Monthly Archives: June 2012

10 Comments

Predestination shown at QCon XIX, beta signups open

  June 28, 2012 ,

Thanks to the guys at Digital Circle, we had the opportunity to show off Predestination last weekend at QCon XIX, Ireland’s biggest anime and gaming convention. The game isn’t in a playable state yet, but we put together a special trailer showing some of the game’s main features and had an open signup sheet to get into the beta when it arrives.

I expected to get a few people interested, but was absolutely blown away by the level of support and enthusiasm people had for Predestination. I really can’t thank everyone at QCon enough, over a hundred people signed up for the beta in just two and a half days after seeing the trailer below: Read More

14 Comments

Tactical space combat: A prototype design

  June 9, 2012 ,

My original plans for tactical space combat in Predestination involved making a good attempt at turn-based 3D combat, which is something no game has done well yet. I had intended to make line-of-sight mechanics and area effects a big part of the gameplay, but every combat would have quickly become a chaotic mess. Our main goal with Predestination is to bring proper turn-based strategy back to 4X games, so after discussing the idea with the rest of the team we decided to use a classic 2D combat plane on which tactical decisions are much more obvious.

I started prototyping the combat system last week with a chess board and some coloured squares, but I quickly ended up with pages of complicated rules and movement/attack tables. The Art Director suggested a hexagonal grid and we quickly hashed out a very simple, intuitive system using that grid that we’re all very happy with. We prototyped the system using a big hexagonal gaming mat and paper cutouts and ironed out all of the flaws we could see. The end result is a tactical combat system I’m really excited about: Read More