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We plan on having 5 skill tiers in Hex Gambit, much like we had in Outwitters. Here are the titles and profile badges you’ll be competing for.
Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.
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One feature of the old Skirmish and Skirmish 2 prototypes that is still included in Hex Gambit (in its own way) is the hero concept, which now takes the form of your team’s Captain. You and your opponents each select one to accompany you into battle. But unlike Skirmish, your captain is no longer a character on the board that can be defeated. Their job is to provide bonus powers from afar.
The idea came when one day, Alex got stomped hard in the Hex Gambit prototype (I had lot more experience playing than him). There’s a point in any competitive game when the losing player is done for, they know it, and they no longer have any fun taking their doomed turns in the slow downward spiral to defeat.
What if we gave that losing player some kind of bonus to keep things interesting? Not a “blue shell” solution; nothing that automatically turns the tables in their favor. But some smaller powers that, if used wisely, could help you change your fortunes. And the worse you’re getting stomped, the more you’d get to use them.
The captain system in Hex Gambit is based on that idea, and it really works beautifully. In a neck-and-neck game, both players have equal access to their captain’s bonus powers, which can be used 1-3 times in a match depending on their strength. But if one player pulls WAY ahead, their access to bonuses dwindles while the losing player’s access grows. The result: players losing badly still have a few tricks up their sleeve, and players that pull ahead can’t get too cocky.
There’s a lot of interesting strategy in timing your bonuses, and it’s a ton of fun to watch these matches unfold. It reduces the “hurry up so I can win already” moments, replacing them with an extra layer of excitement. When you get your hand on the beta, we think you’ll agree!
Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.
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When you first boot up the league in Hex Gambit you’ll have a choice to make: Neptis, Torga, or Volcan? These three factions compete in a larger territory control metagame every season, which we think will last a month each. There are leaderboards within each faction as well, so you can fight for your own glory at the same time you’re fighting for your team.
Profile trophies are awarded to the winning faction at the end of each season, and to the top players for each team. You can switch factions at the start of every season, and we’re also planning some population-based bonuses and lockouts to keep everyone on even footing. We’ll tell you more about the rules of the metagame later in development. It’s designed to provide some dramatic icing on top of our usual leaderboards and skill tiers.
Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.
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This week I’m working on UI, which is going a bit slower than I’d like. Still hoping to have it all knocked out this month, but I’m putting a little more TLC into things than usual.
This is about what your games list will look like should you join the red Volcan faction in our league metagame. Will probably be updating that “player” icon to something original, seems a little odd to be nodding that heavily at Outwitters. Back to work!
Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.
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So we’ve got our plan laid out for the year, and the pace is going to be pretty grueling considering how new we are to Unreal and 3d games in general. January is my month for blocking in most of the game’s arena environment, finishing up our first character’s animations, and working out all of the UI. Thankfully, I had a head start on a lot of this artwork at the end of last year. Hopefully by February I’ll be free to focus on the meat of the project: character art!
The shot above is a peek at the current state of our untextured arena. It’s going to look miles better once the details and lighting get finalized!
I should probably take a second to explain what a Hex Gambit is. In a world called Agon, the Hex Gambit is a wildly popular arena sport where contenders engage in live “battle chess”. Each player assumes command of a squad of expendable tin soldiers. Whether you win or lose, your performance will influence a larger metagame, which we’ll show off later in development.
Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.
While we thought about how our followup to Outwitters would play, I also took some time to work on how it might look. Very early on when a straight-up sequel was being considered, I explored some fresh looks for the old races.
The Dystopian Adorables: If we decided to bring the Adorables back for another round, I thought it might be fun to “Mad Max” them up a little.
I also experimented a little with new takes on some old Feedback and Veggienaut designs:
Since Hex Gambit isn’t a true Outwitters sequel, these characters are staying in my sketchbook for now. When we decided to explore themes outside of Outwitters, that opened up all kinds of possibilities for what characters could look like. I’ll have some real designs from HG to post very soon.
Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.
The consensus around the internet seems to be that 2016 was bit of a turd. But every turd has a silver lining, depending on your diet.
We were extremely nervous about the launch of our first PC game, but the results we’ve seen from Space Food Truck have been super encouraging. We owe a huge thank you to everyone who supported us this year by picking up a copy. You’re the reason that our sixth game is coming in 2017! It took a bit longer than we wanted to get SFT’s tablet port out the door, but we made good use of that down time learning Unreal Engine and Blender to make our next game in 3d.
What’s Ahead?
