Now that I've decided to make a game. It's time decide what sort of game. As with any sort of systems design, you start with brain dump, then refine, then finalize, and then get to work. One could get to work in parallel while refining the game design, but I am trying to be structured here.
Next time we try to refine these ideas in to some static screens to illustrate the flow of the game. Perhaps list out some component properties, such as types of objects and their behaviours. Composition of components and their properties/stats. I suspect next post will be quite big and contain several images.
The Brain-dump:
I would like to make a simultaneous turn-based tactics game. Example of which, and inspiration for my idea, include Flotilla, Leviathan Warships and Frozen Synapse. Why these particular ones? Simple, I've played those. And more importantly I've enjoyed those.
Flotilla (F) is 3D play area, where as Leviathan Warships (LW) and Frozen Synapse (FS) are both 2D play areas. For this effort, I will go with 2D play area as well. It's simpler in terms of math and code complexity, which I suspect will be essential to get to completion.
My game will be closer in look and play style to LW and FS. In that, the player controls one or more ships, i.e issues orders to, ships then execute as many of those orders as possible within the time limit. Thing that will be different is way the orders are issued. The input and command mechanism in both LW and FS bugged me. So the goal there is to come up with a scheme that works and still maintains the depth of the game-play system.
As for art style and audio, I am not an artist nor an effects or music specialist. So, art will be all place holders hand-drawn and scanned in. Everyone loves programmer art. Audio will be again programmer audio, i.e effects made by my voice recorded by Sound Recorder in Windows. And lastly for music, I am tempted to just some public domain classical works, if I can find any, else it's no music. But these are for the moment secondary concerns. Primary concern is Code, and how to structure said code.
