the simplest of tasks without having to go down a never ending rabbit hole of partial or conflicting solutions from Youtube roulette after every other error in the code. I’ve also amassed a growing stack of papers covered in mad scribbles of code and theoretical workarounds and balance concepts and potential issues that might arise because everything is intertwined and its reached a point that its hard for me to keep it all in my head without a functional prototype to test the concepts on. Seeing people crank out a working prototype of things in less than an hour for things that are taking me weeks to figure out is taking its toll.
I KNOW this has the foundations for the framework of a good game that has the potential to grow with community ideas and concepts but as I am now I fall too short of what the game needs to get there so I’m hoping to reach out and ask the community for help in this regard. Ideally I’d like it if somebody could mentor me through some of these things but I’ll take any help offered from anyone interested. I’m open to any criticism, or game idea, or mechanic rework you guys might have too. If something isn’t gonna work or would work better somehow, I’d rather know now than a month later when I’ll have to scrap a months worth of whatever I’ve just built that depends on it.
