This winter in Stockholm it is as it should be: cold, and marginally brighter due to the little light we have reflecting off of snow. The roads and sidewalks are salted, but a month of foot traffic over those snowy paths and the blowing winds have turned all that into about four centimeters of ice covering every place you put your foot.
Normally I'm a bike commuter guy, even in winter, but this season I've taken a rare monthly train pass to lower my chances of a total wipeout on ice hard asphalt. So I've had a lot of time to review the daily builds of Tactichord: Glam Strategy on my Steam Deck. Looking at the latest build tonight, a lot has changed in the last two months, so let me tell you all about it!
Is it feature creep if you take some fundamental part of your game design and make it better? Looking at the full retail version of the game, one thing that struck us was how could we make the game scale? We have a design pillar that the levels have to be short, you should be able to get in and out of almost any tussle in under ten minutes. So we have turn limits, small maps, and 3-4 battles per level. Where do we introduce complexity that guides you to refine your thinking? First off, we decided to add growth to the game.
Match 3-1, now with 50% fewer children! (and action points)
Now the AP (action points) and two health pools (Heat and Cool), grow over time as you complete levels. This means at the beginning of the game (which will be the demo), you will be able to accomplish much less in a turn than later. There is a different kind of challenge in the game where you have a chance for at most two melee attacks before you're out of AP, and only half the health we used in the last play test. It's a different kind of mechanic and you'll need to alter your strategy slightly throughout the course of the game.
As our designer Magnus was redoing all the levels and strategies in the demo levels, I was looking at the music video simulator that celebrates your success in each level. You choose the lyrics and guitar solos turn-by-turn when battle the hordes of music haters. We use an orthographic projection for most of our game to aid visibility in the overhead grid-based view. Our cutscenes also use it to suit our retro style. But the music videos were suffering a little. It didn't really feel like a music video when the lines didn't converge in the background. So we changed to a perspective camera and redid all the shots into three types: full-body, half-body, head shot, replete with new orbits, zooms and pans. It feels a lot more dramatic! On top of this we've added movie overlays to get that classic superimposition that was so much MTV in the era. Epic!
Look at those epic pans! (and Terminator HUD assembly code)
There are more usability improvements than I can list here so I'll go with the three that caught my eye in the DONE list of the game task board.
Converting haters into fans gets you more heat and cool health. Overfilling your health meters gets you bonus points. Bonus points fill your rank meter and then, you go from C to B and all the way to S+. This wasn't satisfying or noticeable enough so we added some lightning sfx, a cry of "GNARLY!" and a giant ribbon every time you fly past a rank threshold. Most ostentatious!
There is a wry joke in the office that we've reached the point where we're referring to a feature as "old style" tooltips. And the game isn't even out yet! But now we have those "classic" white popups back over the Action Bar commands, but this time they tell you why you can't pull of a Wail or Perform at the moment, so the space below can simultaneously explain what awesome thing will happen if you fulfill the requirement. Wicked!
The main form of "attack" in Tactichord is Performing: on your guitar, air drumming, or just shouting into a mic. The old icon was a bit too generic and not quite musical enough, so our new art intern Ella spiced it up. Radical!
The new "Perform" attack just feels more melodious.
There is a lot of stuff going on next month. One of the biggest is we'll be in the #TurnBasedThursdayFest here on Steam! To celebrate we'll be running a new playtest that week with all the things I just mentioned above and some more goodies. Now is the time to help us get more people trying the game. Tell your friends!
March is also the Game Developer's Conference, and since that is the same week as the Turn-based Fest, we'll be dividing the team and Johannes will go to San Francisco to demo the game live there while I do some streaming and run the playtest here in Stockholm.
We will also have two new songs for the demo that I am just finishing the lyrics for this week, so look forward to that!
But before all that, you can help control the direction of these upcoming changes. Queue up for the next playtest now on the Steam page and join our Discord here to get early access and tell us what you think.
Rock on!
/David