Game design for our new game

Inspiration for your new game can come at any time. It might be something you dream of building for a long time or something which you think can be done better after playing another game. Every time something strikes your mind as a potential idea for a game, it is important to dig deep into it and analyze the pro and cons of the idea.

Once you understand what you are trying to achieve, it helps by writing it down and have a clear vision and focus for your game. This is help in looking back at the source to see if your new mechanic or system fits the vision of the game you are building. Often times we get carried away during development and add more and more features when we are deep in the development mode

We came up with this idea based on a restriction we had for ourselves to come up with new game concepts and idea. This can help in thinking out of the box and coming up with fun and unique concepts.

Design Restriction: Combine two genres and make a unique game

Idea: Combining tower defense gameplay with turn based action

Tower defense genre is mostly about having the player react to the enemies in realtime and increasing the power of the enemies over time. This increase in enemy power corresponds closes to the player progression over time.

Tower defense game for reference: Tower Defense: Lost Earth

Turn based strategy genre is all about proper planning and execution of the plan without the need for big reation time of the player.

Turn based strategy game reference - Into the Breach

Real challenge when combining these two genres is that we have to make the player engaged when playing the game as a turn based and still having a good progression curve for the player as the action ramps up.

We are yet to find out if this game will be engaging for the player and hold their attention to overcome this huge challenge. Even if it doesn’t it is sometimes fun to experiment and combine things to see if it works for not.

Theme: Ocean is fighting back with the plastic pollution. So in the game you can use the different ocean creatures to block and sink the manmade ships which are causing more pollution in the ocean

Gameplay loop: Ships are moving along the grid towards the plastic garbage patch with more plastics to dump. You will use the card to perform actions on the the ships and stop them from destroying the ocean further. You will have a total action points which you can play per turn and each card will have separate action points and once your action points are completed, it will be enemy turn to move and attack.

We have introduced the meat of the game in this post and more details will be posted as we build more systems and experiment with the game.

Join us on Discord to talk more on game design and other interesting topics - https://discord.gg/AUjrcK6eep