Episode 2: What exactly?

I wanted to get a bit technical in this article, but I figured there is no sense talking about the "how" while we can't even answer the "what". So in this article I'm going to summarize my basic concepts about the game, and what inspired them. This is to get an overall impression on what it is going to look and feel like to play the game.

So we know that we are talking about a tactical wargame set in WWII. How came this choice?

Memoir '44

I have recently bought a set of Memoir '44, a turn-based tabletop tactical wargame, and I fell in love with the simplicity of the core game mechanisms at first sight. This is a game by Richard Borg and it's based on his Commands & Colors system, a beautifully simple and clear system with a really fast learning curve, yet it models battlefield conditions and probabilities quite realistically.

In Memoir '44, to attack a hostile unit, all you have to do is to calculate the number of "battle dice" your unit can throw against it, which basically depends on the distance and the terrain conditions the attacked unit might benefit from. Each battle die has a chance to hit, and it's all as simple as that!

When I woke up one day with this weird urge to create a video game, one of my first candidates was an adaptation of Memoir '44. In the first few weeks I was constantly daydreaming about all the real cool ways of adapting and modifying it, and by this time (four weeks from the beginning of the design process) I can say I have a pretty solid idea about what it's going to be look and feel like.



Real-time

The first thing I decided to change, and also the thing with the biggest impact on the overall game mechanisms was that I wanted to play Memoir '44 in real time. Switching from a turn-based concept to a real-time one is quite drastic (just imagine how a real-time version of chess would be like :) ) and there are many modifications that are needed to be made to facilitate this change.

The one thing I hate about turn-based multiplayer games is that I either have to wait a lot while other players think, or that other players bug me to think faster during my turn. This is a non-issue with real-time games.

Real-time games are really good at conveying the pressure of having to make fast decisions -- you really feel like you're an officer on the battlefield in command, actually giving out orders, not just some theorist having all the time in the world to figure out the smartest move.

Strategy vs. Tactics

It is also important not to confuse real-time strategy (RTS) with real-time tactics (RTT) games. Strategy and tactics focus on totally different aspects of warfare. While strategy concerns grand-scale productional, economical and logistical aspects, tactics is all about optimizing combat effectiveness in given situations.


In RTS games, such as Dune II, Red Alert, and StarCraft, players usually compete against each other by controlling and managing resources, training units in a matter of minutes, which shoot at each other until the green bar above their head runs out. Realism is not as important as a fun, fast-paced gameplay. On the other hand, RTT games tend to be more realistic: players have a set of troops to start with, and gameplay is actually real-time -- units are not being created in a couple of minutes.

Combat is focused around critical locations on a map in both cases, but while in RTS games these strategic locations are potential sources of income, in RTT these are positions that are offering good conditions for attack or defense.

RTT, as a genre is generally not as popular as either RTS or turn-based tactical games.

Back to the Hexes

A concept in tabletop wargames that I really liked and wanted to keep is that the battlefield is split into a repeating pattern of hexagons (hexes). This is a necessity in board-games, to simplify game mechanisms, and there are not too many reasons why a computer game should lock itself inside the boundaries of hexes. Indeed, real-time strategy and tactical games have broken out of the hex-based terrain system many years ago.

Still, I decided to stick with the hexes, since they give you a huge amount of clarity and simplicity. Individual soldiers doesn't get stacked over each other, you immediately see how far a hostile unit is, and whether your units are in harm's way, you can guess how long it's going to take for a fireteam to get into position. It also makes it clear whether you are being covered by a bunch of trees or not. Hexes make things simple, and that, we like!


I believe that this simplification won't hurt realism either. You can perceive a hex as a unit's zone of control. A fireteam of four soldiers can cover the area of a soccer field (about the size of a hex in the game). More soldiers than that in the same spot would be counterproductive -- would not increase fire power, would increase chance to get hit.

Graphics

Since the game focuses mainly on gameplay, instead of fancy graphics (couldn't compete in that area) I decided to go for simple 2-D sprite graphics. You see the battlefield from bird's-eye view, but from a small angle so that you can see things like which direction your units are facing, and things like that.

A great deal of effort should be invested in the design of a clear user interface, meaning that the control of the game should be intuitive and seamless. Many times games fail because the designers didn't bother to make the . Players don't read manuals, so you have to make the controls so easy they grok it instantly, intuitively, otherwise they just give up.

So that's it

In this blog, we are going to learn about the process of game design by following the creation of a hex-based real-time tactical computer game.

I'm doing it for the first time, so I have no idea where it's going to lead, but I'm sure it's going to be heck of a fun! :)

[M'44 battle scenes with awesome customized figures and terrain by Brummbär]