Valiants

• Direct Download

  Code on GitHub

• 2018

My approach to superhero games. More S.H.I.E.L.D, less Spider-Man

Valiants is my latest university project. In this tactics game the player is controlling the fate of an extraordinary group in an European superhero universe.

With this project I wanted to test an unique approach to the tactic genre. Not only is the game mostly focused on melee combat (including a tag system) but also it is using a simultaneous combat system. Of course, this combination alone poses very big design challenges. This also led to the game going through a lot of (failed) prototypes. Major questions in the design are how to provide the player with enough clues for informed decisions, making brawling interesting when good reaction times aren’t necessary and how to make the characters different in meaningful ways.

In the current iteration the game continues in real-time as long as the current character has commands that it can execute. As soon as the unit is out of orders, the time freezes and the player is able to give new orders. Each order has a different cost of focus points and a different amount of time it takes. To prevent the units from running out of focus points, the player can give multiple orders at once which forces him to predict the future with limited information. This is the basic conflict the battle system poses. Currently every character has four melee moves, a block, a jump and a move action.

Valiants is a purely solo-developed game as I wanted to develop my skills in programming 3D games but also try an interesting design challenge.

As I ran out of time after trying different approaches and had a greater focus on programming, the game is very unpolished right now in regards to things like user interaction as well as animations (as this is possibly just another prototype for a battle system).