A new genre, taking time to fail

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People have been poking me a bit about doing something different than another platformer game. And first of all, yes I know why and understand you, but I’d also like to point out three things:

1) I love Platform games, and I love what I do.. so I love creating platform games and that won’t change.

2) I have created: shooters, one-button games, puzzle games, a rogue-like, action-shooters, survival/twitch platformers, snake-like games, gimmicky games for mobile, and much more in the last 10 years of game development.

3) if you want something else, try one of the millions of match-3 games that everybody else creates, or an end-less runner game that everybody else makes.. or.. don’t get me started, a flappy-bird clone!

So those points are very valid replies, but I also agree that it could be fun trying something completely different. The last time I tried that it spawned a pretty famous dungeon crawler called Heroes of Loot, and I yes it was the biggest game (sales wise) I have ever created.. so there’s that.

Where to start

So the “rogue-like” genre is something that I really love. I never actually play those type of games but I like the concepts within. I ventured into this area with Heroes of Loot and just gave it my own twist and take on things, so it ended up being a dungeon crawler but one full of action and shooting.

This time I’m going to try something slightly different and make the game a turn-based game…. the genre I normally have absolutely no interest in.

No idea what I’m doing

Now I actually never ever play a turn-based game. I tried testing Halfway for my friends at Robotality but didn’t get very far. The game is AWESOME and beautiful and you should absolutely try it but the genre isn’t my thing.

So I have no experience with this type of game, no idea what goes into a game like this, and no idea how it eventually should look or feel.  How could this possibly go bad?

I have worked on it part-time for a few days now, and the game mechanics of moving around the “board” are started to come together. I’ve been using graphics pulled form Heroes of Loot so that it at least looks like something, and I have been reading up on what turn-based rogue like games actually are and do.

I’m basically setting myself up for failure.. but I’m loving the challenge from a development and design perspective. Thanks to Gunslugs 2 release being a pretty good one, I have some time to put into this prototype and who knows.. it might be the Heroes of Loot 2 that everybody keeps asking me about.

So have you ever tried developing a genre you aren’t used to? or not familiar with? let me know in the comments!

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