A New Game Is On The Horizon – Code Name: West Wars

After a fair bit of experience making Alley Avenger, I’ve decided to a promising fresh project with a new genre. Strategy games! Anyone who knows me well knows how much I love Civilization 5. It’s a turn-based 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) that never gets boring! Building up cities, being diplomatic with neighbors, creating an epic military in the age-old struggle to be ruler of the world…it’s such a fun experience!

On that same note, I love mobile games. As a frequenter to /r/AndroidGaming, I found there to be a huge void where good strategy games should be. Many users have requested strategy games, to which the community would respond with options that were either horribly implemented (Civ Revolution 2), had unbearable controls (FreeCiv), or were actually promising Indie games that are perpetually in alpha. Every post that requested a good strategy game looked grim…the pickings were slim! (Did I just rhyme?)

Well, with that said, my next game was clear. I needed to attempt a strategy game…Code name: West War (literally, I’ve been writing the game code with this name 🙂 ). I haven’t gotten far, but I’ve already rallied another developer and fellow Civ 5 fan in my office to join my cause. We’ve already made a cardboard cutout “simplified” version of this in board-game-form and hashed out all the rules for Phase 1.

I won’t reveal much so far, but I WILL say that we’re aiming for the following:

• Turn-based hexagons, with a focus on hexagon development. Each hex will have 6 different resource triangles which can be built upon.
• Western setting.
• Entire game playable in portrait mode with just one thumb.
• Online play-with-your-friends.
• 99 cent price tag.

A few nice-to-haves (which we are giving serious consideration since the Unity engine supports a fairly painless way to do these):

• Google Cardboard / Occulus Rift support for hands-free virtual reality!
• Cross-platform play (PC, possibly Mac, possibly Web).

Below is a screenshot from current development on the progress I’ve done in the past couple of months. More to come in the future!