Zodiac Legion: an upcoming game of medieval fantasy guerrilla warfare

[Galdred]

Hey there,
As I wrote in the introduction thread, I am working on a turn based tactical RPG of fantasy guerilla warfare:


This game could be described as a cross between X(-)COM and a classic dungeon crawling RPG.
The overworld elements, the research, and production are heavily inspired by X-COM, but the tactical gameplay is closer to a dungeon crawler with dungeons that make a single, large encounter.

The game takes place in a world where magic returns after a millenium of disappearance.
You are the commander of the forgotten Zodiac Order, whose mission is to defend the realms of Asteria against the demons that came with the return of magic, and the sorcerers who managed to secure part of this magical energy for themselves.

On the strategic layer, you will manage your stronghold, your heroes, your spies, and your armies.
Your stronghold will allow you to study the lost magic knowledge, to craft magic items, and to train heroes. It can be bolstered by individuals of great talents you will find, and some of the valuable artifacts you will recover (like golems to man your forge, a famous scholar to direct your spell research, and a legendary blacksmith to craft pieces of magic armor).
Your spies will be valuable in term of tracking ancient places of magic, identifying cells of enemy agents, and spotting opportunities in enemy provinces.
Your armies will be needed to defend your land and your allies', and to take over the demesnes of the awakened wizards that threaten the kingdoms you are tasked to protect, or the traitors that could favor their side over yours.

Mission opportunities will occur whenever you find a location (dungeon, lair, hideout) in a province you control or nearby, or when one army or a spy cell is undertaking an action:
You can then send heroes to tip the scale in your favor (by extracting one of your cornered spies, or launching a raid on the enemy sorcerers to make the mission of your army much easier).

I plan to have various objectives for the missions: Open the gates of the fortress to let your troops enter, assassinate the enemy wizard before he performs a ritual, recover a magic grimoire, take an artifact from the enemy...

I am developing the game with moai. The tactical layer is functional, but lacks a lot of polish, and would need some more content and functionalities. The AI is also currently pretty basic.

The strategic layer is barebone, but I intend to keep it simple, as it is mostly there to give meaning to the tactical layer, so it will be similar to X-COM or Jagged Alliance, complexity wise.

I plan to kickstart the game during Q1 2018, and release it during Q4 2018, so there is a lot of time to discuss things until then.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/812910/Zodiac_Legion/

Discord[discord.gg]
Zodiac Legion [zodiac-legion.com].

[Galdred]

Reserved for later use

[Captain_Narol]

Interesting concept and original settings, good luck with your project.

[Smile]

What technologies do you use?

[Galdred]

Originally posted by Captain Narol:

Interesting concept and original settings, good luck with your project.

Thank you!
The settings sees very frequent revisions, but the zodiac theme is more or less set in stone, as the character art is mostly done.

Originally posted by Smile:

What technologies do you use?

I use the moai engine. It is a native 2D engine, written in C++ with lua binding. It is not very popular these days, but it powers Invisible Inc, Broken Age, Freedom Fall, Crimson Steam Pirates.
Its main strength is to allow easy tinkering with the engine itself.

I wrote a blog post about it[zodiac-legion.com].
We make the levels with tiled [www.mapeditor.org]. My artists used graphicsgale [graphicsgale.com] for the animations. I then use
Texture Packer[www.codeandweb.com] to optimize the texture files.

I will write a blog post about these tools "soon".

[Saint Scylla]

Good luck galdred, and let us know about your progress. We'll cover your game in the group's news.

[Galdred]

Originally posted by Saint Scylla:

Good luck galdred, and let us know about your progress. We'll cover your game in the group's news.

Thank you! That would help a lot!

[i_nive]

Intriguing because of thekeywords: xcom, eador... good luck! (subscribed to discussion for later use (kickstarter/wishlist))

[Galdred]

Metapixelatron made a video piecing together the information about my game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzp0KRQ6IRM

[Restoration]

Whoa, the game looks and sounds just like my kind of deal.
My most pressing question regards Customization.
Character Creation and Customization; how expansive and in detail will it be in Zodiac Legion?
Another question is, will there be mod support and if so how extensive?

A heads up: in the Steam Xcom 2 discussion forums there is a thread about a 'fantasy xcom' with many posts. You might want to check out or give word to all those players regarding your game. Zodiac Legion is exactly the kind of game they have talked about and were hoping for, as was I!

Here is the link:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/268500/discussions/0/458607699617060768/

[Galdred]

Thank you for the heads up! I replied to the XCOM thread.

Customization

Graphic customization
- Each armor type will match several piece of armor sprites (basically, light/medium/heavy, normal/magic, with several colors to choose from).
So the player will be able to match pieces with each other within certain limits (no leather for plate armor and so on).
- The helms will have to remain in line with a given zodiac sign, so there will only be 3 to choose for a given sign.

