Making a Turn-based Team Brawler Engine
So lately I have been interested in making a game similar to Star Wars™ Galaxy of Heroes and DC Legends, but themed differently with African heroes and stories.
Now these games are available online and for mobile devices and they offer a game play in which you assemble a team and fight against other teams controlled by the game's AI. The opponent teams are usually assembled as part of the game's story mode but you can also play against teams created by other players around the world (which the AI also controls).
As you play, you discover or add on characters to your roster and you can eventually have different teams. Each character will have a set of unique abilities (some which may need to be unlocked) and at times there are also boosts that come along with the character using those abilities. Assembling a certain cast of characters may have those characters benefit from their shared ability set and in turn makes the team more formidable.
As you play, you learn which combinations make great teams as well as generating items (may be called fragments or essence or they may simply just be called cards) which make your character more powerful as well as the characters level up as the game progresses (and it is necessary to level up your characters because as you progress in the story modes, the opponents become more and more challenging).
So now that you have a general gist of what the game is like, let's touch a bit on design, since that will be a very important step before we get into the engine mechanics. The level is quite simple... for what I intend to do, I am looking at using an isometric world, primarily because it is dealing with 2D graphics which look 3D and it is easier to make for more mobile devices and easier in terms of dealing with various screen sizes. 3D tends to also be heavier on some mobile devices GPUs so I want to target more devices and cut down my production time. I will probably use 3D software to then render my characters for my isometric world.
In dealing with 2D, you have the luxury of planning the graphics in simple layers... I simply group mine as follows:
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| DC Legends game play |
Now these games are available online and for mobile devices and they offer a game play in which you assemble a team and fight against other teams controlled by the game's AI. The opponent teams are usually assembled as part of the game's story mode but you can also play against teams created by other players around the world (which the AI also controls).
 |
| Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes - AI in action |
As you play, you discover or add on characters to your roster and you can eventually have different teams. Each character will have a set of unique abilities (some which may need to be unlocked) and at times there are also boosts that come along with the character using those abilities. Assembling a certain cast of characters may have those characters benefit from their shared ability set and in turn makes the team more formidable.
As you play, you learn which combinations make great teams as well as generating items (may be called fragments or essence or they may simply just be called cards) which make your character more powerful as well as the characters level up as the game progresses (and it is necessary to level up your characters because as you progress in the story modes, the opponents become more and more challenging).
So now that you have a general gist of what the game is like, let's touch a bit on design, since that will be a very important step before we get into the engine mechanics. The level is quite simple... for what I intend to do, I am looking at using an isometric world, primarily because it is dealing with 2D graphics which look 3D and it is easier to make for more mobile devices and easier in terms of dealing with various screen sizes. 3D tends to also be heavier on some mobile devices GPUs so I want to target more devices and cut down my production time. I will probably use 3D software to then render my characters for my isometric world.
In dealing with 2D, you have the luxury of planning the graphics in simple layers... I simply group mine as follows:
- arena - lime green background
- players - stars
- hit-points alerts - white text (generated when someone is attacked
- health bars (the bars above the stars) + effects (circles above the bars)
- GUI (buttons in the bottom right corner and the section in the top left)
Now the design is pretty much complete, in my next entry, I will look into the inner workings of the level and do some implementation using the NZYM scripting language.
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