What is Loreisle?

Simply put, Loreisle is a multiplayer turn-based tactical game.

Those of us who grew up playing games on the original Playstation likely remember the new experiences and gameplay ideas being introduced through those early games. Our goal with Loreisle was to revisit some of those games and try to bring back to the player the joy and the magic of experiencing something unique.

The idea of making this game is not new. My first attempt at creating it was years ago when I told the general idea to a few friends during happy hour at local bar in my hometown. Back then, we tried to build it using Irrlicht Engine, eventually coming up with a game that was neither fun nor terribly functional. I confess we spent most of the time trying to write shaders to make it look good instead of focusing on making the gameplay experience to make it feel good.

Compilation of screenshots from the old prototype

After this initial failure, the idea obviously inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics and Vandal Hearts, was put to sleep. It was many years later, after gaining Unity experience, that I brought the idea to Schell Games. With the help of Josh Lippert, a big fan of tactical role-playing games, we ended up with a game that’s fun to play.

A good strategy RPG, like Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts, has an incredible level design, an epic story, and engaging gameplay mechanics that allow players to combine a relatively small number of elements (character classes, skills, spells, etc.) in all sorts of ways to produce a vast array of different results. But, in the end, it’s still a single player experience. What if we want to play against a friend? A good Artificial Intelligence can make the game interesting, but can also eventually become predictable; for a truly chaotic, always-fresh experience that tests your abilities, you have to play against another human being.

Strategy RPGs can offer a fantastic amount of complexity, but tend to be single-player experiences.

Since our development time was short, we decided to drop many standard RPG elements (a grand story, character evolution, etc.) and instead focused on the basic game mechanics. In chess, each piece has a limited set of attributes: basically just movement and attack patterns. Imagine if each piece had more complex attributes, such as different offensive and defensive strengths, different attack ranges, imagine it as fully animated characters rather than being static game pieces. Got the idea? Now picture the board as a dynamic medieval landscape, with places to take cover, rivers to cross, mountains to climb, etc. Unlike chess, each board (or level) becomes an unique experience, where the player needs to rethink his or her tactics and adapt in order to win.

Gameplay

As mentioned above, Loreisle is a mix of classic strategy RPGs and strategy board games. It endeavors to blend the complexity and tactical maneuvering of a strategy RPG with the pick-up-and-play nature of a self-contained board game: as in an RPG, there are a variety of complex character classes, each with their own stats and abilities, but as in a board game, each player has the same pool of characters to choose from, and there’s no continuity between games, like leveling up or item collection. The strategic element comes from how players use the tools at their disposal, rather than in how they direct longer-term character evolution.

The game begins with players choosing from a pool of fantasy characters - warriors, mages, and the like - and placing some combination of them onto the playing field, a la Stratego.

We mostly stuck with balanced teams, but mechanically, there’s no such restriction: if you want to see how well you can do with eight white mages, the game won’t stop you.

Once the teams are in place, the main phase of the game begins, and players take turns controlling their band of warriors in an attempt to wipe the other team off the map. Fighters rush into melee combat with swords drawn, archers snipe at enemies from a distance, some mages can incinerate and debilitate foes while others heal and buff allies, etc.

If it sounds like standard medieval RPG fare, that’s entirely intentional. We’ve tried to add some details to keep things interesting. For example, stronger characters can stand in front of weaker allies to try to protect them from arrow fire, and physically weak mages can counter-attack when struck.

We’ve also tried to spice things up by deliberately making the game mechanics somewhat unforgiving, so that miscalculations and mistakes can potentially play a large, but hopefully not frustrating, role in how battles unfold. Some important mechanics are difficult for players to control directly (the directions characters face matters, but that direction is controlled by the last step the character took, not by direct player choice), while others, like movement, allow the player very little room to undo decisions once they’ve been made. Friendly fire is also possible: it’s as easy to catch your own teammates in the blast of a fireball as it is to accidentally heal or, worse, revive a wounded or fallen enemy. Like chess, we envision Loreisle to be a game where players learn from and try to adapt to mistakes, rather than one where they play perfectly. “The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake,” as chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower famously observed.

Player 2’s dark mage is about to light things up with a fireball.

Challenges encountered during the week

One of the main keys of the game is the balance of the characters’ attributes. In order to balance a character, we must analyze all of the different behaviors: the attack range, what kinds and quantities of items it carries, how powerful the offense and defense are, odds of nailing a critical blow and much more. Dialing and turning those knobs is something that needs to be constantly revisited. With every new feature, attribute, and magic we implement, all those values must be balanced again.

On the technical side, we didn’t have an artist on our team, so all the art that’s currently in the game was made by kind artists selling their work on the Unity Asset Store. This also meant that we faced many technical issues with the animations, user interface, etc. We didn’t have a dedicated designer, either, so all of our game balancing had to be conducted by intuition (informed by our love of and experience with strategy RPGs) and trial-and-error.

Another challenge was to create a fun, fast, and smart path-finding algorithm for character movement, spellcasting, and ranged attacks. We wanted the terrain hazards to block character movement and ignore spells, and have characters be able to take cover from fire by hiding behind obstacles..

We also learned that new users get frustrated by not knowing the game mechanics. Making sure that the learning curve is fun, especially in a currently-multiplayer-only game, is a hard task. To that end, we’ve been working on both a quick-start guide to playing the game and a longer, more in-depth instruction manual.

Future Work

As limited as the current state of the project may be, we feel that it already has a good foundation, and we’ve already come up with numerous ways we’d like to expand the game in the future:

• Expansion - We’d like to expand the game to allow four players to battle against each other. It could be total madness, but sometimes total madness is a lot of fun.
• Online Gameplay - The game is fun even when two players are sharing one computer to play it, but it’s certainly not an ideal situation. Once we feel that the core gameplay mechanics are solid, we’d like to work on online multiplayer options.
• Tutorial AI levels - We want to further mitigate newbie frustrations by having an option of learning the basics in a series of matches against a computer player.
• Player Co-op Mode vs AI - If we go through all the trouble to making an AI, why not play against it beyond the tutorials?
• Victory conditions - In its current form, the game ends when one side is completely wiped out, but other victory conditions could make things even more interesting (and require a change of tactics, which is what this game is all about). What if each party had a leader who had to be protected? What about king of the hill matches? Or a match timer and sudden death mechanics?
• Dynamic environments - What if casting an ice spell on a body of water caused it to freeze over? What if striking a tree with a lightning bolt could knock it down, creating a (potentially flaming) obstacle and crushing those who are beneath it as it falls? What if casting a fireball into a field of dry grass could start a brushfire that would continue to burn and spread?

As a friend used to say, “The game developing cycle never ends, it just stops when you think it’s good enough.” We know that Loreisle is still far from being a complete game, but thus far we’ve been limited by our short time span and the small size of our team. We believe that, given more time and more resources, it could be “good enough” and more.