Fellow grogs, I’ve been making 2D games for fun in Godot (and previously in Game Maker Studio) for a couple years now, and I need advice on a wargame project. Do you all have any smallish wargames you’d like someone to build? Like many wargamers, I’m mostly interested in WW2. I know it’s over-done, but after a half-century of wargaming I still find it fascinating.
My main wargame-creation achievement was a WEGO treatment of Tobruk that I did for a game jam last year. It worked, but I didn’t spend enough time on the UI, so no one besides me could figure out how to play it. That was a painful lesson: we make games for gamers, not for ourselves!
Anyway, I’d like to build on that experience to build something a little more ambitious, and a little more user-friendly. My secret ambition is to make a grand-strategy WW2 game in the vein of Strategic Command or WiF, but with my own take on the genre, especially naval/air operations. Realistically, though, I probably should start smaller. Maybe Guadalcanal? South Pacific? A North Africa scenario broader than Tobruk? War in the Med?
IGOUGO is my choice for my next project. WEGO is cool for smaller-scale engagements, but I like to push my own units around in larger-scale games. Using WEGO did allow me to hide the flaws in my AI, though; since the player was never quite sure what would happen after pressing “end turn,” the AI sometimes seemed smarter than it really was. Still, if I’m ever going to get serious about making wargames, I need to improve my AI skills. I am proud of the minmax AI I made for my chess engine, which competes with me until the endgame. But minmax won’t work for something as complicated as a wargame.
These days I’m using the Godot engine, always in 2D. I made Tobruk in Game Maker Studio 2, but I’ve come to love Godot, which I’ve used to make a bad card game and a slightly less-bad management game.
Finally, I’d consider a 4X-ish alternative, like “Shadow Empire”. But that would be even more work, wouldn’t it?