Comments - RossD20Studios

Thanks, man!

That's awesome! So cool, so happy for you guys. Cheers to awesome and supportive wives, and working on games we love.

We use an art studio for our game art. Kelly provided the concept ideas, and the art team delivered the sketches.

Wow, thanks for the kind words, TXGM! :D Really appreciate that.

That's awesome that you get to work with your partner every day as well! I think when people can make it work and find a place where each person can flourish - like you both are doing with coding and art work - it can be really special and fun.

Thanks for the kind words :)

I'd describe it as a fine-line balance between the two. We want different effects in gameplay to interact naturally as you'd expect as a player of the fantasy genre; we also want clear rules so that when something happens, it's not a "Huh?! What just happened?" for new players. Some abilities will be natural mechanics integrated with the rules. The gravity combos are a natural rule system that we'll introduce early on. Knowing the rules, players will be able to decipher and generate natural combos with minimal card text. For instance, our thief carries a grappling hook as one of her abilities and she can "pull" enemies to her instead of melee attacking. Because of the gravity combo, she'll attack any enemy she pulls in response to them landing next to her (assuming she hasn't already used her counter attack). Her pull effect will also trigger any other friendly characters to attack that enemy if they are adjacent to the space its pulled to, allowing the player to "setup" a combo by positioning characters accordingly.

We'll definitely have a "shatter" effect, but it will probably be specific to certain characters (ex: giant hammers) or cards ("Shatter") that directly respond to a given condition (ex: destroy frozen character).

Damage being dealt can carry any number of properties (such as Fire, Poison, Ice, etc.) and many characters will have different effects when a specific damage hits them. For your Fire Elemental example, our current system might call this "Vulnerability to Ice (1)". Vulnerability means that a character will receive extra damage from the indicated source in the amount indicated (in this case, Fire Elemental would take 1 extra damage whenever it's hit by ice damage).

Wow, thanks, Adam! I'm glad you bring up combos. Another important thing I learned working with our players and hearing about the kinds of things they expect from tactics games was actually combos! One of our players in particular was adamant that it's actually the combinations of multiple decisions working together that leads to the satisfaction experience in tactics game. I hadn't considered this and I learned a lot from my discussions. If you have personal suggestions about combos you'd like to see in a game like this, I'd love to hear them. I'm sure this would help our game be even better!

A visceral, 3D SimAnt with a way cooler sounding name?! Sign me up. This looks awesome!!