Tactics Game Online

Free truly means free in this case.  No strings attached.  No hidden fees.  If you like turn-based strategy games, how can you argue with free?  Especially if its a good one?  The main goal of Tactics Game Online is to provide you with a quality product that allows you to play a turn-based multiplayer game with your friends online with no cost to you.

Not only that, but you are more than invited to participate in the ongoing development of TGO.  Any new characters, abilities, or maps you come up with can be voiced here on the website, and we will take you seriously.  Share your strategies with others here as well, and view your ladder ratings.  All that and more you can expect to see here.  This is being shared now so that you know what is coming in the near future, and to get you as excited as we are to be a part of its journey.

Well, a solution for the relationship between strength and defense may have been found, and it can be summed up in one simple rule: the 150 rule.  This rule is simple, between a unit’s strength and defense, the total cannot exceed 150.  This solves many problems, and keeps players from making armies of maxed out units.

Out of the five attributes in Tactics Game Online, one has been difficult to describe, that of defense.  To keep things as simple as possible, strength, defense, and speed all have values between 0 and 100.  Range and splash could be given these ranges as well, but these seem better and easier for players to understand if they mean literally 5 range for 5 squares distance, and 2 splash for 2 squares from target square.  More on these examples another day for those that this confuses.

Defense, though, if more difficult to determine because its relationship with strength has a huge impact on combat.  There are a couple of scenarios.  Some relationship are extremely simple and allow players to predict combat results quickly, others would be more complex. The question that must be asked is if the tradeoff between complexity and a more fluid combat system is worth it.

The most simple approach is to have damage equal to the attackers strength minus the defenders defense value.  How much simpler can you get?  Some disadvantages are that this can create many situations where units have no possible way of damaging other units.  For example, a unit with a strength of 20 would almost never be able to hurt an enemy with a defense of 70.  And would about units that have 100 defense?  How do you hurt these tanks?

Another, more appealing approach is to have defense depict the percentage of absorbable damage.  So, if a unit with a strength of 50 attacks a unit with a defense of 50, the defending unit takes 25 damage (50% of 50 damage).  Pretty simple still, but again, this situation runs into the challenge of what happens with units with defense values of 100.

A goal I have is to have units be able to inflict some amount of damage to all units, regardless of how high their defense values are.  One way to allow for this in either scenario mentioned above would be to allow units to inflict greater damage if they attack the back of their enemies.  Appealing, but a greater level of complexity to battle dynamics.

Here we are, two weeks into development, and the army builder section of the game is finally functional.  This section allows you to build your first armies for the game.  Game dimensions have been considered in this process too, and I thought it best to go for 900 x 500.  This is a good maximum window that should fit in most users browsers these days.  There may be an option at some point to allow for a full screen mode.

More features will be added to the army builder eventually.  This initial release has the bare essentials for your viewing pleasure.  And let me share with you a reason why not much attention is going to be devoted to game balancing at this point.  A built-in tracking system is being implemented that will save every game and the factors involved in the winning players success.  Over time, this data will be used to alter point values of units, attributes, and abilities.  The system for altering points has been built in already too.

So the final attributes that made it into Tactics Game Online are strength, defense, speed, range, and splash.  These five attributes added with status effects that change units attribute values in battle should allow for plenty of variety.

The saving system in the army builder has been designed to make it transparent to the player.  When you add a unit to an army, that unit is saved to the server immediately.  When changes are made to the attributes of the unit, these are saved every minute or when the player selects a different unit.

For now, explanations on attributes and the point system will have to be handled on our website.  An integrated help system will be implemented down the road.  The simplicity of this game should minimize players need to rely heavily on a help system.

The fun never stops here at TGO.  As I have been working on the army creation section of Tactics Game Online, the thought occurred to me that it would be great to offer you a way to suggest unit names that can be randomly chosen for new character units users are adding to their armies.  How cool is that!  So, expect a fun AJAX character name form here soon that will allow you to add names to use in the game.

After describing so much of the intricacies of developing a fun and balanced multiplayer tactics game, I decided it was time to dive into seeing what it would take to build one.  Fortunately, I have a great starting point from the project I last worked on, Legendary Kingdom Tactics.  LKT for short, this game was my first game I have developed.  It has much of the same elements as this one, with one key difference, this one will be much simpler.

Unity 3d IDE

I forgot how much fun it is using Unity 3d.  If you have never heard of it, go to their website and check it out.  The first order of business was to tear out everything that LKT used that Ball Tactics will never need.  That has been quite a chore, and I am sure there is more that will be removed later.  With that completed over the weekend, I was able to begin working on a login and registration process.  LKT never had an integrated registration, something I wanted to change for Ball Tactics.  Well, as of this morning, both are working.  As you can see from the screenshot (kind of hard to read I know), I was able to successfully create an account in the game and log in to it.  Next up, developing the army builder section, which will allow you to build your armies that you will wage war with other players through.  I will keep you updated on how that is progressing this week, and also place a working version of the game online after that is finished.  There is no point putting it up for you now, since all we have is a working registration and login.  There are other account management screens I know it needs too at some point, like a “forgot my password” button and an “View/edit account settings” page.  Those will come eventually.  Lets get something working that is fun for you to play with first before we do the boring stuff like that.

Over the past couple of days I have had some wild and crazy ideas about the characters and what each of their roles is.  Here is a working list of some of the starting characters with general information about each one.  These guys are for the most part balls that that have weapons and attack each other, a lot like Worms, if you have played or heard of any of those games.  Another great thing about Worms is the humorous spin they put on their characters, something that would be great to incorporate here.

