Planning Ahead

Pixelated Beauty

Titan Tactics is the first game I’ve worked on in this style. In trying to recapture the mid-90s in gaming history, I discovered something amazing: there was a small window in which display resolutions were still limited to at most 240p, but hardware was capable of fast 3D rendering. This was the perfect recipe to make a combination of 3D and 2D rendering look good. If we raise the resolution even a bit, it starts looking absolutely terrible.

The Future

Titan Tactics is also the first game I’ve worked on in a jam, that really got me excited to see where we could take it after the jam. A plan takes shape.

First, we want to release a version that is exactly what we intended. The jam was hectic, and resulted in a rushed release with many issues unsolved. Without the jam to dictate our goals and schedule, we have to set our own. To that end, we’re using Gitlab’s excellent issues and milestones feature to plan development. So let me outline our first milestone:

Milestone: Release 1.0

Missing features:

• Create AI states for “idle”, “alarmed” and “hostile”. This will allow us to create “stealth” level goals.
• Add level end trigger for achieved goal (move to tile, kill specific character, etc)
• Add polymorphing mage ability. Some rare magic items will enable mages to turn adversaries into weaker characters (probably only Bobas)

Issues that must be resolved

• End-turn flow is not working well
• Various UI glitches
• Move points aren’t always set properly on the first turn
• Camera movement is erratic during AI turn
• Game does not end properly on level 10
• Pathfinder allows some illegal moves

And then what?

Sure, we could just continue adding content to the game, incrementally releasing new versions… But you know what else we could do? We could build an engine. Godot, our chosen game engine, allows loading resource packs at runtime - this should allow us to let people download mods to add levels, story lines, characters, portraits… really just about anything! So how do we get that done? First, we really need to polish the creation tools for the game. Building levels and adding story elements to them is a bit clunky, but we should be able to make that a much smoother experience. Then, we should add templates for the various game elements a mod might add. And finally - a good set of tutorials and videos to describe the process.

There will be more details on exactly how we see this after we hit our Release 1.0 milestone.

Release

Speaking of release - we’ve agreed to release the game and future tactics engine open source, under the following licenses:

• Titan Tactics code by Team Potato, Armen138, Simster and contributors is licensed under CC0 1.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0

• Titan Tactics assets by Team Potato, Romaselli, Federico Calchera, Ondjon, Kssio, Mr.T, Dieg Barcellos, MarcAelo Cabral, TheZakMan, Quitandeiro and contributors is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0