This is the first in the series of blog posts detailing how I’m going with Charge.

So far I’ve got most of the core gameplay systems up and running. There’s turns, each player has an army, you can do all the core orders for each unit, movement, pivots, charges, using abilities, etc etc.

The game isn’t much to look at right now, but I’m thinking that once the core systems are implemented I’ll move onto making it less.. placeholder-y. Then the screenshots will come thick and fast.

I hit a roadblock last week where the data that was being sent between turns (aka, the entire game state and history) was too big for Apple’s GameKit turn based systems. I figured I’d hit this point eventually, but not quite so soon. So this post picks up where I left off last week trying to implement the reducer pattern roughly inspired by this blog series:

Making a turn-based multiplayer game in Rust – What’s a turn-based game anyway? (part 1/3)

Long story short, we just send the actions for the previous turn, and then rebuild the game state locally.

It’s more or less working at this point minus a couple missing features and a nasty bug with the Unity Editor itself. I’ll figure that out sooner or later.

It’s also a roaring success for transmission size. Back down to under 10% of the budget.

I’ve got some concerns about how saving the game state to iCloud is going to perform, I’ll have to keep an eye on those sizes, but at least 1mb is bigger than 64kb.

I genuinely think it’s all coming together pretty well so far. Sure it’s taking forever, but I think I’m getting better at programming whilst doing this, so fingers crossed it doesn’t all fall over in a shit heap.

On the productivity front, I switched out Notion for Things 3. Had a couple days where the internet was basically dead and I couldn’t get onto Notion to see what I had to do next. Decided I wanted something with a little more purpose, a little more offline and Things definitely seems more of both.

Next week I hope to finish the work on the reducer pattern and get back into regular dev. Might even treat myself and make some more models or work on effects.


Tasks completed:

(03/03/2023)
• Playtest Reducer pattern some more.
• Reducer Event: Dice Results
• Reducer Events: Combat results
• Attacks aren’t deterministic, their results occur upon consumption.
• Reducer Events: Morale Results and Psych changes
• Change auto-deployment so that it intersperses leaders amongst regiments
• Orders: advanced
• Unit Controller Status Checks

(02/03/2023)
• Anything that is consumed by the reducer should be logged to logger system.
• Split order results into individual result-events
• Look into building a better way of divvying up tasks into sprints

(01/03/2023)
• Switch bug reporter over to Things
• Research Astra Fellowships
• Add Deselect button to Unit UI
• Don’t store full unit data in game data
• Replace existing c# events with messenger service
• Camera FOV gets wonky sometimes with an NaN error
• Change gamplay transmission to be orders only
• Unit Exhaustion

Bugs squashed
• Using abilities causes a nullreff
• Attacks just fall over. The event doesn’t actually fire.
• Order results are busted completely lol.
• Orders get spammed / looped somehow
• Missing Ref: UnitUI.ShowAbilityRadius
• Player one can see Player Two’s army on deploy
• Individuals are hard to select
• Cannot pivot a unit unless dragging from centre
• Unit names incorrect in viewer
• Order events only send state, not dice rolls or logs
• Local games camera always starts at player one
• Turns aren’t sending on Device
• Load game crashes after a game has already previously been loaded

One of the elements that was prevalent in older tabletop games was a concept of leaders directly.. well.. leading their units. The main title I keep thinking back to is Napoleons Battles. In that, a unit can only be ordered if a leader model was within range, else they’d either hold or at best, return fire. I’d played many games with this mechanic and always thought it gave a sense of value to the leader units beyond their direct combat utility.

Modern titles reduce heroes and leaders down to a morale bonus at best and at worst, mostly redundant. To me this feels like a shame and a missed opportunity. The leader, as part of the hobby is going to be a centrepiece to the army, and as part of the gameplay should feel like the core gear that an army turns on.

In Charge then, my initial approach is to make them both a powerful unit and a centrepiece of an army. Leaders begin each turn with an order pool. They may issue any order to a unit within their radius, including themselves and other leaders. They also may function as a bonus to morale checks (depending on the army list) and / or also function as a powerful hero unit. In this sense I feel like they’ll act as directorial units. A powerful melee hero leader with a small pool of orders and limited range will naturally pair well with cavalry or shock troops, where a more strategic leader will offer options to a wider set of units..

This also creates opportunities for vulnerability within an army, as a unit without orders cannot do much. That aforementioned hero unit might be killed early in the match, opening up opportunities for a counterattack.

There’s a ton of edge cases this opens up, like losing all leaders early on, or not having enough orders to cover the army, but I think that the overall opportunities for interesting tabletop storytelling outweighs the potential issues. I also feel like modern techniques for handling individuals lend themselves nicely to keeping them alive long enough to be effective.

All this is to say I’m still exploring the subject within the game, but I do feel that it’ll feature heavily.

So for the past few months I’ve been primarily working on my next title. Interloper has done way better than I could’ve expected, but after two and a bit years I think it’s time to work on something new.

I’ve built a bunch of prototypes over the past year or so, every now and then taking the time to create something small, or some tiny slice of a larger game. From a spiritual sequel to Unstoppable, to some experiments with smaller game mechanics to taking some new swings at old ideas I’ve had running around, none of them stuck.

That is until Apple released the Unity Plugins at WWDC last year. There’s a lot of good API’s exposed via these plugins, including some cool audio stuff, a neato input alternative, but the one that stood out to me was GameKit, particularly Turn Based Games.

I’m a long time tabletop wargamer. I was brought up on the likes of Operation Warboard, Squad Leader, Napoleons Battles and then of course… Warhammer. My first miniature was a 2nd edition Space Marine Dreadnaught, but the first army I’d fully painted was a 5th edition Warhammer Fantasy Brettonian army. This is where my love for what became the genre of “Rank and Flank” games began. Growing up through my teenage years I’d assembled both the aforementioned Brettonian army, and then later a Skaven army. Building the miniatures, painting the ranks of rats, trying out the odd combinations of the army lists, winning and losing games were all some of the most formative moments of my life. I was extremely fortunate to have an incredibly supportive family with this hobby. My Dad, Brother, Stepdad and Uncle were all just as into the game as I was. Most weekends we’d have a game of some kind.

This is all to say, I’ve spent the past twenty years forming opinions on tabletop wargames. That through my time as a game developer I’ve felt that I can bring something to .. uh… the table.

Enter: CHARGE (working title) a tabletop wargame that spans both digital and physical versions.

The core conceit is that it should get to the meat of what makes a rank and flank interesting quickly. It’ll bring back some mechanics that’ve been lost to time, and it’ll simultaneously be a multiplayer digital title (initially available on apple platforms) and a rules set for physical tabletop play. (there’s a stretch goal of adapting the digital models as printable files for 3D printers, separately available on something like MyMiniFactory)

This is a bit of an ambitious project (why would I make games if they weren’t ambitious) and I expect it’s going to take a while to build, and I’m hoping to chronicle it’s development here.