[Archive] Inspiration and early prototyping
STEAM NEXT FEST is just around the corner! Many people have shown interest in our game after checking out the game on various channels, and some have said that it brought to mind other media like the movie Kingdom of Heaven and the game Battle Brothers.
After seeing this, I thought it would be fun to show you a little bit of what kind of game we wanted to make initially, the central concept and the development process.
Bear in mind, this week's post is called Archive for a reason, as it’s not discussing the current state development. In the future, we will use this format when looking back at stories from our development’s past, rather than a glimpse at the current development.
The most direct inspiration for Remore: Infested Kingdom’s development was Zombicide, a tabletop board game. This is a one to six player game that focuses on cooperating with one another to survive against zombies that are constantly spawning. There’s also a choice of thematic versions from the Middle Ages to Modern Era and even Science Fiction.
What we found attractive about Zombicide was the "thematic feeling". Using the concept of "Noise occurs every time you act, zombies track players in view, and you must escape by searching for items to help avoid and battle the monsters," players can get both the strategic/tactical fun of a board game and also the atmosphere and tension of the zombie theme.
There’s no shortage of zombie apocalypse-based games, but we felt that games that blend strong thematic feelings of survival and escape along with tactical depth were not common in the turn-based genre. Therefore, in the beginning of REMORE’s development, we asked the question, "If we try to reinterpret this kind of fun to fit a PC game, would we be able to create a unique game?"
In the first paper prototype, we tried out a number of features and thought that in addition to the rules found in Zombicide, we could create additional fun elements by adding our own systems and content.
Of course, Zombicide focuses on "the fun of co-op play," and we wanted to create a Tactical RPG game that is fun while playing alone in the form of a campaign, such as the XCOM series.
In the transition from a board game to a digital game, we had to consider new interface conventions that adhere to the style of PC games and incorporate Pixel-Art graphics. All this led to the birth of the first version.
The most noticeable feature of the first version was that it was turn-based but without using grid-based movement. We believed that a non-grid-based system that allows units to overlap with each other would better depict a "large number of zombies". The basic mechanism of "finding weapons hidden in boxes inside buildings, killing enemies that stand in the way, and then escaping" has been maintained in the current version as well.
The internal evaluation of the first version was surprisingly good. We were able to validate the framework that reinterpreted the core fun of the board game into an interface and ruleset suitable for a PC game. The enjoyment of switching out and using various weapons was also positive.
However, due to the nature of the non-grid system, it was difficult when deciding issues of distance like “how far to move to be able to attack enemies." We had concerns about solving these issues through UI or AI pathfinding mechanisms and reaching the level of “completeness” we wanted within the constraints of the top-down pixel art 2D style.
Moreover, basically we felt that we wanted to be more unique, even though the base level of fun had been achieved. We started wondering if there was a better way to capture the apocalyptic theme beyond simply "avoiding zombies and looting items" or "sneaking to evade enemies' sight and noise detection." This led us to attempt a completely new approach for the second version.
The second version took a complete U-turn by adopting a grid system. It used a semi-turn-based approach seen in games like Stoneshard or Shattered Pixel Dungeon, where time progresses for the entire world with each action or movement of the player character. Player’s Allies automatically take actions, followed by all enemies immediately after.
The primary goal of the second version was to implement a system where "automatically acting allies" could be controlled, trying to capture the emotion frequently seen in similar themed movies where allies panic, flee, or attempt unreasonable actions.
Also, the advantage of having all enemies act simultaneously was that the game pace was quite fast, as there was no need to individually observe the movements of multiple enemies.
However, the more we fleshed out this version, the more we felt we were drifting away from the initial goal we wanted to achieve.
- The actions of uncontrollable allies were more annoying than fun.
- The simultaneous movement of enemies/allies, rather than leading to the consideration of tactics for survival, felt more like hack 'n slash genres like Diablo.
As a result, we decided to return to the turn-based system, where all allies were directly controlled, while keeping the grid structure and the diverse weapon types with different attack ranges, which received positive reactions.
After this, we went through two more rounds of experimentation with different core mechanics before settling on the current approach and we’ll show this challenging journey in more detail in the next post!
See you soon Followers of Remore!
Thank you
