Hartacon Tactics - XBOX and PC

[Charlie Fleed]

experimenting with the website :)
http://www.hartacon-tactics.eu

[Charlie Fleed]

Exciting news guys. I'm testing online gaming! I need a few people to help me. I will give you pre-configured accounts to login and play. Please reply to this message with your desired username and I will contact you to assign you your password and give you the link to donwload the game.

[Pherione]

I can help out with that if you want. Been following this project on here for a while now right.

Just the same username as here.

[Charlie Fleed]

info sent, anybody else?

[Charlie Fleed]

Hartacon Tactics website is online at www.hartacon-tactics.eu

A new Hartacon Tactics alpha build has been released, featuring online multiplayer battles.



The new build comes with an improved map editor, and the new desert tileset. Players can challenge each other on maps of their own creation.

[Charlie Fleed]

Hello dudes and dudettes, thanks for stopping by. You know that recently I released the alpha with multiplayer battles. Did you try it? You can download it here: www.hartacon-tactics.eu/public/setup/hartacontactics.zip

Thanks to your feedback I was able to fix an annoying bug and now the game doesn't freeze when the game's window loses the focus. It's an issue that many XNA developers had to deal with.

I cannot help but notice that very few registered an account and are playing online, so I wanted to ask you how do you feel about playing TBS games online against other players. What makes it good for you and what turns you down.

Finally, I am thinking about switching to a squad-based turn system instead of a character-based one.

FFT had individual turns, but it's one of the very few successful titles which took this road, the large majority of TBS went the other way.
Maybe the most engaging aspect of tactics games is the fact that you control a team of characters and not just a hero, and being able to move all your team members together gives you a lot of freedom, more decisions to make, more room to plan and carry out your strategy. However, when played online, with large teams, and possibly more than two players, this could mean you have to wait a lot until your turn comes, and some sort of advantage necessarily goes to who plays first, hence my decision to go for individual turns.
But now I feel that I am sacrificing too much in terms of gameplay.

So, how do you feel about it? Squad-based or character-based turns?

[MechanicalPen]

Squad-based would make "fuzzy ax man's" movement skill more useful, because right now anyone he uses it on is just going to walk away. And because of your counter system, the benefits of moving an entire team first are lessened.

Also, I'm guessing no one is playing online yet because they haven't learned how to play. Competition is scary! There's way too many choices to sort through to feel like you are making good ones, and one cannot compete without understanding. Which is why a single player mode that teaches concepts (and not through a tutorial, I mean set up situations that need to be beaten with certain game mechanics) is important.

[Charlie Fleed]

Dudes and dudettes! Hartacon Tactics has finally been released on XBOX 360 Marketplace, in the indie games section. Link: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Games/...eleaseDate

The game is right now the all-time top rated!!!