==Iridium Soldiers== Our Kickstarter Journey.
polycounter
The time has come for me (and friends) to start our own game company and create our first game. A little background on me....I've been making environments for games for over 14 years. It's been a wild ride and it's time to apply everything I know about games/art/passion into something of my own making. I thought it'd be fun to share my journey in creating a game from scratch with all of you. We have no funding at this point, we'll be throwing it up on Kickstarter at the end of March. Hopefully all goes well, and we'll move forward with the project. None of this is considered "final art" only WIP and proof of concept. With all that out of the way let's got rolling!! 
Game: Iridium Soldiers. I'm a huge fan of turn based games like Moonbase Commander, Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, and Field Commander. This is where we begin. I'm envisioning a turn based strategy game that mixes a lot of my favorite elements from these games; blended with our own special style of creativity, humor, and design. We plan to release on IOS and PC with stretch goals for other platforms (I really want this on my VITA), but more info on that later, for now let's get things started.
Bear in mind all of this VERY WIP and all in various states of completion working towards our pitch video.
First things first. Company name and splash screen. I'm envisioning the little robot coming in from the side and shooting the logo from black and white to full color. Almost like blasting off the rust.
Up next Iridium Soldiers main badge and logo. Possible title screen. Background temp.
Here are the two units I've got so far.
Comments/feedback greatly appreciated!! Thank you for your encouragement and support.....let the journey begin! More to come.....
Game: Iridium Soldiers. I'm a huge fan of turn based games like Moonbase Commander, Advance Wars, Fire Emblem, and Field Commander. This is where we begin. I'm envisioning a turn based strategy game that mixes a lot of my favorite elements from these games; blended with our own special style of creativity, humor, and design. We plan to release on IOS and PC with stretch goals for other platforms (I really want this on my VITA), but more info on that later, for now let's get things started.
Bear in mind all of this VERY WIP and all in various states of completion working towards our pitch video.
First things first. Company name and splash screen. I'm envisioning the little robot coming in from the side and shooting the logo from black and white to full color. Almost like blasting off the rust.
Up next Iridium Soldiers main badge and logo. Possible title screen. Background temp.
Here are the two units I've got so far.
Comments/feedback greatly appreciated!! Thank you for your encouragement and support.....let the journey begin! More to come.....
Replies
Which Engine you want to use?
We're planning on using Unity. It'll be 2-D sprites for the final game, at an isometric angle.
Can you think of a single strategy game you enjoy playing on mobile?
Touch screens suck for precision gameplay, and you will end up spending a lot of resources on something that isn't the best experience you could make. If you guys just decided to do mobile because it seems like it is something you should do, i would reconsider and focus on making the best damn pc game you can.
If you want to talk about the market space on mobile send me a PM. That is the space i've worked in my entire career so i know it pretty damn well.
Also it sounds like you plan on baking out your 3d models to 2d... any reason for this? It makes no sense to do this if you are using a fully featured 3d engine.
Yes I love Kingdom rush, although I play that on my tablet, and I think that works wonderfully. I've also sunk a huge amount of time into Pixel Junk Monsters on my Vita as well. Some stuff works with touch controls and some things not so much.....I believe Iridium Soldiers should work beautifully on touch based devices. We want to release on PC/Steam, but were a long ways off from that. You haven't played advance wars? This game is turned based, and precision isn't really necessary. Once I get to the environment stuff hopefully it'll make more sense.
We need to have up to 100 units on the map at any point and I don't believe you can do that on tablets, the joint count would kill it.
And his big brother!
Back to work I go.
His gun will have a ball of energy floating in front of the nub.....a mini lightning field, and the clamp will open and close down quickly when it fires. Hopefully it'll look cool. Our animator starts next week. Can't wait!
But i don't see how a turn based strategy with hundreds of units is going to be fun, unless you have the units in squads?
Not trying to be an asshole, just a devils advocate, as i do like the work you are doing.
So, what are some reasons for 3d, then?
* Arbitrary rotation of the screen - rotating at fixed angles (as defined by the number of sides of the playfield's grid) are fine, but anything else really requires full 3D
* Arbitrary zooming of the screen; both of these are largely design decisions - there are few times when it isn't sufficient to have limited viewing angles & distances.
* Memory - assuming you have a reasonable texture size for each object (less than 1 texel/pixel at max zoom), it can actually take LESS memory for a model than the equivalent sprites once you take into account the 4/6/8 (for square, hex & oct grids) images per animation frame per animation. You'll also need to take into account models which are almost identical except for the texture - such as elite or damaged units.
* Quicker changes - with the sprite method, you'll need to re-generate the sprites every time you make a change to the model OR the animations. Obviously, this won't affect the player, but it will impact the development time.
Of course, with some clever sleight-of-hand, you can use a hybrid 2D/3D approach for the best of both worlds. If an object is standing still, replace it with a sprite; when it's moving (attacking, walking, dying, whatever), use the 3D model. This will require some work, but could give the best results.
pew pew
THIS IN NO WAY REPRESENTS FINAL ANIMATIONS! This is only a test.
All the knights had these awesome helmets.....When I was a kid I took a magic marker to one of em' all black....I would often pretended they were the hawk-men from the 1980's Flash Gordon movie.
Anybody want to 3-d print this guy so I can re-live my childhood?
Back to work slave! Stop talking to your friends on the internet.:)
It was really starting to look like something too.
Mockup- combat screen & UI
The big faction leaders are temp (lifted from some robot image I found somewhere) as I hadn't gotten around to building those yet.
I wish I could of stayed the course on this one......bucketlist dreams.