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!