XNA Game: Tactics Game

     After working on Crazy Party Fight I decided to give another shot at developing a game in XNA. This time I tried to find a couple of my university classmates to help me with a bit of the coding.

     We decided to make a tactical turned based strategy game. For those not familiar with this genre it is basically like chess but with custom pieces and other role playing game elements added. In our game each player would move each character individually during the movement phase and then if they were within range of another character they could attack during the attack phase. The goal was to defeat all of the opponents pieces.

     We decided on a couple of interesting design features for this game, one was the use of an isometric board. Isometric is a type of camera projection that in 2D games basically results in angled diagonal tiles. This makes movement a bit more difficult to deal with because it is on a diagonal but gives the game a bit more of a 3D art style. Another difficulty was implementing the opponents AI. One simplification that we noticed with other commercial games of this genre was that the player always moved each piece during each turn, instead of one piece per turn like in chess. This simplification allowed us to consider a reasonably good move for each piece rather than trying to figure out which piece would be best to move. Although our AI is relatively simple compare to  some chess AI, the strategy of a tactics games is more based on the comparative strengths and weakness of the pieces rather than their positions on the board. There are also elements of randomness thrown in to determine if an attack is successful or results in a critical hit.

     Unfortunately, my attempt at making a project as a group fell apart just as we had finished implementing the core mechanics of the game. The failure was probably a result of the other group members not feeling any real obligation to work on the project. However, convinced that we had created something interesting, I decided to continue working on the project to get it to a stage where it was presentable. I replaced all of our place holder graphics with new ones I made in Inkscape, and created all of the menus for choosing a level and positioning pieces.

Screenshots and Characters from the Game

     After finishing all this work I created the YouTube video you see at the top of this article. Surprisingly this YouTube video has attracted a large number of hits, about 5500 at the time of this writing, which is large compared to the one or two hundred hits my videos usually get. Clearly, this is a genre of game that is particularly popular, especially among indie game developers.

     The final result is still a work in progress. I would really like to continue and finish this project, especially considering the YouTube popularity. However I have always been to afraid to, since I have a vague memory of just how much refactoring is required, especially of the parts I did not write. Another factor that holds me back is the amount of art content that I would need to create. Being a programmer I am not most efficient artist, and yet I am also a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to my personal game projects.