This week I’ve been doing more international travel, so I’ve had less time to work on Rads & Relics. Still, I’ve been using my time to focus on new character designs as part of Make-a-Character March, so today I wanted to share some reflections from this first week. Design Space and Constraints With Rads & Relics still in its early stages, I have a broad idea of the game, but much of it remains in flux....
This week, I’ve been moving, so I haven’t had much time for Rads & Relics. However, now that I’m settled in my new apartment, I want to discuss what’s coming next. As previously mentioned, I’ve spent a lot of time refining the core gameplay (and learning about Godot). Now that I feel confident in that foundation, I want to shift my focus to the characters in the world. My vision is for Rads & Relics to have a full roster of playable and enemy characters that make each run feel unique and exciting....
Playtesting Rads & Relics This week we’ve been doing playtesting for Rads & Relics. Up until now, we’ve been building out the core game engine, the supporting UI, and other essential systems, so this was our first time really sitting down to focus on the gameplay. The game was playable, but, if we’re being honest, it wasn’t a lot of fun: the map was too big, the enemies had too much health, and basic actions required too many clicks....
As we’ve been prototyping, we’ve often built our UI to have the bare minimum functionality. For example, here’s our title screen at the start of the week. This gets the job done, and it lets us get to the gameplay. But it can be kind of a drag, when everything is a silent, monotone gray. And so this week, we’ve spent some time making upgrades to our UI and our title screen, including the following:...
Having built out our basic command structure, this week we wanted to focus on the gameplay of our tactical battles. From the beginning Rads & Relics has had two main sources of inspiration: XCOM and Into the Breach. Both are turn-based tactics games, but they approach the genre from very different perspectives. XCOM is notoriously punishing. Usually, you are outmanned and outgunned. It is not uncommon to lose your soldiers, especially in the early game....
One of the biggest problems in tactics games is that it’s sometimes hard for a player to know exactly what’s going to happen. You execute an attack but forget that it will expose you to another enemy. Or, even worse, you accidentally click on the wrong tile. In Rads & Relics, we wanted to mitigate these frustrating moments by building an undo system that allows players to take back some of their actions....
Anatomy of a Tile When building a game, one of the first questions you have to deal with is how the player will move through your world. There are two main ways to approach this: continuous movement, and tile based movement. Continuous movement allows the characters to move as much or as little as they want, similar to movement in the real world. Most modern triple-A games allow this kind of movement....
Welcome to the Rads and Relics developer blog. Today, We’ll be introducing our new game, and talking about why we’re starting this blog. Rads and Relics Rads and Relics (R&R) is a roguelite, turn-based tactics game, set in an post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Major influences on the game are XCOM, Into the Breach, Slay the Spire, and Fallout. About this Blog This blog will be a portal into our development process. To be upfront, this is our first major game development endeavor....