Concept

The focus of For Hallowed Ground was to create a strategy game that not only had the general mechanics of an ordinary army strategy game, but also had a higher level of strategy that made gameplay more interesting and complex. By allowing for the player to put units in formations to cast powerful spells, there is now an additional level of strategy that involves the position of units to gain both an advantage over their opponents, and maintain optimal positioning for future turns.

Design

Originally, the design of For Hallowed Ground was planned to have the feel of a digital board game. Attempting to bridge the gap between the most complex digital turn-based strategy games, and the simpler forms of physical ones. In a sense, the game was designed to lead people from board games to digital games, and introduce them to a new world of gameplay. Most of the mechanics themselves were focused on having few possible actions in a turn and only a few of them being usable at a time. This limits to the player a little bit, much like many strategic board games do, said actions, like casting spells, are a more open to the player as they require proper planning to over multiple turns to execute.

Players take turns moving, attacking, and rotating their units three types of units, melee, ranged, and defense. Each unit can only do a maximum of two of these actions, however, and they are able to cast as many spells as they want so long as they have the proper formations and resources accumulated. In order for a spell to be cast, there is a required amount of faith that must be gathered from nearby temples that generate it periodically. When a formation is made, the faith of all spell participants, which would be unit within the formation requirements of the spell, is added together and the cost of the spell is subtraacted from the unit selected to cast. This will result in a unit with a negative amount of faith, and will keep the other units at their current faith. Specific types of units have their own individual movement patterns, attack patterns, and stats. This was done to allow diversity between units and playstyles, as well as give players who do not have faith a chance to fight back against their opponents. In addition to the units themselves being able to attck, certain tiles have differeing terrain on them, which provide varying adjustments to each stat depending on the type of unit that rests on them.

During the development process, there was little focus on level design. Primarily, finding ways to balance the movement of pieces, spell cost and formation, and accumulation of faith were the main focus of development. Being a strategy game, there needed to be ways that players could make choices for their team, and mechanics that were universally known so other could anticipate in some way. This led to looking at various strategy games and finding specific units, movement patterns, and attacks.

Throughout the development process, we had many difficulties balancing the spells. Issues came primarily from accessibility, and overall freedom of the spells. Originally, some spells were chaotic and much easier to cast. Their costs were lower and they were not entirely limited to a certain proximity or area around the casters. There were spells that, while cheap, were meant to be exclusively be hinderances to the other players that could be placed anywhere in any desired orientation. This allowed players to easily interfere with their opponents plans, without needing much access to resources or units. This was adjusted out because it prevented players from interacting with each other directly. These spells never dealt actual damage to their opponents, and thus, mad ethe game significantly longer, as well as less satisfying and entertaining. As a result, the game allows for players to be more focused on surviving in the chaos of fights as well as casting spells.

Changes

Pieces and Resources

In general, I would have liked to have a larger variety of pieces with more movement and attack patterns, but given the time we had, I feel we had done well conveying the keys points of having different classes. One of the more important ones I would have liked to add would be a faith generater of some sort. With large movement and little to no attack range, this unit could be a focus for gaining faith and essentially replace the regenerating overworld temples. The temples, while being effective for providing element of strategy, ultimately end up being a bit clunky in gameplay, because it is extremely easy to read when another player is rushing back to gain more faith. Additionally, even with three players fighting each other, the game hits slow points when nobody has any faith remaining and begin fighting with the units themselves. I feel that having units that can generate faith on the teams would allow players to keep the threat of spellcasting at the forfront of their strategy, as well as create openings in design regarding the use of the temples. For example, having higher cost, higher power spells only be available to the unit on said tile would create dynamics for players deciding whether or not to reform their units to do the most damage, or focus on pressuring opponents away from temples, now that they have access to spells more often thatnks to the new unit. Overall, there is an imabalance in the flow of the game as running out of faith prevents players from effectively defending sections of the map.

For the most part, other units that could be added would simply have more intriciate movement and attack patterns. Units that might be significantly strong attackers will only be able to move by skipping over tiles, making their attacks difficult to plan for spells, but have them be able to infiltrate opposing forces easily. Other units could be poor attackers, but focus on pushing or pulling other units around the map. Additionally, there could be certain units that are devoted to specific higher powers, giving that player access to specific spells that other might not have. This would allow players to strategize around information that the each player could have access to different types of spells.

Starting Teams and Positioning

As a complimentary change to the increase in classes, I feel an ideal change would be to allow players to select which units they want on their teams. This provides an enormous amount of personalization and replayability to the game as a whole. Players can learn and develop strategies with different sets of units. Utilizing strengths and weaknesses of your opponents units to gain an advantage is an important part of strategy games. Along with this team customization, I think it would be interesting to change the way units start out on the board. If players could choose to sort their units in specific ways, it could open or close doors for different types of play on the player to player basis. More aggressive players would put their fast and aggressive units in front as much as possible and keep ranged in the back, while more passive players would have defensive units in the front and faith gathering units on the sides or in closer proximity to the temples. These changes could also allow for a format selection to exist, opening up play for 4, 6, or 8 units on each team. Players that want shorter and simpler games, could stick to playing with, and against, 4 units per team, while those who wish to test themselves against the entiety of the game could try teams of 8.

Environment

In the end of the development process, I couldn't help but feel a lack of enthusiasm for the current environmental features in the game. While tiles with attribute based effects can be interesting, they are severely common in streategy games. I would like to perhaps keep these, but add a more event style environment mechanic. Events would be likely to happen between turns and could change the effects that tiles have on units. These events would take the role of natural disasters perhaps, and would lay waste to tiles in different ways. For example, a sandstorm event could change several tiles from their current type to desert type tiles, removing any bonus they were giving units. This would add a small bit of chaos to plans, without being completely unreasonable for players to strategize effectively.