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At this point, I’d spent a lot of time just figuring out how to get the best out of the art assets I’d received, as well as finding replacements for the people who did not work out consistently or reliably. While this is something I’ve glossed over somewhat, my performance took a serious hit every time I had to start combing through portfolios and looking at artist’s backgrounds to find someone who would fit the team and who hopefully was reliable.

After finding Yuriy Mazurkin, I was finally able to take off my producer’s hat for a bit and start alternating between the development and design ones, and turn to the first thing that needed my attention: the game stages.

As I’ve discussed the initial plan was to create the stages procedurally out of hexagonal tiles. The characters would be posed figures, out of scale with their surroundings, to give a miniature feel. Going back to an old example with placeholder art:

By the time I got the initial models back from Ovidiu Voica and Daniel Matei, I had started to reconsider. With models like this, shouldn’t I go for a more detailed stage?

I decided I should at least look at concepts, and asked Yuriy if he could recommend someone who was good at drawing environments. He replied quite humbly that he could give it a shot. I’d had bad experiences before with people in fish-out-of-water situations, and most of Yuriy’s work seemed to be focused on characters, but we’d worked by now on quite a few character concepts and I was comfortable enough with the workflow with him that I decided to give it a shot.

I needn’t have worried. He created a great initial draft, that he then transformed into something that looked like the dream stage for a miniature/diorama setting. While I’m not going to publish it here yet – saving that for when we return to this project – I would be remiss if I didn’t showcase his environment painting skills with an image he did for someone else.

Now I had yet another deviation from the original plan, and of course, one I felt would get the project more attention, as it moved the style closer to what I had originally intended.

It’s evident from the screenshot above that I was doing 1-hex 1-character. This means that if a hex was mostly occupied by a decoration (say, the corner of a 2×3 hex building, or a piece of wall), that hex would be off-bounds for all characters. I had my doubts of how well the hexagons would adapt to this, so I decided to make some quick tests.

The first step was grey boxing the stage before building the whole thing. I had a very quick-and-dirty model created and started measuring and playing with the models. There were two approaches that I tried:

1. Free roaming within limited distance
2. Square grids instead of hexes

The first approach is the one you can see in Valkyria Chronicles, for instance, where characters can move freely up to where their action points allow. This allowed for some very quick stage exploration and partly solved the issue of whole hexes being blocked off by a piece of decoration, but moved me too far away from my initial design and would have required me to re-design and playtest everything once again. It seemed fun, but would have to wait until possibly a later game.

The second one was more straightforward to test and, if I decided to go with it, my current design and character balancing would be much easier to adapt, so I spent a lot more time pursuing it. While decorations _were_ easier to lay out to match a square grid, after a lot of testing I found that I was happier with hexagons for my character movement for several reasons, but mostly for the following two:

• Positioning the characters in a hexagonal grid gave the game a much tighter feeling, with characters closer to each other and in a nicer-looking staggered fashion than with the square grids.
• Moving from a hexagon to the center of any of the surrounding hexagons always meant moving a consistent distance, where as moving in a square grid vertically or sideways required moving less distance than diagonally.

I did not like this inconsistency this last one introduced, considering I was going for a miniature skirmish game feel. It might seem like a small thing, but it would surprise you how fussy wargamers are about such details. An option would have been to introduce a change were diagonal movement was more expensive than vertical or horizontal movement, but this would also require another change to the design and would complicate the case of slow characters that could already move only one unit per round. Should I allow them to move anyway? This would penalize those characters that do need to pay the cost. Not allow them to take the diagonal at all? It would make them feel stiff.

In the end, I decided that even if the other reasons weren’t enough, not changing the design trumped whatever scene layout advantage I would get from going with square grids instead of hexagons, even if I’d spent some time testing them. (1)

In the end, these were the right decisions made for the right reason: I was sticking to both my gameplay design and target audiences. I was already overburdening the visual design from the original plans, which would obviously impact the project length and cost (even if the extent of the impact wasn’t obvious right away), so I shouldn’t introduce even more uncertainty by chucking out the window a design I had already playtested.

It was time to playtest the specific stage further using the hex layout.

Lesson learned: don’t put the cart before the horse. The stages should serve the gameplay, not the other way around.

And once again, I had to divert my attention again to producing for a while. Ovidiu and Matei had been doing constant progress on the models, but they were coming along slower than expected (and slower than the first two as well), as there had been another spike of work that was requiring them to go into overtime. I also still lacked a contractor for visual effects, since I was putting it off until the second batch of characters were done to lump my requests together.

Next week: Taking a step back and looking at the whole bit.

(1) At some point after making the decision I realized that I could have my cake and eat it too – ye olde Fallout had laid its buildings out in a square grid while using a hex grid for character positioning.