Derelict Rogue. Day 2

Not much progress since the previous day. I’ve mostly played around with generator rules and wider ship designs: adding different shapes as prerequisites, adding rules for symmetry and corners, and deciding which tiles should be outer-only.

A view of what I call the 1-2-3 wider ship design, with a hexmap overlay. I've changed the hex orientation and tried to force symmetry on the hexmap to make it look better.

While I was discussing the game concept with abbradar, he joked that my idea could be designed as a scenario for the strategy game The Battle for Wesnoth. My initial ideas were drawn from another great game — Invisible, Inc.. And those are very different kinds of gameplay: tactical strategy and turn-based stealth don’t usually mix well. But I decided to explore the idea of turning the game into a tactical roguelike with strategy elements, and proceeded to test on generated hexmaps with the simplest of mechanics for attacking, spawning, and controlling nodes.

A tactical view of one of the previous hexmaps. The player controls two drones, seen as D1 and D2 on the screenshot. The ship's security system has three spawners, seen as red diamonds, and control nodes, seen as green squares. Not much gameplay other than move and destroy for now.

After some testing, the idea of a tactical layer was intriguing enough that I think I will continue to improve it. Adding a clock for derelict stability, similar to the alarm in Invisible, Inc. And interactions with different ship systems to add to the tactical decisions and complexity.

This post is part of my #100DaysToOffload challenge.

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