Our First Prototype Build

Hey guys! It's Cecil from the Tactical X team!

Tactical X (tentative title) is a 2.5D puzzle game with simplified mechanics based on turn based, grid based strategy games. Puzzle design is based on chess puzzles, where the chess pieces are set up in a specific way that requires the player to plan and execute all the steps in a precise manner in order to win.

As this is our first devlog post, I'd like to introduce our members:

Computer Science
Cecil Cao
Jason Sastra
Aayush Bhan
Ross Magill

Art & Animation
Nick Lin
Lorenzo C
Vishnu Handa
Yuan Yuan
Lily Yip
Cheolkyu Yi

Audio
Daniel C
Emmanuel Luna

Producer
Nikitha Abraham

Supervising Art Directors
Allen Tseng
Xiaolong Wang

We're excited to begin this game dev journey together as a team and  present to you our first game build prototype. For the most part, we're looking to create a turn-based tile puzzler with Unity, with aspects inspired from Tsume Super Robo and The Last Piece Standing.

The premise of the game is that you're a cyber elf, tasked with venturing into a stronghold which is the likely source of a scourge of bugs infesting cyberspace. Your can find more information about our project and game direction in our creative document!

What we are primarily aiming for in this build was to get the basic grid system set up and have some prototype models and level designs set up so that we can have a feel for what we want the player to interact with and what we want to constrain. At the moment, having everything move at the same time has been an interesting mechanic to program and develop. 

This current build has a prototype level we made during an 8-hour game jam, with a bit of polish afterward. You can control the player with the WASD keys, with the ability to shoot, and the enemy will move at the same time as the player, patrolling in either a vertical, or horizontal axis on a grid board. We also implemented a victory screen and a lose condition for when the player bumps into an enemy. Our game design lead, concept artists, and 3D modelers have also been hard at work, fleshing out basic designs and models that we used for this game. That isn't to say that our music crew wasn't pulling their weight! We got 2 unique tracks (one during gameplay, other plays in the main menu), and 2 SFX clips (death, victory) that we made use of. I suggest you try and trigger them for yourself!

The biggest problem from a development standpoint is deciding how an enemy is supposed to harm the player. Since everyone is moving at the same time, it is still up in the air HOW an enemy should do so. Should they do it if both player and enemy land on the same tile? Should it be based on intended moves? Proximity? Right now, we have it set based on proximity, for the sake of brevity, but the goal would be to implement something more intuitive in the future.

Other features we plan on implementing would be a portal function still under prototyping. The goal is to let the player have the ability to swap themselves with objects on the board to create scenarios that allow us to do more than "escape the level", or "kill all enemies", but we're still in early prototyping. Another feature is a hacking gun. One of our devs thought it might be on theme with what we have, and it might be interesting, "re-programming" the enemies' or obstacles by redirecting the direction they're facing, or injecting different behavior. All in all, these ideas are still in the backburner, and we hope that the feedback we get from others will help illuminate ourselves towards an interesting, but enjoyable direction for all; both on the dev side and player side.

For now, feel free to check out our game prototype! It's not much right now, but it is filled with love and much more to come!