Basher – melee

• high strength
• mid defense
• mid speed

Knight – melee

• high defense
• mid strength
• mid speed
• detection
• protection

Ninja – melee

• high speed
• mid strength
• mid defense
• camouflage
• double attack

Archer – ranged

• high range
• mid strength
• mid speed
• low defense
• low splash

Bomber – ranged

• high splash
• mid strength
• mid range
• low defense
• low speed

Frosty – ranged

• high splash
• mid strength
• mid range
• low defense
• low speed
• slow

Healer – support

• high strength
• mid range
• mid speed
• low defense
• low splash
• heal
• cure

Grouch – support

• high range
• mid strength
• mid speed
• low defense
• low splash
• weaken
• poison
• sleep
• curse
• slow
• blind

Health Points

To keep it simple, and very intuitive, every character will have a fixed, unchangeable health point value of 100.  This value cannot be increased or decreased in any way by the players.  Each characters health value may be influenced by only one factor, whether the total army value exceeds the allowable amount.

Strength

This value refers to the amount of damage a character will inflict on another character.

Defense

When being attacked by melee or ranged characters, the defense value refers to the percentage of damage this character will absorb.  For example, a character with a defense value of 50 will take half damage, rounded up, from melee and ranged attacks.

Speed

The amount of movement points this character has available to move each turn.

Range

The number of spaces away this character can be from its target to attack.

Splash

The number of spaces away from the target square that are affected by an attack.

Lets say for a moment that we are on the right track with our characters, battle system, and battle field approaches.  At this point, we can put some of our decisions to the test by seeing how they interweave with each other through the creation of some of the characters, on a conceptual level of course.  Well, lets cement down some basic building blocks of that they all have in common.  As proposed previously, their essential traits are: health points, strength, speed, range, and splash.  After some deliberation, two additional traits that will create a paper, rock, scissors strategy are defense and resistance, which allow characters to absorb damage from physical and magical sources.

Since we are planning on adopting a point-based approach to army creation, it is important to begin thinking about whether we want every character in the game to have the same point allocation needed for all traits, or if there should exist different character types that have varying levels of point cost for their traits.  If you think about some of the different character types, like melee, ranged, and magic, then it leads to a quick conclusion that each type should have different point allocation.

Now is a good time to discuss game balance.  Game balance is essential in the creation of a good game, but how do you develop characters that are different, yet balanced with each other equally?  Ultimately, we want to give players a fair chance at winning against other players no matter what strategy they incorporate in the building of their armies.  Establishing a perfectly balanced game when you are dealing with different characters with different strengths and weaknesses is impossible to do, but if we consider the elements we need to analyze success of players utilizing different characters, we can adjust and balance the game over time relatively efficiently.  I met another game developer who was preparing to release a game with huge off balance characters and abilities.  When I asked him why he wasn’t spending more time on the game balancing, he stated proudly that he was so confident in his game balancing formulas based on data collected over time, that he had no worries about releasing an unbalanced game at launch.  I was amazed, and am now a high believer in incorporating the right data collection formulas to ensure effective balancing over time.   This is especially helpful if you plan on releasing new content for a game, after its launch.

Getting back on track, lets take a look at what the trait point costs would be for some of the character types we mentioned above: melee, ranged, and magic.  Before we can do this, however, the trait ranges should be decided on:

Now that we have some concrete numbers to use, we can decide how each character type will prioritize these traits.

Melee

Ranged

Magic

Character Costs

Army Points

Based on the above data, we can start with a total army point value of 1,000 points.

LKT - My previous game project

The battlefield is half the fun in a grid-based tactics game.  It largely impacts strategy, and variety of gameplay.  I am sure you have seen many a maps in your tactics adventures, and so have I.  So what are the factors that must be considered when designing the perfect battlefield for our tactics game?  Well, I am glad you asked!  One obvious one is whether there can be difference in elevation.  Here are some things to consider with elevation changes:

• If elevation is drastic enough, units may not be able to attack each other even if they are in squares that are horizontally next to each other, due to an elevation difference
• An additional character trait, height, must be added to the game
• Another possible character trait, jump, may need to be considered as well
• Rules need to be determined for unit adjacency, unit climb ability, and line-of-sight determination
• Splash area abilities just got a whole lot more complicated

As you can see, elevation adds a lot of complexity to a grid-based game.  So what are the advantages?  Well, the maps get a lot more interesting.  Character units could climb to higher ground, gain offensive and defensive advantages, and limit movement capabilities.  Some nice advantages, but are they worth it? Perhaps there is a compromise that gives us the best of both worlds: have maps have a maximum elevation change of 2 that allows for height advantages without affecting or creating the need for additional rules.  Unit height and climb capability would not be required for such a small elevation change, if units are considered to have a minimum height of 3.  Maps could then have small hills, and water could be a bottom elevation (0) with the rest of the ground being on elevation 1 or 2.  Line-of-sight checks would not be needed, since the units would be higher in height then the most drastic of elevation change of 2.  Plus, obstacles such as building and trees could still be used to break up the battlefield even further, adding more interesting elevation changes while minimizing rule complexity.

The terrain itself can impact strategy as well.  Traveling on a street or pathway can be faster for units than traveling across sand, swamp, and snow.  These factors are easy to incorporate, with each terrain type costing a varied amount of movement points to cross.  Movement points can be derived directly from unit speed.  Climbing up to a higher elevation could also cost additional movement points.