Gameplay customization
To be honest, this is not set in stone yet, as there are not many perks in currently, and we are still iterating on the core gameplay. It will probably change a lot during testing. The idea would be to have around 50% passive skill or stat increases, and 50 % active skills (or active skill upgrade/sidegrade) on level up.
Some will be random, and other will be decided by the player.

Random skills will probably be given at the lower levels, because it would be a bit pointless to spend time skilling up newbies that will be sent to the meat grinder, and it makes it easier to plan the character build around given random perks than to have it compatible with all options.

Given that the player is leading a small military order, hero characters will usually be supplemented by regular soldiers or spies. These will basically act as level 0 units that can be recruited to the player roster of elite soldiers after a mission.

Character creation
In order to make it viable to sacrifice characters to complete mission objectives, there will be no character creation: Your recruits will have a random perk in the beginning (cf gameplay customization).
You will play the commander of the Zodiac order, but you can die. In this case, you will switch to the next one in charge, like in Crusader Kings.
You lose when the frotress of the order falls to the enemy, not when the commander dies on the battlefield.

Stronghold customization
Unlike in XCOM, there won't be a strict grid to let you arrange your base to maximize defense (X-COM) or adjacency bonus (XCOM). Instead, you will have several facilities to build or upgrade, and several spots in the citadel, inside the city walls, or outside.
It will determine how easy it will be for the enemy to raid each of your facilities.
The stronghold itself can be sieged and assaulted, so some of the inner building slots might be reserved to bolster its defenses.

Building can then be upgraded by either using upgrade schematics to magically enhance them, or assigning characters or special rewards to them (like a 24/24 worker golem).

Modding

The game is made with moai, so most of the game logic uses lua (except for a few calculations that are made in C++, like line of sights and pathing). It means the scripts can be modified by anyone, but it may be a bit complex (I will try to keep data separated to make it easier).
The maps are made with tiled, an open source map editor (I plan to move from maps assembled from preset parts made with tiled in the future, like X-COM or XCOM2).
So these will be moddable. The only problem would be the documentation, and the need to be proficient with lua.
For the graphics, it will be much trickier, as I use Texture packer, and I cannot really ship it with the game.
The graphics <-> game data file will be editable, but the character sprite sheets themselves would require texture packer.
That said, I doubt anyone will be willing to animate each character frame by frame for 20 to 40 frames/sec, so I don't think texture packer would be a big issue.
So I would say that modding missions would be easy.
Changing scripts would be much harder, and adding new pieces of equipment would require even more work.

[Machiavelli88]

Looks good. Keep us posted :)

[Restoration]

Thanks for the detailed reply!
If indeed Zodiac Legion is completed according to your vision, I'm sure it will be a great game.
What you have mentioned regarding Customization and Modding is indeed near perfect.
There are some limitations, but it seems like there will be a lot of freedom still.
Just a bit of a pity about Character Creation; will players be able to change the names of characters or is that also not a possibility?

Edit: I can advertise this thread for you on the xcom topic; did not do so because there was the possibility that you would not want that.

[Galdred]

Originally posted by The Loki:

Just a bit of a pity about Character Creation; will players be able to change the names of characters or is that also not a possibility?

Changing the name of the characters will be possible indeed. It has been a stapple of X-COM games forever. It would be a pity not to be able to rename them to MeleeDPS5334, Tank2583 and such

Originally posted by The Loki:

Edit: I can advertise this thread for you on the xcom topic; did not do so because there was the possibility that you would not want that.

Thank you, that is very nice of you, and it would not be a problem for for me, but I already advertised the thread on the topic you mentioned, so don't worry about it.

[~ Fabulous ~]

This game sounds fantastic, I am looking foward on playing it :)

[Galdred]

There is still a long way to go unfortunately.

I am currently working hard on the fondations for AI:
Pathfinding is in, but I also need to help the AI understand the terrain (ie partition it into meaningful areas, so that it can get a better "high level" picture).
I am trying to do the same thing they did in Kohan 2 actually:
Partition the terrain into zones of similar terrain (room, forest piece, road, grassland...) , then I plan to tally the number of units there ("influence") from both sides so that the AI can easily see where reinforcements are needed, which zones need to be defended (be in position to defend all the paths that lead to the objective), and when to retreat.

Partitioning the map was pretty complex, but I am almost done with it. I still have some post processing to do to split and merge areas so that they are more or less convex, and of similar size.

Then, I will focus on adding gameplay content (more abilities, and some rebalancing), until the game is good enough to be shown at indie festivals (ideally around october).