OneTurnTactics is now released!

The Last Pieces

I said last week that I had just a few things left to do on OneTurnTactics, just a couple of hours. Turns out, I was just about right in my estimate – I finished up and released it on itch.io on Tuesday morning, just two days (and 3-4 hours of work, including writing the copy and making the images I need for the store page) after the post! Unsurprisingly, I ran into a couple of bugs and a some quality of life stuff I wanted to fix. I fixed the problems that were bad, or would slow me down in finishing the campaign, but tried my best to ignore the ones that were just annoying. I have a list of things that I would like to add, including some issues people have had, but I’m going to resist the urge to tinker with it too much (but I might allow myself a little bit of bug fixing…)

So far the reception has been quite good, which is nice. The game is outside my development comfort zone in some ways, so I wasn’t really sure how well it was going to end up. Some parts of the code are pretty gross, of course, but overall I think it’s pretty okay. I wouldn’t be completely against coming back to it some time and making it into a bigger thing.

In terms of actual development, I think the “being out of my development comfort zone” was a big part of what led to me putting this down for half a year. I thought the idea was solid but I wasn’t sure I could really execute on it in a way that anyone would enjoy, least of all me. In that sort of headspace it’s very easy to get distracted with a shiny new idea and chase that instead… which is exactly what happened. I’m glad I came back to it, for a few reasons. The first is pretty straightforward – I’m terrible about leaving things “open” for myself. I often don’t decide to stop a project, so much as I put it aside for a day, which turns into a week, which turns into months, and years if I let it. Finishing this and releasing it means I can check that off in my head (and also literally in the doc that I have keeping track of all my project ideas), and that can feel pretty freeing. It feels good to wrap things up.

Second of all, I think I actually like the game, and I’ve received some nice feedback on it. That just feels pretty good.

Though this list is a little less interesting given that there wasn’t really a full accounting of the development over time, the last few things I fixed/added were…

  • Made units that attack move into the vacated space if they destroyed (or moved) the unit they were attacking more consistently. This was handled in an ad hoc way for each unit but I realized I just wanted them all to work that way.
  • Let the player drag units around on the board without changing their order in the action queue; previously you have to remove them and re-add them, and that was just incredibly annoying (especially in level-editing mode).
  • Fixed an issue with re-ordering the action queue in sandbox/level-edit mode, where sometimes it wouldn’t reorder the way you expected when an open [?] slot was involved.
  • Added mute toggles for sound effects and music to the main menu of the game. Ideally I’d have added an options menu smehwere with more complete volume controls but that’s a lot more work.
  • Let the player hold Shift to show the action order right on the units, on the board. It can be pretty confusing/annoying without this to figure out the order things will actually happen in.
  • Hid the Exit to Desktop option from the main menu. Since I have only released it as a browser game, this was a silly thing to include!
  • Built the rest of the levels for the campaign and tightened up some of the language in the tutorial levels.

Some of those features feel pretty important once you’re used to them, but they were easy to just ignore during the rest of development. They were all pretty straightforward to add, at least mostly – the code is definitely hitting the limits where a couple of places need some serious clean up and refactoring, but adding new units and the like remains quite easy.

Just because it might be a little interesting, a few of the things that I’ve got on a list for “maybe in the future”, because I cut them for time or I’m not actually sure they would improve the game (“more complicated” isn’t necessarily better, after all)…

  • Adding different typing to damage. Some units could be stronger against crushing damage than piercing damage, or I could introduce Wizard units that throw fireballs or new terrain types that deal cold damage.
  • More interaction with different kinds of terrain. Fire damage could turn a tree into a bonfire, firing projectiles through a bonfire could grant them fire damage, throwers could throw rocks, that sort of thing.
  • Progress saving. For each campaign, I could store what levels you’ve completed and offer you a chapter selection. This would be much more important with more campaigns available, or longer campaigns.
  • Custom campaigns. You can export a “save code” for a level you’ve created in the sandbox, but there’s no way to actually bundle those up together into a campaign. I could even expose the tutorial text feature I added, and you’d have space some space to tell a bit of a story. I’d want to add UI to let you enter and save a list of these campaigns.
  • Different conditions for beating a level. Every level is currently just “destroy all red units”, but I could instead require you to just defeat a particular unit (like a King or something), to move a neutral unit to a particular location (everyone loves escort missions, right?), or maybe you have to end with a certain number of your units still around.
  • Similarly, some units could have special conditions for their defeat. Maybe a unit can only be damaged by spikes, or a unit MUST be dropped into a water tile, and so on.

Like I said, though, they make things much more complex. Right now, you can learn every unit pretty well (though honestly even I find it finicky to pick the correct one between Left Redirecters and Right Redirecters) in a short time. I’m not sure that having a huge number of units would improve the game, necessarily? Or… maybe it would be fun to discover all the different units (or even let players make their own custom units…?)

Anyway, to be clear, I do NOT have plans for more OneTurnTactics at the moment, aside from any show-stopping bugs. I would guess that the most likely additions from the list would be progress saving, and, if I discover people are very excited about the game and are trying to share levels, then probably custom campaigns. Those would both be relatively straightforward to add, while everything else would run the risk of over-complicating the game. If you really wanted to be vocal about that, I suppose reaching out on Mastodon or comments on the Itch project page would be the best ways to make your excitement known!

Onto the Next Thing

I’ve got three things that I’ve been focusing on since the release:

I’ve been tinkering with this site. Actually having a functioning website means that I pretty much never have a shortage of things I need to do or intend to do on here. I’ve been meaning to separate out to my own theme, since I’ve just been kind of hacking up the existing one willy-nilly and (unsurprisingly) I’m running up against some issues with how I want to use the theme vs. how the theme wants to be used. Nothing against the theme, it’s perfectly fine by itself, I just need to do some fixes. I’ve done a few, but there’s more I need to do. I don’t necessarily want to spend a ton of time on that so I’ll probably just pick at it over time.

Second, as I mentioned a while ago, I’ve been working on putting together a new demo for Alice is Dead. That took longer than I’d anticipated, but it’s very nearly ready to release, and then I’ll be forging forward to make some actual progress on the game.

Third, I have a new project that I’ve just started to do some prototyping for. I’ll talk more about this when I have a bit more nailed down, but I’ve got a basic idea for the story and I think I know the structure of the gameplay I’ll be aiming for.