Zodiac Legion: the game I spent my 7 last years on, will air its debut trailer on June 5th for the Guerrilla Collective

The geoscape part will be turn based, with 1 turn=1 month. There will be minor factions that can be diplo-ed or conquered, “instant missions” like in x-com, and ongoing operations that will last several months(with optional missions each month to advance them).
The operations and diplomacy basically work like in Star wars: Rebellion(the old pc game), but will generate tactical mission opportunities to advance them faster.
Military operations will allow taking over a group of provinces and the installations in them or defending them.
They will work a bit like PnP mass battles in which the heroes get battle opportunities to change the course of events.

Sounds great, thanks

I’d ideally be playing on a 55" 4K TV, but it’s some distance away so UI needs to be big enough to read at couch distance. This is also why controller is preferred for me - I can play on my monitor but I sit at that all day working. :)

I may be a bit of an edge case in that regard, but I think it’ll hard to please everyone’s combo of resolution, screen size, and viewing distance without some kind of adaptive system.

It’s hard to say exactly what that system should be since I’m not familiar with how the game works, but generally:

  • Playfield and backgrounds should be a fixed size regardless of resolution (at lowers res you see the same amount of map area as at higher res).
  • Zoom levels should be dynamic and controlled with mouse wheel/controller.
  • The UI/HUD should be adaptive and independant of zoom level. The scale of this, including the font size, should be configurable by a scale option.

It’s a lot of work and no-one likes writing UI code when there’s more fun stuff to do lol… plus I guess you’re only one person?

It’s a matter of cost/benefit, defining target audience, weighing up the potential extra sales and positive reviews by making a more inclusive and adpative system, versus the cost of making that system.

Note I am all for a 90s/2000s aesthetic, but I think it should come with 2020’s accessibility. :)

I see. I will definitely make UI element scaling separate then.
The issue is that we cannot really have non integer values for zoom and scaling with our art: the results would be really bad.
But that also means that maybe pixel art icons and UI frames are not the way to go (unless I only change the font size and not the icons, except at some thresholds where they would have a doubled/tripled size? ).

I work with freelancers, but I am alone on the coding part (and a few other things).

As for controller, it should be easy enough to add an option to replace the mouse input with a controller that would move the cursor, but is it ever a good compromise?
Hexagonal grids don’t map too well to controllers, so it is hard to map tile move to directional input.

Old people with bad eyesight thank you. Seriously.

Would you have exemples to recommend of RPG with a party or tactical games that do UI scanning well?

In that case, yeah at higher resolutions you see more of the map, as long as you can also scale in/out dynamically. Integer values are probably fine for that. In XCOM/Phoenix Point you can quickly zoom right out to get a lay of the land, very handy.

Looking at Chronicon, which is a one-person indie ARPG with fixed pixel art but a crazy amount of seperate scaling options for various UI and text elements (as well as colour-blind and controller support), they allow scaling by 25% increments but on things like HUD and character icons it’s only sharp at the integer values. I think that’s okay, unless you also want to be drawing seperate UI to account for the 25, 50, and 75% cases… :P

You could probably already do that via Steam Controller mappings, but driving a mouse interface with controller is never great… :)

For games with hex grids that support controller really well, look at modern Civilization or Age of Wonders games. Of course XCOM and Phoenix Point are good examples of controller implementation too, even though they’re square tiles.

I.e. half this forum! :)

Wishlisted!

I was wrong. It was not 5PM CET, but CEST, so the guerrilla collective Twitch stream should start in 13 minutes.
Saying that I am anxious is an understatement. :D

Did I miss it?

Mine hasn’t started yet, but it is really hard to find on Steam, which is disappointing.

Here is the link for your gameplay trailer:

Congrats on doing this. Ton of work to grind thru on your own.

Looks good.

“Zodiac Legion is a tactical RPG with hexagonal tiles and that looks unsettlingly complicated, if that’s your thing.”

But of course it’s our thing!

I can dig it.

Some of the comments while trailer was showing on the stream…


lol

About the video, I’d recommend to try to make the combat have a little more oomph. Obviously doing custom animations would be too prohibitively expensive, but maybe you can do a few blood splatter sprites, and show them on top of a unit for half a second when it received damage.

We definitely need to add blood splatter and hit effects indeed

I recorded a complete let’s play of one of the missions (I didn’t do the voice over, because my French accent is presumably really hard to understand, so our writer stepped in to comment the action afterwards):

This kind of game is exactly what I love so I wish you godspeed in completing it. I will however agree with what was said above about the combat strikes needing to have more effect.