Kacper Szymczak - Turn based tactical design fundamentals

[@SleepDepJoel1]

Really enjoyed Showgunners. Imagine my surprise to find out this vid's lecturer is it's designer. Thank you for this talk.

[@idle.observer]

Was a wonderful lesson for game developers. Depply appreciate it!

[@Cloud-Yo]

Where the heck was this talk all of my life!?! This information is pure gold!

[@dahanster5578]

More like fool's gold.

[@andresmicalizzi5420]

I've been wanting to create a tactial game for years. Damn this talk has awesome advice!

[@TouristAarchie]

why? are you a game developer?

[@andresmicalizzi5420]

@@TouristAarchie I'm wanting to be one. Don't understand what's the point of the question.

[@ByChristóforos]

This is a well put together presentation with very good information for game deisgners!

[@blotcho84]

Very informative presentation!

[@not_ever]

BG3 is a really good example of how not to do turn based combat and why big battles can not always be fixed with a timeline. Having to wait for 10+ enemies to take their turn, whilst bugging out and not doing anything at all for several seconds is not fun gameplay.

[@user-bigschnoz]

You just have to understand your tools better for BG3. It's pretty engaging once you learn it, but there is just a lot to learn before that point.

[@not_ever]

@@user-bigschnoz I don't know how you read the original comment and came to this conclusion. I have played the game multiple times and understand the "tools" perfectly well. If there are too many enemies/NPCs which happens in a lot acts 2 and 3 it bugs out the enemies/NPCs often freeze for up to 30 seconds before the system it moves to the next enemy. Even when it doesn't bug out it is extremely dull to watch so many enemies/NPCs taking their turns in a row. It is tedious and not a good turn based system.

[@pierrelaflotte8540]

I fully agree on that issue in bg3. Would you have a solution in mind? Id say this is an issue of "scale" with the only solution being the use of some reinforcement mechanic to keep the simultaneous enemies lower. Alternatively, you could maybe increase the amount of player controlled characters to have more player actions on such a bloated timeline 🤔

[@not_ever]

@@pierrelaflotte8540 The game clearly suffers from bugs in this area because it's not intentional to have NPCs to freeze and glitch, so getting to the bottom of why that is important as well as working out how to better mitigate for this so that the player is not sat around waiting for frozen NPCs to give up their turn. Having allied NPCs and enemies work in swarms/units rather than as indiviuals could be a possibility for more speedy combat, as well as having a facility to just skip/speed up the animation for the NPCs and just report the final action/damage they did. Ultimately I question the need to have so many characters involved at once in certain areas of the game. In the places where devs wanted to create the illusion of some sort of mass brawl it would have been more realistic to have groups of allies and enemies fight in the background like extras. Once the player finishes their immediate fight they could chose to involve themselves in any ongoing action or just leave them to it, which could have interesting consequences that impact the role playing aspect of the game.

[@arashtadjiki]

Super interesting! I didnt even consider the point on elevation.

[@dahanster5578]

I totally disagree with him on the point of elevation and verticality. This factor can drive innovative and fun game mechanics. Many excellent tactical games have effectively implemented verticality into their game play.

[@D-Ice55]

@@dahanster5578They just implement this for the destroying and fall damage mechanic. I agree with him on this. Its clunky and annyoing..

[@benoitcerrina]

Some of the principles describe make sense but many are not applied by the games the speaker mentioned as examples to study. He should in those case specifically address why it caused problems to those games or why it was acceptable.

[@dahanster5578]

Totally agree.

[@dahanster5578]

He's taking a cookie-cutter approach to tactical game design, which is a fallacy based on his personal perspective and/or preferences, in my humble opinion. You are totally correct, many of the games he references go against the design philosophies that he describes in this lecture.

[@marfin4325]

Wish this had more views. This was really informative.,

[@dahanster5578]

It was very opinionated.

[@dahanster5578]

It seems the presenter has never played Tactics Orge, Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem, Mario VS Rabbids (which he references), amongst many other square-grid tactical games with nature based arenas. Several of his fundamental design philosophies aren't fundamental in the least and are simply preferential design choices. What might not work for one game may very well work excellently in another. So many people in this comment section are taking his recommendations as the tactical game design gospel when it simply isn't. Do your own research on tactical game design, compare and contrast the information you gather, and implement what works for your game. Playtesting and player feedback is key, especially over this single resource.

[@D-Ice55]

Gamers are consumers who cannot think on this meta level. Why they enjoy things or why they dislike things. He thought about this stuff why something is good why something is bad why things are in the games and what they achive. There is no research here no information gathering. Its called thinking. I agree with him on a lot of things. But he does not show or discuss solutions to this. Its a just so statment. Also his Game Showgunners got praised. And highly positve reviews on steam. considered a "little gem". So he cant be so wrong. He is not only a "Know-it-all" big mouth talker. He also delivers.

