Floppy Knights – Designing an Approachable Tactics Game

Hi! Hi! My name’s Chrstian Scandariato. I’m the lead game designer on Floppy KnightsRose City Games has created a card-battler tactical game. Rose City Games developed the original concept. Floppy Knights We were deeply influenced by the games that we played as children, and we decided to create something different. This was done by mixing tactical gameplay with strategy card elements. Let’s take a look at how that turned out!

“What If We Made Advance Wars, but with Cards?”

Starting point: We riffed on some of our favorite retro video games, such as Advance WarsAnd Final Fantasy Tactics You can get a newer look with this piece. Breach. One of the key features in Advance Wars You have all information available at your disposal, can easily view and strengthen your army in order to win wars. The challenge of the genre mix is the reason I enjoy drawing cards.

This is the goal Floppy Knights This allowed a player plan the perfect turn using a random sequence of actions. The game is more accessible and more exciting because players can’t plan more than two turns in advance. Also, we knew visuals would be important for the game. Marlowe Donbe’s character designs were a strong choice to portray the personality of each armies.

From our inspirations, we settled on the first combination. It consisted of a unique party with individual characters, each possessing their own skill set and the ability for you to augment your army. We kept the concept of an easy army with powerful buffs, upgrade cards and a basic interface in mind. The Plants Deck was our first army.

The Paper Prototype

Here are the cards! When everything, from commanders to actions, is made up of cards then each unit card can be assigned unique abilities, which in turn will result in more action cards. The goal of my games design is to create games for the unique capabilities that only video games offer. While it would be hard to create cards with cards, digital design is much easier.

Making a cardgame is easy. You can quickly test its components without needing to code. The core idea (play units and get more cards), was then presented to me as a paper prototype. The floppiest was finally prototyped after a couple of months. Floppy Knights we’ve ever seen, so we consolidated the core mechanics of our system and began to program.

Mixing it Up

Mixing genres came with many strengths, as well as concepts that didn’t make the final cut. Our focus wasn’t to evenly mix the genres together, but to deliver on the concepts that showed off the strengths of the game. Our goal was to ensure that the game would be enjoyed by all. Floppy Knights We had enough flexibility to design fun decks to encourage different play styles, without making it too confusing for players.

Over the two-year period of development, it was the major concern to be able move units easily. Players were reporting constantly that their movement options were restricted or that cards were being drawn with zero movement. It was easy to let each unit move only once per turn. However, this made it less important to play actions with cards and we wanted to prevent that from happening.

After months of playtests, we landed on creating a system for our leader units, Commanders, to generate a card into the player’s hand each turn that allowed for a unique movement. It allows the player to have a highly powerful card every turn. This helps keep the emphasis on individual units. We finally had a playtest round that gave us no feedback about movement. Success!

Our core mechanics were our focus and we always referred back to the original inspirations. We wanted to create something new that would be useful for both younger and more experienced players.

Floppy KnightsS and PC Game Pass.|S (via backwards compatibility), Xbox and PC Game Pass! I hope that you have as much fun playing it as I did creating it.

Floppy Knights

Rose City Games, Wiip

☆☆☆☆☆
69

★★★★★

$19.99

PC Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass

The Floppy Knights are tangible projections made from floppy discs. Tactics fuse with card game mechanics as Phoebe and Carlton, a brilliant young inventor & her robot-arm bestie, square off in turn-based battles. Choose your Knights and refine your deck to win!