About Us

Dusk Tactics Project or DTP was founded in 2011 when the idea first came about to create a tactical role playing game.

For a long time things were quiet until a small group of employees stationed on the upper floor banded together and declared themselves management. With nobody higher than them at the company to challenge their claim, they started calling themselves “The Boys Upstairs” and in 2014 began a hostile takeover of the company with plans to restructure DTP into a limited liability waste management corporation.

By early 2016, after gaining majority control of the company, they were abruptly denied their Solid Waste Handling Permit thus putting the restructure on hold indefinitely.

While the takeover only resulted in a dozen or so casualties, hard feelings persisted causing constant strife between once amicable colleagues. This prompted the late CEO, and last remaining founder, to enact Louis Sachar’s ‘Wayside High’ mandate.

Well it was pretty obvious as to what this declaration meant. Each individual employee would be required to work on a different floor of the office building.

To accommodate the nearly two hundred employees, construction hastily began and was hastily shut down in January of 2017 due to several factors, the most important of which being that DTP was renting their office building and held no rights whatsoever to modify it. The resulting lawsuit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount which ended up putting the company finances in the red. Massive layoffs ensued while the top executives worked tirelessly to try and right the ship.

By the end of the 2017 fiscal year DTP had laid off enough people to make ends meet. This had the added bonus of a less cluttered parking lot and record high salaries for the top brass. After all the dust had cleared, DTP was finally a successful* business!

*This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration

With the hard part out of the way, DTP was now ready to assign a task force that would create a committee in charge of planning the meetings in which the discussion of making the actual game would take place. Twas a bold step, indeed.

After two years of hard work, the task force had come up with the most important part of game design: a mission statement.

“To not only start, but to finish the process of creating one (1) Dusk Tactics game”.

With this they had everything needed to begin work on the game so they set a date to begin development: March 10th 2021.

What they could not have known was that it wound up raining on March 10th, 2021, thus resulting in the board meeting where the well known Kanare Kompromise would take place.

Two things were obvious to everyone at that board meeting. First, development couldn’t begin, not in this weather. Second and more importantly it was the end of the day and salaried employees don’t get overtime.

The initial proposal was of course to cut and run with shareholder money (C&R Proposals were extremely common back then), but Junior Morale Officer Nanto Kanare had a different idea.

His suggestion? Simply delay the start date.

Now this was a different era, and a maneuver such as this had never been tried before but Kanare was nothing if not determined to leave the god damn office on time for once in his life. He had 10 minutes, and in a now infamous impromptu speech, Kanare convinced those in favor of the proposed C&R that delaying didn’t mean we couldn’t C&R at a later date.

This intrigued the higher ups, especially when Kanare mentioned that a smartly timed C&R could potentially yield even more shareholder money. Kanare got his way and then some. The project was officially delayed 7 months, exceeding the requesting delay timeline by 6 months, 3 weeks, and 5 days, an office record at the time.

This compromise may well have saved DTP. Some even say it put Kanare on the fast track towards upper lower middle management. However most don’t say that because it turned out that Kanare overplayed his hand and was subsequently removed from the board at the next shareholders meeting. Nanto Kanare was never heard from again, his employment status is unknown even at this time. I’ve had many arguments with fellow co-workers as to whether or not he even existed, but what I can say is his compromise became company lore and that’s what matters in the end.

Over a year later when development was brought up at the quarterly meeting, the realization set in that the previously agreed to deadline had long since passed, seemingly forgotten. An exploratory body was setup to assess the situation, but in the meantime a new date was needed. Very few members of the original task force that created the committee in charge of planning the meetings and so forth were still with the company, so July 2nd 2022 was chosen at random.

With the date set, the anticipation of finally getting started could be felt throughout the company.

Note: The logo above was painstakingly crafted over three years by fifteen artists and a junior carpenter. The team decided on using the letters D, T, and P to represent Dusk Tactics Project. The triangle in the lower left symbolizes a triangle, the only true shape known to man.

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Basic Info

Dusk Tactics is a turn-based strategy game, or (SRPG), that was workshopped and outlined in the early 2010s and slowly developed over the past couple of years. It’s a solo project with some of the art and music being contracted out.

The game and underlying engine are coded in Java with JSON scripting. The code base relies on the libGDX gaming library.

The game has a 2D isometric style reminiscent of older handheld and console RPGs and SRPGs such as FInal Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Disgaea, and more. While not truely isometric, it’s what is referred to as “video game isometric”, it enables the creation of a pseudo-3D environment using only 2D elements.

As someone who has been playing video games since I was young, my favorite genre was far and away tactical role playing games, or SRPGs. After the tactical boom of the 90s-00s ended, there was a disturbing lack of games in this genre coming out. With a background in programming, I decided to attempt the possible and make a game.

As of 12/2023 the game is still under development with a TBD release date.