Excaliword Windows, Mac, Linux, Web, Flash game

Excaliword is a puzzle word game mixed with simple RTS mechanics.

I've been working on it since october and will make it public in the next weeks. Excaliword is a 1v1 multiplayer online game where you basically make words to spread your kingdom and annoy your enemy.

A bit of history on the game : I've been obsessed by the idea of conquest & control of territory in all my multiplayer and overall game projects. The original idea was to basically have a sandboxy and chaotic multiplayer game where everyone could build his kingdom the way he wanted and try to expand and defend his lands however he could, along the same line as Rampart.

My first steps with this were graphic-oriented, here a mockup of two different styles for the game:

Then i started prototyping; a first glance at my contour + floodfill algorithm that i thought was working.

Some contour debugging:

Units appeared:

Quickly came the problem of pathfinding and formations, here's me fiddling with some pseudo flow fields:

That's the moment where i realized i should probably refocus myself a bit more and decided to just go with A* pathfinding:

Unit formations:

I've been working a long time on my previous project Berserkrgangr which i decided to put away (aka probably gave up) because of various reasons, one being that i wasn't sure where i was heading, i had all the rules but i didn't feel like it would work that well, i spent too much time and was afraid to invest some more if it just ended up sucking, it didn't help that playtests were too scarce and spent quite a long time researching ECS architectures.

So being afraid to do the same mistake i decided that sandboxy castle fight game wasn't going to make it and refocused on something more simple : a puzzle-word-RTS-castle-multiplayer-online-game!

First draft of Excaliword:

Implemented networking:

Art revamp:

Starting to look like something (i'm in debug mode EIRTDLOEFYCEIIRTTSTCECDIUIO isn't an actual word :3):

And finally here how it looks now:

If you didn't figure it out already you build walls by making words out of the letters on the board. Once you rejoin one end of a wall to another wall you own a land. On that land you can build barracks that will allow you to produce units.

There are two way of winning a game, either you send your units and kill your enemy king (purple square in the screenshots) or you capture the sword at the middle of the board by enclosing it with your walls.

It's about controlling territory using various strategies by defending or attacking.

What i still have to work on:

• Sound! While i already made a little sound system in the game i still haven't added any sound.
• Database & leveling
• Various integrations : Twitter & Facebook login and Kongregate & Facebook integrations.
• Monetization : Ads? Micro-transaction? FGL?
• Achievements or maybe not

I hope to release it in the next weeks - beginning of august.