Understanding modern turn based tactical design || Jan Rawski ||

Developing a turn-based tactical game is a road riddled with traps. Movement isn’t movement. Players don’t understand that a 75% chance to hit is a 25% chance to miss. Oh, and these days turn-based tactical games are supposed to be fun and exciting while maintaining depth and complexity! How does that even work? After making tactical games for eight years, we have some idea. In this talk, I will explain the inner workings and pitfalls of the genre using our upcoming game, Homicidal All-Stars, as an example.
Talk recorded at Game Industry Conference 2022!
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[@ak47training]

Game's now called "Showgunners", not "Homicidal All Stars". For you wanderers who want to check it out.

[@SleepDepJoel1]

Finding this talk after already playing the game was really fascinating. "Oh, THAT'S why they did that."

[@babybornas1]

One of my favourite talks on this edition of GIC :D Very interesting and informative

[@Cloud-Yo]

Im a so looking forward to this game after having played the demo. And Im really grateful for all the insight into creating TBS games with the player in mind. Great talk!

[@PHeMoX]

"Players don’t understand that a 75% chance to hit is a 25% chance to miss." It's a big mistake assuming your target audience is stupid though.... People very much do understand there's a 25% chance to miss. The issue with this occurs when a game has pretty harsh circumstances where a 10% chance to miss can ruin your entire battle beyond 'repair', each and every time. The issue is also in how most games do not take into account how getting screwed by RNG multiple times in a row means the failure chance itself was in fact not the predicted 10%, but much higher due to poor randomisation. That issue is what players will get frustrated by. Last but not least, if a game only presents binary chances of what will happen beforehand, it would probably result in a fairly boring game to play. Some games have fixed results, without a chance modifier. And that works too. But I think for a more exciting experience _some_ RNG is always required. Seeing how popular games like X-COM 2 are, I seriously disagree that 'players hate RNG'. They don't hate it. They love it. If you take out RNG completely, any strategy game will quickly turn into just a puzzle game with a singular optimal solution. I doubt players will really want that. This is also why you can not minimise negative impact of RNG too much. You need the bad, for the good to feel amazing. This is just fact.

[@boohoo5419]

this game will flop so hard.. depth is actually the stuff tactic players like to do. crunching numbers.. making complicated builds.. the first remake of xcom was already way too dumb and low effort compared to the original! this guy didnt even really understand the difference between tactic and strategy games. the normal player will not even realize this game is out.. so you should target a hardcore audience not a casual crowd! on top.. it looks very indie not even near tripple AAA. or AA. dont know what this guy is seeing. this isnt a small tripple AAA title. its the lowest tier of indie! without an orginal idea.. the idea is everything in indie gaming. see factorio. a complex (!!) game with a brilliant idea! nobody cares about the music if your gameplay is generic and seen thousand times. i bet there are pixel art indies that selled 100 times more then this will. just bcs they had a good and deep tactics engine!

[@patnor7354]

And the % is often false. Devs suck at doing probability math apparently.

[@sjwarialaw8155]

Completely disagree, players understand very well randomness, they just don't like it, because... guess... its too random.... The issue is not that its just random, the issue is that it creates a snowball effect, and that's why games like Battle Brothers and XCOM ultimately are extremely frustrating. Its not a question of gaming the game, every gamer can do that, its just that it isn't fun to have to min-max games, or too have to know the meta. Say for example, in Battle Brothers, playing on a higher difficulty, the meta is to stab enemies with daggers, so that their armor isn't destroyed, so that you can then use it on your soldiers. Its not intuitive, its boring gameplay. In XCOM, you have a limited amount of turns to complete an objective, if you get a few bad rolls, you lose one squad member, another is injured, you have to wast a turn reorganizing, healing, and now you have one less squad member, you have to be more cautious, but you already wasted four turns on the last encounter, and you can't rush now, snowball effect, not fun.

[@stevejurgens9985]

At 31:28 he said there are poker tournaments and magic tournaments and there rng works. No it doesnt. Its called cheating. And every Pro is doing this.

[@boohoo5419]

this game will flop so hard.. i bet.. depth is actually the stuff tactic players like to do. crunching numbers.. making complicated builds.. the remake of xcom was already way too dumb and low effort compared to the original! this guy didnt even really understand the difference between tactic and strategy games. the normal player will not even realize this game is out.. so you should target a hardcore audience not a casual crowd!

[@bogoid]

xcom (firaxis) was the best and worst thing that happened to this genre lol

[@gbort1]

This is pretty funny in retrospect given that the game is now currently doing well on steam with a "very positive" rating

[@numenical]

@@gbort1 This is even funnier in retrospect. SteamDB suggests there are about 40 players worldwide (compared to 3K for XCOM2), and the discount has been steadily increasing over the year (currently 60%), suggesting no one is buying it.

[@ayushraikar597]

​@@gbort1 actually no, it has just 1k reviews which is not bad but for how the game looks it probubly took 3X more to make the game then how much it earned (using this steam-revenue-calculator.com )

[@Stevejustt]

Great talk