If all goes according to plan, you’ll be playing Hex Gambit, the spiritual successor to Outwitters, by the end of 2017! This new turn-based strategy game takes everything we learned making Outwitters and improves on it. It’s fast-paced and easy to learn, with loads of depth and tons of tactics to try out. Also, it’s really pretty.
A Kickstarter is coming around the middle of the year with some cool pre-order-style goodies, and you can keep appraised of that situation by joining our mailing list. If you want to support the development of Hex Gambit right now, you can do that by buying any game or soundtrack we sell! All the money coming in from our other games goes straight into music, sound effects, and mortgage payments for the next one.
We wish you all the best of luck with your own hopes and dreams for 2017, and thanks for sticking with us for our SIXTH year as full-time game designers. We wouldn’t still be here making new games without your continued support. Happy New Year from One Man Left!
The search for a worthy successor to Outwitters continued, and the Ow: Skirmish prototype evolved into Ow: Skirmish 2, where we experimented with a fresh take on the minions’ role.
In Skirmish 2 you still selected 2 heroes, but now their moves were set in stone rather than being customizable. This gave players less reading to do up-front and made it easier for us to make more characters.
The minions were totally overhauled, and they were no longer tied to specific heroes. You could pick any 3 minions you wanted to bring with you: 2 runners and a soldier; 3 soldiers; a soldier, a heavy, and a runner. They were designed to work interchangeably.
On top of that, minions were immortal. When your minion was defeated, your opponent would choose a checker space to respawn them on, and their max HP was reduced by one. So as the game went on, you had to rely more and more on your heroes to get things done.
The goal for victory was the same: Defeat both enemy heroes or control all four flag spaces to win. So much havoc was going on with this prototype that the Victory Points from Skirmish 1 weren’t really necessary to keep the game lengths in check.
There was really nothing wrong with this one. It was fun, it was frantic, and it met pretty much all of our goals for a worthy successor to Outwitters. It was actually a contender to be developed instead of Space Food Truck, but for scheduling and financial reasons we thought SFT was a better project for that time. This is back when we thought SFT was a 6 month project, lol.
So after a few months away making Space Food Truck, we came back with a fresh perspective and sort of blew the whole thing up. We remixed the pieces we liked from every Outwitters prototype we’d done, then we added some fresh ideas on top.
The resulting prototype is Game 6. It’s kind of like this one, but not really. The core idea was: what if instead of weakening as the match went on, your characters got stronger? For my money, it’s the best of the many PvP strategy prototypes we’ve done. It’ll also be our first 3d game!
Want to know more about our upcoming Outwitters follow-up? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.
I got pretty enthusiastic about the Outwitters: Skirmish prototype and did some sketching on the subject.
The six hero characters each represented a different Outwitters race: Tronk for the Veggienauts, Overclock for the Feedback, etc. Festress was sort of her own thing from a race of muties I was calling the Abhorables (sort of an anti-Adorables). The bottom row of the top image are minions that went with each hero.
Only one of these characters still exists in the current version of our sixth game, which isn’t set in the Outwitters universe.
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I also played around with an art style for the game, which you might remember from a previous blog post.
Want to know more about our upcoming Outwitters follow-up? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.
From our earlier CQC prototype (along with a few others that didn’t quite pan out), we arrived at something we were calling at the time Outwitters: Skirmish. It was “Outwitters” in name only; there were no races, no bases, and no fog of war.
In Skirmish you chose 3 heroes, and each hero had its own minion class (the little guys with the numbers). You’d win the match by owning all 4 flags, defeating all the enemy heroes, OR by earning enough Victory Points. VP was a way to keep matches from dragging on too long; you got them from taking over flags or defeating enemies.
A lot of these ideas are still present in Game 6 in one form or another, but a lot has changed.
The biggest cut feature from Skirmish was character customization. Each of these heroes had something like 5 special moves to choose from, but you could only equip 3 moves for a battle. So we might both pick the Scallywag Captain, but we could still be using him in different ways.
This was very cool for variety, but it took a lot of reading and comparing to choose from all those moves (choose 3 characters, now choose 3 moves each). It didn’t help that the moves were also fairly complicated and interacted in all sorts of weird ways. They involved things like status effects and passive attributes that basically went full RPG.
Overall it was a lot less approachable than Outwitters and a lot harder to teach, which is not what we’re going for. Our goal for Game 6 is something as elegant as Outwitters, but with more flexibility and surprises in the way characters can be used.
Here’s a look at a few of the game pieces we had for the myriad status effects and traps in Skirmish:
From this prototype we learned that customization was cool, but we had to keep complexity in check.
Want to know more? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones for our followup to Outwitters, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.