I’ve finally decided what I’m going to try and achieve over the summer, I’m going to take a project I spent a lot of time on last year and starting from scratch recreate it in for XNA (it was originally written in C++/openGL).
The project itself was a turn based strategy game where each player had to move their units about on a hexagonal grid, and also had the opportunity to found settlements and build factories to increase there nations wealth and resources. Combat between units was based on a basic artillery game where the attacking player had to set the elevation and power of a cannon in an attempt to destroy the opposing units.
The original project was more of a technical exercise which I used to explore several areas of game design. I spent a lot of time creating a simple but working taxation system where the player could set the taxation rate for each settlement under their control. The money raised could then be used to either build new units, or found new settlements.
The settlements would grow over time starting as villages, growing to towns and then to Cities. A City would eventually grow into a metropolis which would cause each adjoining sector to have a village attached.
The map was made up of a grid of hexagonal “Cells” and each Cell stored a value which described its level of loyalty to each player. Once loyalty reached a certain thresh-hold then that cell would start contributing taxes to the player it was most loyal to. As its loyalty increased tax revenue would also increase. Loyalty was influenced by players units moving through or occupying Cells and it was possible to capture enemy cells merely by stationing a unit on it for a fairly large number of turns. I was also working on a system where each cells loyalty was also influenced by the prevailing loyalties of adjoining cells. This was supposed to represent cultural influence and would eventually lead to Cells near the front-lines gravitating towards neutrality, whereas Cells far from the enemy with no influence from enemy Cells or units would remain fanatically loyal.
The other main idea I was trying to explore with the original project was the ability to have a 2-player turn based game, and how that would be implemented. This turned out to be fairly easy and I will probably just port the solution I had for this directly into the new game.
The main inspiration for this game was the brief given to us in by Alistair McMonnies in first year for our 2D Graphics module, we were given the choice of a moon-lander or artillery game and my coding-partner chose the moon-lander game ( available here), so over the summer I decided to tackle the other option, this turned out to be fairly simple and so I decided to build it into a more complex strategy game and just use the artillery section as a mini-game that would be used to resolve combat situations.
(Apologies for poor quality of videos, I can’t find decent vidcap software. Any Suggestions greatly appreciated.)