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Fog of War was introduced by that insane genius Shouzou Kaga way back in Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, but not in the form most of us are used to. No, it introduced a fog of war where you can’t even see terrain if it’s outside your field of view, it gives you the feeling of venturing into the unknown against horrible odds and, yes, feeling helpless.

I’M A NINJA

So what do we want to make you achieve and feel with our Field of View system ?

The thrill of marching undetected across the map and sneaking behind the enemy, the satisfaction of laying a trap or planning an ambush, the joy of blinding or altering the line of sigh of the opponent units, that’s what we aim for.

When it comes to Field of View or Fog of War, the main point is obscuring your opponents movements and/or tactic. And in order to see where their troops are moving, you need to keep a unit/spell/whatever in place to hold the fog at bay. 

Not seeing the opponent opens up tons of tactics whereas removing the field of view would eliminate a lot from the game: no more surprise attacks, fake backped or and you can’t lure your opponent to a trap, etc.

What we adopted in SUPERPUNK Tactics is a pooled system, where the player can also based on opponent visible units. Combined with some cool status effect like blind and we should have interesting encounters.

All games must offer a studied probability margin, in which the resolution of a given situation is not based solely on the mastery of the player, but on a chance which materializes all the secondary factors of failure or success. Chance is not the only way to achieve this, however.

Thus, in SUPERPUNK Tactics’s fights this margin is not based on chance, but on an emerging complexity introduced by the combination of Reactive Abilities and Dynamic Characteristics, two mechanics which, when combined, allow the player to have a clear idea of the present and future state of the fight.

Reactive Skills

Units acquire their abilities through the equipment they wear. The player can improve his equipment and therefore improve his abilities.

There are three types of abilities in SUPERPUNK Tactics:

• Active Abilities, which encompass all the actions that units can perform during combat. (attack, charge, etc.).
• Passive Abilities, which do not require any action from the player, but which play a key role in his strategy.
• Reactive Abilities are special skills that the player decides to activate or not. Giving him the ability to cancel or completely reverse the situation by trying to predict and react to the opponent’s actions.

Note that the Reactive Abilities are triggered only when the opponent performs an action, such an attack, giving the player the ability to respond outside its turn. Their effects are diverse and their goal is to return the situation (counterattack, dodge, parry, etc.).

Dynamic Features

For the sake of simplification and in order to target a wider (mobile) audience, the unit characteristics are reduced to the strict minimum, no such thing as strength, dodge rate or resistance percentage, only one characteristics paired with a recovery mechanism.

EP, Recovery Points and Recovery Thresholds

Endurance Points (EP), act both as Health Points and Action Points. The unit loses EPs when taking physical damage and expense when taking action.
To compensate for this, a recovery equal to the Recovery Points (RP) is applied at the start of each player turns. By default, a unit has 10 PR. This recovery is subject to limits called Recovery Thresholds which block the recovery by the tenth (i.e. at 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.). These thresholds, however, remain inactive until the unit uses combat abilities.

We speak of combative abilities when they include the action of targeting or directly attacking the opponent. Other actions such as moving, using objects, etc, are considered non-combative.

Low life, high tech

The story takes place in a cyberpunk universe where the human kind as we know it no longer exists, its evolution has divided into different branches to give rise to several races, including Cyborgs, Shapers and Firstborns .

In this urban and cosmopolitan environment, the higher power use mercenaries more commonly called Wardogs, organized into factions, to keep under control the chaos-dominated territories.

Three factions, the Red Vanguards, the Blue Squadrons and the Gold Covenants were able to prevail taking advantage of a proliferating war economy, and covet the total monopoly territories.

The great War was inevitable.

Hi ! We are working on a mobile game called SUPERPUNK Tactics. This is a first from series of blog posts where we will share information about the game and about the process of making it. The game development started with couple of ideas for a « Final Fantasy Tactics but PvP ». We have been working on the game on and off for almost a year now.

SUPERPUNK Tactics is an Asynchronous, Turn-based and Player versus Player Tactical-RPG composed of three factions. Join one of them, gather your party and get back to the roots of great Tactical RPG.

At the moment the game is playable. However, few functionality are missing or still a bit buggy and it does not yet look as silky smooth as we would like it to be but the demo is still fun to try, shout us an email and we’ll invite you to our next testflight session.

Cheers.