18. März 2019 - Tinytouchtales

The King’s Carriage my 7DRL 2019

The „7 day roguelike challenge“ is a yearly game jam held in march, based around building a roguelike in one week. I’m a big fan of this game jam since it gives you quite a lot of time and is focused on my favorite genre of games. I participated several times now. Most notably in 2016 i made Hook & Shield which later turned into my full release ENYO and in 2017 together with Mexer i made King of Nothing. In 2018 i attempted to make a roguelike based on rolling around as a dice but could not make it work.

This year’s game The King’s Carriage was heavily inspired by my Into The Breach obsession. The second game by Subsetgames (after FTL: Faster Than Light) that is a mix between X-COM and Auro has one incredibly interesting aspect which is that all enemies display their intended actions before they execute them. This means that the game mainly evolves around damage mitigation and not actually unit combat. In ITB there is one early game mission where you have to defend a train that moves in 4 turns through the game board. I took this mission as a base and developed my idea around it.

Developing a game based on another game’s already well designed core is weird since you do not run into any unforeseen issues when trying to create something new. I mainly adapted ITB’s design to fit my need and introduced a Hex based game board to my concept. The game has a limited set of environments, woods, desert and ice, features three heroes (Warrior, Archer, Mage) with two unique skills each and two enemy types (melee and ranged combat).
Even though i could not complete the game within the contests timeline i finished it one week later and made it available to play outside of the main contest. You can take a look at it’s mini devlog in this twitter thread where i documented it’s development with a lot of gifs.

I think the game turned out pretty well even though i could not polish the UI as much as i wanted. As many people have asked if this is going to be a proper mobile release: i feel like the game does not have enough uniqueness in comparison to ITB and i rather would play ITB than this. So for now i don’t think this will become a full release at any point soon.

You can check out the game in your browser on my Itch.io page – The King’s Carriage.