I am not a big fan of strategy games. I tried playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown as I heard about the stories other players had playing the game and… it was okay. I enjoyed it until my best squad members with all my best equipment and I stopped playing the game. I recently played Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle and I enjoyed it much more, even though I had some issues with some of its design decision. This made me think how I would design a strategy game if I were to make one, and that is what this post is about.
First, let me list all the things I liked in XCOM and Mario + Rabbids, so that you understand where I am coming from for the design decisions for my own game.
XCOM
Field of View
I know why it is in the game but I am just not a fan of it. I like how you can always see the whole map on Mario + Rabbids which allowed me to plan my moves more wisely.
Character Customization
A big fan of this. Simple things like changing the name meant I was sad when they died in a fight.
Custom Squads
I know Mario + Rabbids allow you to have custom squads, but for some reason they did not allow me to choose Mario, Luigi, and Peach in my squad. Maybe it is mentioned at the end of the game why, but I am not sure since I still haven’t completed the game yet. XCOM is much better where I could choose any group of characters for a fight.
Upgrades
Not a fan of XCOM upgrades. Mainly because of how extensive they were and how many options I had. Or that is what I remember of it. It has been years since I last played the game.
Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle
Action Points
I liked the action point system in Mario + Rabbids. I am not sure if they were called action points, but I am just calling them that in this case. I could do one move, one attack, and one special ability on every turn per character on my squad. This was much simpler than XCOM’s action points, but that could have something to do with the demographic both games are targeting.
Undo
Not sure if this was fixed in the new Mario + Rabbids game, but this game really needed an undo button. Especially when I accidentally pressed A on the wrong tile to move to.
Movement Combinations
A really big fan of how you can combine attacks into your movement, such as dash and jump. It really allowed me to be creative when attacking opponents.
Cover System
I really liked how the cover system affected weapons (100%, 50%, or 0%). This was much better than XCOM’s, where you could have 80% chance of hitting and still missing.
Bosses
They are just bullet sponges. I was not a fan of them at all.
Weapon Damage Values
Not a big fan of how much damage a weapon can do. It is between a min and max value. I much more would have preferred a constant damage value per weapon so I could plan out my attack more carefully.
Chess Squads
This is just the working title for this game design concept. It will be an XCOM-lite game with the features I liked from Mario + Rabbids. Below is a list of simple sentences describing how the core gameplay loop will work, mostly because I haven’t really thought about this in detail and it just isn’t fleshed out enough.
Each team will have a squad of 3 characters.
Each character in a team will be able to move and shoot once in a turn, in any order.
On a team’s turn, they can only move and shoot 1 character on their team, and then it is the other team’s turn. This is the part I am most interested about to see if this method of movement will work or not.
Boss characters will move based off chess pieces. I am interested on how this will work out and if it will make bosses interesting and not just bullet sponges.
Undo
That is just the gist of what I would make for a strategy game. It will have a mixture of XCOM, Mario + Rabbids, and chess, making a XCOM-lite game? Maybe one day I will prototype this design to see what comes out of it.