A Greybox is the most basic mockup of gameplay you can get while still being interactive. No real graphics, just grey boxes that move around the screen with a very basic UI to convey an idea of gameplay to the Investors and to get alpha level testing running asap.
Here's the Summary:
Basic Outline:
Pathika is a Science Fiction game franchise planned to mix and match the best elements of free to play games of all types; this can be achieved by combining elements of online trading card games, city-builder coin clickers, space-sims, and turn based strategy games. While it may seem that these genres are disconnected and complex, the method of connecting them together is what makes Pathika a unique and fun experience. The goal of Pathika is to make a series of fun, interesting to play games that hopefully will culminate in a Social Game. Hopefully one that involves skill and thought above and beyond simple time and resource management but will stretch a player’s other abilities to whatever degree they choose to explore.
Pathika is a game where the player commands a self sustaining ship traveling between the stars. A nomadic life where you must use contracts for units and equipment to gather resources from the hostile surfaces of planets, fighting off other interplanetary travelers, or exploring the worlds for new resources. The game is played, in general, with cards, which are then used in a hex-grid map to fight one another in battles, or to explore and complete puzzles. Resources are then used either to buy new cards, or to craft tokens to upgrade cards. Further, units earn experience from completing missions, and will level up and gain new abilities or stat increases based upon player choices.
Story wise, the game is set in the Milky Way Galaxy in the 2700s. Humanity has left the burning ashes of it’s cradle, Earth obliterated by an attack of predatory void-traveling aliens, its crust cracked and its geothermal life blood drunk down and a broken, dead husk left behind. Humanity fled the star system in a fleet of converted ships, using untested and newly discovered Faster-Than-Light technology. They were scattered to the stars, and the largest group remaining found itself in a strange part of the galaxy. 200 years have passed, and humanity has found that terraforming planets were nearly impossible to do safely. Most humans now live between the stars, traveling from station to station, planet to planet, seeking the resources to stay alive. They found that most species in this day and age live this way, races that have lost the worlds of their birth, races that seek them still, and those who try to make new ones for themselves while others have long abandoned the search.
There are 9 primary factions, 1 neutral, and 8 arranged in a wheel to denote their alignments, the closer on the wheel two factions are to one another, the more friendly are, while factions on the opposite side of the wheel from one another are mortal enemies. The factions are, starting at the 10-o’clock position and working around clockwise:
-The Scavengers (Scavenge and Repurpose): Driven from Earth, humanity now inhabits draconian and deadly terraformed worlds, and massive nomadic ships, traveling between the stars, taking any advantage they can get against their foes, the Drifters.
-The Zenith (Charge and Combine): When their world died from over industrialization, the Zenith shed their mortal flesh to inhabit mechanical bodies as digital life. Now they seek to understand the universe while opposing their insane foes, the Primacy.
-The Greys (Maneuver and Manipulate): Having left their homeworld eons ago to travel in a massive migratory fleet in order to study the universe, the Greys have some of the most advanced technology in the entire galaxy which they use to exterminate the upstart barbarians who have invaded their ancestral worlds.
-The Grigori (Storm and Regenerate): A species of colonial bacteria who seek out new experiences and to test their social hypotheses upon the rest of the galactic species. Outwardly friendly, they are more than capable of seizing control of unconscious foes in order to thwart their ancient mercantile enemies, the Traffickers.
-The Drifters (Demolish and Endure): The Drifters have lived between the stars since the beginning of their existence. A race of sapient asteroids who feed upon the geothermal life blood of planets, they now fight a desperate battle against the vengeful Scavengers, using the conflict to expand their understanding of non-Drifter intelligence.
-The Primacy (Swarm and Overwhelm): When the Zenith destroyed their homeworld, some did not upload themselves, the Primacy were created from these vengeful scientists to be the retribution of nature against technology. These plant like beings inject enzymes and retroviruses into their hapless prey to mutate them into forms more fitting for their dream of a galaxy spanning ecosystem, free of technology.
-The Maulers (Stun and Disrupt): These techno barbarians are all that remain of a once proud and powerful race of nanotech wielders. Driven nearly to extinction by their own hubris, now they are part flesh, part nanotech crystal, serving the nanotech and spreading it’s corruption from planet to planet. They hate and fear the Greys, who have come like avenging angels to impede their every effort in spreading their crystalline god from world to world.
-The Traffickers (Buff and Envenom): A race of consummate merchants and bargainers, they are bound only by the letter of their agreements, and seek every advantage they can get in this galaxy. They have long been at war with the Grigori, disrupting their social experiments and defending their trade networks from their gaseous Foes.
-The Mercs (Get Work and Get Paid): [This faction is at the center of the circle] While mercenaries are part of an ancient trade in the galaxy, the Mercs, wielding strange bronze and black box technology from an unknown source, have recently risen to unite the various mercenary groups under their banner. They have no enemies and no friends, simply working for whoever can pay them for their efficient and affordable services in a variety of areas.
