#tiny combat

[why485]

The history of Tiny Combat.

[why485]

Finally added a third person camera, along with camera motion that's an improved version of what was in the original Tiny Combat(s). I’m really happy with how 

[why485]

CALLING ALL IDEA GUYS

I’m going to do something I pretty much never do. This is breaking the Garry Principle hard. I have a lot of thoughts about how to do this, but none of them are good and there are still significant holes in my plan. I feel like I need people to give me crazy out there ideas that I would never think of. I’m really out of ideas here. I’m at the point where I kinda think I should just start coding and asking questions later because maybe I’ll figure it out when I get there.

So on the flowery designer prose level here’s the ~experience~ I’m shooting for: 

The player is in charge of a mercenary squadron of a maximum of 4 jets. Missions are very short, but intense. You have very limited and very specialized weapons, with very specific targets to take out in a battle that is much larger than you. You will not destroy everything in a battle. You are there to do your mission. 

However, between missions, you are always just squeaking by. You have to plan missions very carefully to maximize your range and time in the battle. Planes require maintenance and are hard to come by, so you need to plan accordingly so the right aircraft are available at the right time. You need to buy your own weaponry, and carefully choose what gets deployed because its this mercenary business doesn’t pay as well as everyone thinks.

While your contributions to the war may seem small, your efforts are what make the difference and “win the war.” Whether it be strategic strikes on targets of opportunity, or defending an area of operations that will allow for the final push and finish the fight.

What any of that above actually means translated to gameplay is who knows man. I already have a mostly clear picture for mechanically how the battle stuff works, as that’s the stuff I know I can do. It’s the stuff surrounding it, the metagame, that I have no imagination for. That’s what the prototyping was for and that’s what the (now 20+ page) design document is for. I have some rough ideas on mechanically what I want, such as battles being anywhere from a couple minutes to ten minutes max, and a full campaign run being a relatively short affair (maybe 3 hours at the absolute max?). There’s meant to be a bunch of different scenarios for campaigns, and maybe with some (or all?) randomization thrown in aside from the starting conditions.

I’m kinda rambling at this point, but yeah. I’m totally lost, and I think that this project is way beyond me. It’s why I’ve been thinking of making a much smaller version of this that’s roughly analogous to the Arena mode in Over G just so that I can at least do the battle parts of this.

[why485]

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately of what Tiny Combat should be. Somebody told me that to avoid spinning my wheels the way I did previously I should actually put together a design document. That way, I’ll always have a plan to refer back to while working on something and not just start doing whatever. It’s not something I’ve ever done seriously, and ideaguying something like this is kind of fun.

Right now I’m at 23 pages, but there’s still a lot left undefined. Some open questions I have remaining (without context): 

How realistic should the aircraft physics be?

What exactly happens when you win a battle?

What exactly are the implications of missing a turn? (This and the previous one are the two most important ones right now.)

Is maintenance a good idea at all? So much of gameplay would have to be balanced around making this fair that I’m willing to remove the idea completely. Maintenance creates many questions of its such as: 

How many aircraft can the player own at a time?

Does the wingman count as a plane?

Is an inventory screen necessary if everything can be bought and sold from the hangar while looking at a plane?

When time on station runs out, how should the mission end?

Should the mission just hard end with a “Mission Over”?

If the player must leave the area on their own, how can you de-incentivize taking one way trips to missions with a cheap plane and run it out of fuel?

Are allies running their own concurrent missions on the strategic map? What is their outcome during a turn?

Should target sites instead turn into multi-mission operations so that the player can switch between areas that need assistance?

Is there strategic value to capturing locations beyond just pushing the front line forwards and moving closer to the final goal?

There’s a ton of things still left unresolved. The moment to moment flying and shooting stuff I’m not too concerned about because that stuff is easy to write. (Both from a code and design perspective.) I want to iron out the plan for the meta game first and then design the mechanics of combat to be in service of that. Unfortunately I’m not much of a designer.

I’m open to random ideas at this point, so feel free to send them to my inbox or reply/reblog this post. There’s absolutely zero guarantee that I’ll do them, but I think discussion would go a long way and make me consider things I wouldn’t have otherwise. This is almost like designing a board game, something of which I have very little experience in playing.

Yes, those prototypes were related to the design document.

[why485]

In the process of porting stuff to Unity 2018.

[why485]

Does the Tiny Combat flight model represent gravity? Do planes gain speed in dives and lose it in climbs? How do you represent that, does it come organically out of the mechanics or do you need to code it in?

Yes, but only very, very slightly. Gravity is still present because it’s not turned off and always applied. However, the high drag required to keep planes flying in the direction they’re pointed prevents it from really being much of an effect.

That’s just a consequence of the simple way I’m doing the physics. If I were doing it differently like with the SimpleWings stuff, for example then it would be very easy to make gravity have a bigger effect on the plane.

[why485]

I have a very tentative plane list for a game I would like to make but probably never will. It’s something I really want to hash out with people. I can rattle off somewhat lesser known front line USAF and USN fighters like the Century Series jets or stuff like the F4D Skyray, but I struggle with coming up with equivalent lists to fill out 2nd gen, and to a lesser extent 3rd gen, RedFor.

I also don’t want to be so US focused with the plane list, so I’d love to see a community list with a bunch of weirdo UK and EU jets (like the English Electric Lightning) to fill out Blue, and the same for Red.

The goal is to have a decently representative planelist (but preferably short!) starting in mid to late 50s and ending in the early 80s. I want to give some love to often overlooked 2nd and 3rd generation fighters. I want to cover a very wide variety of jets, and I want every jet to be unique and have a very specific set of advantages, disadvantage, and quirks. 2nd and 3rd gen jets were really good for that sort of design because of the way aircraft design was driven in those days. Everything was so cutting edge, and most of the time it barely worked.

That and I would love to add some of the cooler Cold War experiments, but if they actually worked, such as the awesome looking VTOL XFV-12.

[why485]

Tiny Combat Demo Day 19 Build is Released!

Check it out on Itch.io