Finding Fun

It’s obvious already what an “interesting” job it’s going to be, to find the exact right balance of gameplay and strategy to make One Dee War an exciting and fun experience.

Version 1 (that was submitted for the Make A Game In A Month challenge) had three units (small, medium and large warriors), each of which took time to spawn (via a slowly recharging “Courage” bar) and resources to create (so even if you had the necessary Courage you couldn’t spawn a soldier without the resources).

Anya and I decided that these two systems conflicted and we should go with one or the other. I felt that the resource bar was least interesting – it was effectively a cooldown timer for each unit and many RTS games had used this. I liked the Courage bar as it went well with the one button approach and also led onto some interesting options in the deck-building card game arena.

The idea is that you press and hold to charge up a bar and release it to perform an action once Courage has built up to the level you want. More powerful actions require more Courage, so they take longer to trigger. In addition, those more powerful actions can’t even be added to the army without the support from lower ranking actions.

So, before battle, the player has to build up a “deck” of actions/troops in such a way to give them access to the more powerful actions.

Hopefully, this design gives players who want to obtain the best results the kind of planning they’ll need, whilst keeping the actual battling gameplay immediate, fast-paced and fun!

One Button One Dee War

One Dee War started via a challenge to “Make a game in a month!” that is a regular occurrence at my work. Each month’s challenge has a theme, in this case “RTS (Real Time Strategy).” I entered the challenge a bit late – the weekend before the deadline, but I was able to throw together the first version of One Dee War.

While researching accessibility in games recently, I came across “one button games”, games that could be played with a single button input (that “button” could be the blink of an eye, the nod of head or simply blowing down a tube). These games have been designed for people with disabilities that prevent them from playing regular controller-based games.

I’d been toying with the idea of a one button game for a while, not necessarily from an accessibility angle, but simply inspired by the Judgement Ring from the PS2 game “Shadow Hearts”. So when I decided to have a go at the RTS Game In A Month challenge, I went with a one button approach. And One Dee War was the result!

A huge advantage of the one button approach is that it is perfectly suited to mobile gaming. The final version of One Dee War is likely to have a more complicated interface than Version 1, but starting from a point of absolute minimal complication seems like a great way to approach my first mobile game!
It also made for an interestingly catchy title - One Button One Dee War!