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gerbilsinspace

Strategy Game Engine

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Hi guys,

 

I've been thinking about creating a small strategy game about democracy, where you start off as a newly elected politician, who is attempting to gain more and more influence. Basically House of Cards the video game. Here is the rub, I've checked out sortingh.at and places, and I can't find any strategy game specific engines. Am I going to stick with something more generic, or is there something that you guys would recommend? I'm only just coming up with the most basic of systems at the moment, testing it out with pen and paper, and maybe using something like twine. I have had GameMaker and Unity experience, but both of those are rudimentary.

 

One other thing, my main computer is a mac, so if there is a mac version, that would be perfect, but I'm more than happy switching over to my windows machine if needed. 

 

 

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Most game engines aren't genre specific... so go with what you are most comfortable with.

 

For example, Xcom 2012 and Mortal Kombat 9 were done in Unreal 3, engine that got famous with a third person shooter.  Endless Legend is done in Unity.  Game Maker isn't well known with strategy games but so far I managed to get a working hexagon war game going so again, go the engine you are most comfortable with.  It could be Unity, Construct 2, Game Maker or whatever.  AFAIK, none of those have any specific edge over 'strategy games'.

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If you make a mock-up of what the game might look like and what the interface will be like, I might have a suggestion.

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The main question is really what are the needs of the game? If you're looking to model thousands of units there likely isn't an engine out there that can do that easily out of the box. So as far as writing an engine goes, what would you need it to do that can't or isn't easily done elsewhere?

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It won't be a thousands of units thing, it may involve you as a politicians keeping promises on a local and national level, you making decisions which may end up weakening those promises. It will be building influence with others, to be able to swing votes in your favour, while keeping constituents and financial backers happy. I'm thinking of more of a card based strategy game, rather than 4X like. 

 

If any of you played the Democracy games, I'm thinking something like that, but with more emphasis on personal relations between characters. As far as i know, there is nothing in here I won't be able to achieve something like that in unity, i just wanted to know what my options are.

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If it isn't going to be that art heavy, or be entirely 2d, going with a 3d engine might be unnecessary. It might even be easier to go with an event-driven input framework, for example something like windows forms, which will make the UI construction a heck of a lot easier. Though if you are comfortable with Unity, that seems like the best bet.

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I am just as unfamiliar with any game engine. I have made two games, both in unity, but I played around with game maker before I got the mac.

 

I am a web developer by day, so I see the sense about the webforms. There is nothing really stopping me doing this just in a browser, maybe even using cordova for ports to phones. That being said, I quite liked the idea of having native, cross platform apps, and using a controller if needed. 

 

Food for thought.

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Your concept doesn't sound like it needs a full featured engine like UE4 or Unity. You may find yourself just getting bogged down wrestling with them. I think utilizing your web skills would be a realluy good idea. Plus web apps are becoming so slick (Neptune's Pride II Triton?). I would look into a Java Script framework to use.something like Impact.

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Thanks for your help guys. At the moment I'm shelving this project for the time being as I'm teaming up with Super_Jogurt on a pretty cool project for you guys. That one is going to be written in unity, which means that hopefully when i come back to this project I'll be much more comfortable with the platform.

 

That being said, I'll still consider working directly on the web. I would prefer the game to be local to people's computer, rather than connected to a server, but if it is thebest way of utilising my skills, I'll do this anyway.

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