A Not-So-Tactical Approach to a Tactical RPG

iamboris's picture

My life has been quite a roller coaster lately, so I haven't been streaming my development project. The teinstick is currently on hold, but I have started on a tactical RPG. 

The idea started while I was playing Fire Emblem Heroes, and I found it enjoyable. Unlike earlier titles, it has been limited to a simple "red-green-blue" triangle. This is the same for both magic users and weapon-wielders. You also can only ever have 4 characters on the map at a time. This I feel is acceptable in a phone game where they are intending to pull in a wide variety of players. 

The game got me thinking about how much I enjoy these types of games. I like the Fire Emblem series and I loved Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced. I guess I think of them like chess, but with some randomness thrown in. I'm starting this without a design document. I think I mainly just want to start building some stuff and see what ends up being fun. So whether I will have any sort of "facing" mechanic, I don't know yet. 

To start I'm just playing with different design patterns to see how I want things to work. I would kind of like to allow for procedurally generated maps, so I've implemented a factory to generate the individual squares on the grid. Each grid adheres to a GridSquare interface. The main point being that when a character is on a square, I'll just be able to get the properties from the square without really caring about what kind of square it is. 

I'll put out more details as I do more. Stay tuned.