Gameplay Outline:
Pathika is broken down into 3 general layers or levels. For the purposes of illustration, they will be explained in terms of cards. At the highest level, we have the collection layer, which is where all your cards, known as contracts, are contained and can be viewed. These cards may or may not be in your deck, but if you own a card it will appear here. The next layer is the Ship layer, which one might think of as the actual playing deck. Taking cards from the collection layer, you can place within the ship, creating a structure that is the home of the unit represented by the card. Finally, we have the tactical layer, where the units placed in the ship layer are randomly selected and placed onto a hex grid map to complete missions, involving violent or exploratory objectives. These three layers form the core of the gameplay.
Collection Layer: A big inventory for the cards a player owns. Each card gives more detailed information involving that card, and even user reviews and ratings of combinations with cards and tokens.
Ship Layer: The layer the player will probably spend most of his time on. Here he places structures down, each one representing a single card and unit. Where he places them is important, because of synergy. When two structures are next to one another, they have a synergy with one another. When the cards are drawn at the Tactical Layer, units with synergy will be more likely to be drawn together. Further, units with synergy will perform better in combat and during missions when in close proximity to one another. The structures also allow for a coin clicker like aspect, giving player experience points, cash, resources, and allowing for the crafting of tokens (which are how you upgrade cards) from those cash and resources. It should be noted that any resource gain is very slow compared to even playing one game of any mode, and Pathika will reward those who participate in missions of any type (combat or noncombat, pvp or pve) more highly than those who sit back and just collect from their Ship Layer.
The Ship Layer is, as one might guess, and starship, and each faction has their own starship that players may purchase with resources and quests. You may not own multiple starships, only one at a time, and you may not buy one belonging to the faction of your mortal enemy. Ships determine your deck composition. Up to 100% of the cards in your deck can be comprised of cards from the same faction as the ship, up to 75% can be from factions friendly to the ship’s faction, up to 50% of neutral cards, 25% of unfriendly cards, and 0% can be of mortal enemy cards. This means that I could be a Scavenger player with a scavenger ship, and not be able to field any drifter cards, but, if I have a deck strategy dependent upon drifters, I could switch out my scavenger ship for a Zenith one, and then while only 75% of my deck could be composed of Scavenger cards (despite me being a Scavenger player), up to 25% of my deck could be comprised of Drifter cards.
Tactical Layer: The meat of the game play happens here. Units are deployed, and fight each other on a hex grid map. There are 4 kinds of cards, Heroes, who have special abilities and the most potential for upgrades from leveling up, Units, who are your bread and butter troops. Ordinance are spell cards with a cool down between uses, and Logistics units are those that act and move like normal units, but have no combat abilities. Instead, they give you a boost to your rewards at the end of a mission if they survive it. But beware, your opponent will gain bonus points the faster they kill a logistics unit! Turns will be made asynchronously, allowing for players to take turns in their own time in order to allow those with different schedules to still fight one another.
Card advancement is simple. Every card has 10 possible levels. Depending on the type of card (Hero, Unit, Ordinance, Logistics), how many upgrades they get will change, and will allow a multiple upgrades. From increasing a card’s ability to move, to what powers it has, how many token slots it possesses, or numerous other number based stastics (HP, range, attack power, etc.)
Every card has several features, but we shall focus upon the Unit and Hero cards as they make up the vast bulk of cards that will be deployed to the field. Units and Heroes have two actions each, Move and Action, Action can be used to make a multitude of other actions, such as running (moving for a second time), attacking at range, attacking close up, hiding (so that a unit cannot be targeted, except by AoE or Melee attacks), or using special abilities. Units have various scores, such as health, movement, ranged attack power, ranged attack range, melee attack power, and rarity.
What we are looking for
1) What systems are we making this game for?
Initial versions of the games as meant to be Android and iOS (in that order of priority) with PC soon following as soon as we can afford to buy the full Havok Engine, not just Project Anarchy (the engine we're intending to make this in because it is incredibly robust and free)
2) What language is the game being programmed in?
C++ is the language of Project Anarchy, but you should download the package and see if there are other languages that can be used. I believe it's also compatible with LUA for example.
3) What are we looking for in a programmer?
I'm looking for someone capable of creating a turn based strategy over a network. We need at least the very first stage of the game done, the greybox level of the tactical map (2 teams of 8 units that move around a hex map with one action, then with the second, can shoot one another, use melee attacks, move a second time at full speed (running), hide in cover on specific hexes that have the cover attribute).
We plan on releasing the races in pairs to begin with, and in single player campaigns to raise revenue while we work on the larger game and multiplayer (so Scavenger<>Drifter would be one set, Grigori<>Trafficker another, etc.etc)
Author
Topic: Need help getting an indie project off the ground. (Read 872 times)