Indie Game Spotlight: Wintermoor Tactics Club (@wintermoortc)
Get ready to roll a D20 in this week’s Indie Game Spotlight. Wintermoor Tactics Club is a narrative-driven tactics RPG set in a private boarding school in the 1980s, inspired by classic tactics RPGs and visual novels. It’s about a misfit tabletop games club trying to survive high school as they’re forced to fight in a mysterious high-stakes snowball tournament. The game is earnest and light-hearted in tone, with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor (they like to use the term “hygge,” if people are familiar with that).
We spoke with Kyla Fury, who works on the narrative, and Ryan Anderson, who created the combat design, about gameplay, characters, and more!
How does Wintermoor Tactics Club balance tactical combat and visual novel gameplay?
Kyla: We wanted to make sure the two types of gameplay would both support each other. You alternate between playing tabletop tactics games in your clubroom and exploring the campus, talking to other students, and helping them with their problems. Getting to know students is how you get new upgrades for your tactics team, and playing the tactics game is how you recruit new team members to progress with the story. We’re hoping there’s something for everyone: if you love story and characters, you can spend time exploring every nook and cranny on the campus. On the other hand, if you’re more about the tactics gameplay, then there are extra-challenging battles where you can really put your tactical skills to the test.
Who are some of the characters we can expect to meet?
Ryan: We tried to design each character’s abilities around something that reflects the kind of C&C character they would be most excited to play. For instance, Jacob’s character is all about repositioning enemies and allies to set up clever and unexpected plays. Alicia, on the other hand, plays a character that supports teammates from the backline while she waits for the perfect opportunity to call down a massive chain lightning attack.
Are there any specific influences that inspired the game?
Kyla: We were initially inspired by the snowball fight tutorial in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Our combat, however, is a little less like traditional long-form tactics games, and more similar to something like Into the Breach, where each turn can be predicted and puzzled out, so you never get taken out by an unexpected lucky dice roll. We wanted to make sure that this game would work as someone’s first tactics game if they’re not familiar with the genre, so we’ve tried not to be punishing in the way some of the more classic tactics games can be.
We were also hugely inspired by more narrative-heavy games, like Persona 4. We cared a lot about the idea of your abilities improving as you spend time with people and get to know them, and characters that really reveal their true colors over time.
Ryan: Into the Breach’s incredible combat was a great inspiration for how we approached things. Each turn presents an immediate set of choices, battles are short but decisive, and your mistakes are clear so you can try a different approach next time. In addition, the Mega Man series heavily influenced our approach to progression throughout the game. Their boss battles frequently feature abilities that you unlock by defeating them, turning the challenge itself into an exciting future reward.
Finally, as a kid I was a massive fan of Final Fantasy Tactics on Playstation. Easily my favorite part was that I could use creative combinations of abilities and characters to create unique approaches to battles. The upgrade system in Wintermoor is much more focused on giving you more options rather than directly increasing your power level, allowing you to tweak your favorite characters into new roles to fit how you want to play.
What are some of the themes in the game, and what inspired you to make a game about those themes?
Kyla: We wanted to make a game relevant to today, so we decided to make it about the internet. That may sound silly—especially for a game set in the early 80’s—but there’s a lot to say about how we communicate with each other in today’s digital world. We wanted to make a game about the sort of isolation that people can feel when they’re treated as an outsider (like being one of the only Black girls at a private boarding school, for instance), and the type of fanaticism that results from basing your entire identity on one thing. It’s really a game about trying to reach out to people. Internet culture promotes a very intense sort of tribalism that has a tendency to force everyone into viewing the world as a flawless “us” and an irredeemable “them.” We often forget that real people are more complicated than that; sometimes, we even forget that about ourselves. So the metaphor of school clubs forced to battle each other for domination felt like it resonated really well with many modern problems. We hope our players will feel that resonance with their own experiences as they go through the game.
Wintermoor Tactics Club is available for PC on Steam! The game will be releasing on Switch, Xbox, and PS4 later this year, or you can follow them here for more updates.
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