WARENGINE
What is Warengine?
Warengine is an online 2-player PvP turn-based battler. Each player constructs a team of 3 units, before equipping them with 3 attacks and an item. This gives a huge amount of variety in the teams that players have built, and creates plenty of emergent strategies.
What is Warengine?
Warengine is an online 2-player PvP turn-based battler, made entirely by myself. Each player constructs a team of 4 units, before equipping them with 3 attacks and an item. During battle, each player secretly selects which attack each of their units is going to do and locks in; then all units follow their orders, starting from the back of each team and alternating.
What is Warengine?
Warengine is an online 2-player PvP turn-based battler. Each player constructs a team of 3 units, before equipping them with 3 attacks and an item. This gives a huge amount of variety in the teams that players have built, and creates plenty of emergent strategies.
When starting development I knew I wanted to allow players to use mindgames, and that to be a core part of the loop. This lead me to two must-haves:
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Must be PvP, since mindgames against bots are pretty meaningless.
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Must have hidden info, so players have to make calls about what their opponent is going to do.
Doing this local would have been possible using cards around a table, but this project was during COVID lockdown, so that wasn't an option. So, my fallback was to create a google sheets document, and make it playable in there. This solved all the issues: it's already online & accessible by a link, and by giving the players each their own sheet, you can have hidden information! It also had the bonus of making iteration super easy, since the numbers/data were all being pulled from the same spreadsheet.
After ~4 weeks of playtesting this version, locking down the mechanics and rough balancing I moved into engine (Unity) to create a nicer version. Because the mechanics were solid, this version only took about 2 weeks to implement, including extra testing and iteration.
What is Warengine?
Warengine is an online 2-player PvP turn-based battler. Each player constructs a team of 3 units, before equipping them with 3 attacks and an item. This gives a huge amount of variety in the teams that players have built, and creates plenty of emergent strategies.
What I learnt
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Big Numbers are only fun if they're Difficult. A big part of Warengine's "meta" was to do with buffing a single unit and using them to sweep your opponent's team (or debuffing your opponents). This was way too easy to do, largely in part because I'd made the defensive calculations too swingy. They were based on multiplication & division, which meant that single-point changes suddenly doubled or tripled the amount of damage you did. This was only made worse by not capping (or soft-capping) these values, which meant that a single turn dedicated to buffing a good attacker made them unstoppable. Players enjoyed this... for 2 matches, then it got old.
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So, the key part for me is that those unreasonable numbers are an important part of the experience, but they should be difficult to get. This way, when they do happen it's an exciting moment that sticks out because it's spiky. Having all the numbers too in-line creates a flat, smooth experience, so you need the spikes.
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Usability & Onboarding really really matter. Look at the image on the right. It looks bad and it's very unreadable. That's the interface for creating 1 of your units! It's very functional, but that doesn't mean anything if players can't figure out how to engage with it. This meant that new players always had to be walked through how to use it, which just wouldn't work on a proper release.
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The key point for me here was to pay extra attention to what players understand by themselves when interacting with your game. What do they get? And what do you need to explain to them? Ultimately, you won't be able to tell them anything, so it's really important that you get the game's usability down.
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Designing for Mindgames. As I mentioned above, this was a core goal of this project, but I don't think that I properly achieved it. As mentioned above, the numbers were quite swingy which can be good for making each action really count, which in turn leads towards each decision being really important. The problem is that you have an extra action each round (compared to Pokemon, for example) which means that things start to loosen up. Each action isn't as important anymore, which means countering them is less important. Combined with the numbers being out of whack, the game feels too loose to really hit that mindgames feeling.
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If I did this project again, I'd focus more on interactions with the opponent: things like Pokemon's Guard move (in competitive doubles), which can forces the opponent to account for it, simply by being equipped.
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