[@simplesin7673]

I really wanted an answer on the D&D question, as professional GM!

[@EpyonCF]

A huge chunk of extremely important tactical turn based golden base rules.

[@dahanster5578]

More preference than "golden rules," in my humble opinion. Many of the games he refers to break several of these "golden rules."

[@OldDadGamer]

I would love to find a tutorial on how valkyrie Chronicle was made.

[@LunarLemonade]

I'll never understand the insistence on making comeback mechanics "secret", be it as a player, game dev, or tabletop GM. I think the TTRPG advice on fudging applies to video games as well: if you're not comfortable with the odds or the result of a roll, to the point of secretly changing your own rules, it highlights that you made a mistake and shouldn't have let that roll happen in the first place. An explicit bonus per downed units to offset the snowball into failure is great! Why not apply it to the general difficulty adjustment? When I've tried it, I found that (given the right presentation) having your characters grow stronger from being backed into a corner, or the game acknowledging your mastery and upping the difficulty, gets a positive reaction on a both visceral and imagined-narrative level. Not to mention it ups the skill ceiling. Maybe I just make stuff for a very different audience but I believe we need to stop sleeping on that sorta stuff.

[@D-Ice55]

Because people like the idea of turning a situation around through their action. If you tell them that actually no the game cheated in your favor. Then peole are thinking on a meta level. Like in Rimworld for example. Yeah the storyteller wont give me a raid right now because someone got downed. I get a good event now because someone died. This you can use to your advantege then. Exploiting something. Now I dont like this either. But thats the Problem of perma death in games. Again people like the idea of perma death but end up save scumming. Why? because of the snowballing effect. And here a good game designer is needed how to solve this problem.

[@nangld]

Nice analysis. Although you have missed two other forms of time scheduling.

[@yazuki-wolf]

I personally kinda hate the D&D 5e system. They try to make it simple by using phrases like action, bonus action, extra action, etc., but then you also need to keep track of what resets with a short rest, what resets with a long rest, how many spell slots do you have, etc. So it's really not simple. It's not always super clear what counts as a bonus action and what is a full action as well. Then add movement , jumping, etc. and it gets even more complicated. Having played a bunch f BG3, which is a great game, I couldn't help but feel relieved when I went back to Larian's other DOS series and got to enjoy the simplicity of a point based, intuitive system.

[@NateHirsch-p1s]

Can you explain a bit more what you mean by 2 AP systems? Like no action should cost more than 2AP?

[@RamHornBeast]

I think he means move (1AP) then attack (1AP). Rather than a many AP system that might go: Move 3 squares (3AP), reload (2AP), shoot (5AP) then you end your turn having wasted the remaining 2AP cause there's nothing left to spend it on.

[@Sarseth90]

Myślę że raczej jest odwrotnie

[@linuxrant]

I think this is very nice of Kacper to mention the shortcomings of RNG. This is probably the biggest wrong turn in game design a developer can make. It is probably fine for games like diablo, where the game is fundamentally a dice-roller, a gambling game about drawing items. but whenever you introduce any type of chance, all sorts of weird things start to happen, it comes from math, chance is a very peculiar area, and also you just make a lazy choice of not thinking through the events and relationships between them. randomnes is just a fools replacement word for unknown variables and factors. If you want to reward yr players for creativity, just ditch randomness totally or SIGNIFICANTLY, and replace it with secrecy, mystery, fog, obstruction of data, think through factors and relationships between events... I think that might require a little more time with a notebook, but it might be legendary. Chess are legendary, what is random there? choosing color? :)

[@dahanster5578]

I think you have a very narrow perspective on RNG in game design. It has its appropriate place and function. I recommend you watch Game Maker's Toolkit's video entitled, "The Two Types of Random in Game Design."

[@ItWasSaucerShaped]

probably not hiring now :P

[@sjwarialaw8155]

Yeah I couldn't play XCOM and similar games because of RNG, it was extremely frustrating to have everything in place and all of a sudden I miss three times with 80%+ odds, meanwhile the enemy not missing anything, all of a sudden I have a dead squad member, I have to waste another turn killing the enemies, another turn healing and reorganizing, and I'm not reaching the objective in time... Snowball effect is bad. Battle Brothers is another example of bad design in my opinion, almost everything has around 40 to 60% chance to hit, so the same battle can either go horribly wrong or its a breeze. Its all good if the consequences for going horribly wrong weren't so game breaking...

[@quanwashington]

This is just a problem of XCOM adapting the spirit of OSR TTRPG rules without the consideration of OSR combat model being deadly and generally a last resort fail state. In OSR, characters are expendable and fragile. You and enemies alike are encouraged to run when you are at risk of death; you don't just duke it out mindlessly until you die. Sneaking past enemies is just as valid if not preferable to combat.