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Dusk Tactics is a turn based, tactical role playing game being developed for PC, Mac, Linux. It features 2D isometric pixel art, dynamic battle maps with varied terrain and weather, an overworld, and in depth unit management system.
This project is the culmination of everything I’ve ever wanted in an SRPG / turn-based tactics game and it’s come a long way, however there is still much to be done. I’ll have more info on the devlog soon!
You can check out a list of implemented features here.
- February Roundup: Portraits & Shadowsby lou
So far this month we have already smoothed out dozens of gameplay features and cleaned up several bugs. This includes visual things like small tweaks to sprite animation problems (animations not playing properly) and proper placement/size of 2D shadows. Both of these have made gameplay look a lot better.
Below we can see how the shadow takes on an appropriate size at all times. Even when a unit’s movement type change to hover and then reverts back to normal. This is also used when a unit jumps across a gap. Since we lack a real third dimension, we have to fake a lot of stuff that requires depth, so little things like this really are very important to get right.
In the tactical role-playing game / SRPG genre, you’re going to have a lot of characters. This includes main characters, side characters, enemies, and even one and done NPCs. All of these require both sprites (obviously, haha), and larger portrait art to be used in both dialog cutscenes and on the in-game UI. As of 2/24 we have a complete set of main character portraits, side character portraits, and five (5) generic job portraits (one for each gender, making 10 total!). For now, our goal is to have proper portrait art for everything included in the demo, which is a lot.
The 40+ scenes in the demo include gameplay and dialog that will most likely change in the actual release version. For now, we’re trying to see what works, and set up a proper pipeline to create scenes and display them in a nice looking user interface. There’s so much that goes into little things like where a text box should show up or when to pan the camera that it’s important to get these fundamentals down pat before creating the entire game.
The screenshots below are from the end of the 3rd scene where our main characters, Belavosi Grandoff and Miranda Donovan meet the talented purple haired Scribe, Relena Farrow. This is just one of many variations of our dialog/scene layout that we have tested. It’s possible that for smaller scenes like this where just a few units are speaking to one another, we’ll use a 2x zoom in. It’s also possible we’ll change up the size and location of the textbox.
Currently we’re just using faces (neck up) for dialog portraits, but since we have 3/4 body portraits to work with, we can try out different sizes (busts are used below). No matter the size, the portraits will all feature a range of different emotions (see Relena in panel 1 & 3).
These are the fine work of our official portrait artist, Pzxl. While I don’t want to spoil everything, they just finished up some of the generic portraits, which are done a bit different than the main character portraits.
For generic units, i.e. units you may recruit or that will join you and have no real distinction other than their Job and gender, we have a paper-doll style system to give you a variety of different looks for similar units. Generic portraits are solely based on the Job, i.e. Warrior, Scribe, etc. There are two variants (usually), one for each gender. On top of that, we have several variation in terms of hair style, hair color, facial features, etc. So even two units with the same Job and gender will have some variety.
- Happy New Year 2024by louIn the last few months of 2023 we had our first closed alpha testing of Dusk Tactics. It was on a very small scale, but it has already provided a lot of helpful feedback.
Some of the goals for 2024 are to expand the scope of the alpha testing, focus on getting a solid stat-growth balance for Jobs, and getting as close as we can to balancing the gameplay before it reaches an open demo release.
To help speed things along, the alpha demo will run in a special fixed resolution 1280×720 windowed mode. There is some work that needs to be done to get the UI working (and looking good) at different resolutions and I don’t want that to hold up gameplay balancing.
The current closed alpha demo (version 0.7) has about 10+ hours of gameplay over 10 scenarios. I plan to cut this down to just the first 3 for now to get the most basic of bugs worked out. The full demo is more of a vertical slice demo in that it features a little bit of everything that would be in the full game, which was the focus of 2023.
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I’m still adding the Development Logs from the previous site, I’ve gotten about ~40 of them up so far (covers up until November 2021). I also have some new logs to add as well. I’ll be updating them regularly from now on.
You can see them by clicking “Development Log” on the menu to the left or by going here: https://dusktactics.com/categories/devlog/.
One day I’ll get around to making a proper landing page, but for now the highest # log is the newest. - Happy Holidays 2023by louYet another year has gone by and we got a lot done! In early 2024 we will be expanding the alpha testing to include more people as we continue to iron out all the bugs and start balancing various mechanics! I hope you’ve all had a great holiday and stay tuned for more updates as always!
Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays / Happy New Year!!
-Lou
- Website Constructionby lou
So this site will be similar to the last one, sort of a mix between a development log and a game website.
The side menu will have multiple categories that (when finished) should provide up-to-date information about the different features of the game.
So far I’ve completed the Attributes section and laid out the Features section. Current work is on the Story/Characters section.
I’m mostly writing this post to see what multiple posts look like on the main page, but I figure it can also be used as a small update on the websites progress.
- New Website Serverby lou
Well, the old server apparently went down for good, which is a bit upsetting. I have been meaning to make a cleaner site for the game so maybe this will be a good chance.
I’ll probably use this blog feature for updates similar to a development log. I don’t want to take any time away from the game to build a site from scratch so WordPress is what we’ll use. I’ve never used it before so it’ll take some getting used to. I kind of like the light/dark theme thing, so use whichever you like.
As I mentioned above I’ll allow account creation and commenting after I figure out a good spam filter.
I might also bring over some old news post from what I can gather via the cache for the old site. For posterity, of course.
I made some new images for this site as well as the game’s IndieDB site, which is now live but nowhere near finished.
I also wanted to thank Twitter/X or whatever it is now for removing so many features from their API. Would have been nice to have a feed with images, but what can you do?
Also would be nice if people without an account could view posts.