When we first came up with the idea for the game, it was just a bunch of raw game mechanics and general concepts. We felt like brand new tactical games were missing from the App Store, it seemed all the tactical games available just weren’t made for mobiles. At the time, we had idealized numerous ways to expand the availability of this genre in the iOS universe.
First, we thought about how long it was to finish a simple tactical match, we tried to play some games from the App Store and we realized, that in all the games we played (either multi- or single-player) we never spent less than 30 minutes in a match. As we know, mobile games tend to be fast, dynamic and straight to the point, things that most tactical games are very far from being. We came up with a bunch of solutions for this problem, but the most appealing was the simultaneous turns. Waiting for someone to play would take too much time, specially thinking about the life cycle of a turn in the tactical genre:
Player one moves, sends the move to player two, whom then analyses it and make another move, returning to player one and restarting the cycle.
The problem with that cycle is waiting for the other player to move. Considering a scenario where both players are online, waiting for your opponent’s move is the same of doing absolutely nothing. A synchronous game type would be more interesting time-wise, since both players will be playing constantly. The turn cycle would be a little different, using the game as a moderator to unify both players moves.
This cycle, at first glance, looks more complex and not really fastest, and in reality, if only one player is online it is as slow as a classical tatics turn. Therefore, we chose this game cycle thinking about the first scenario, where both players are online simultaneously and playing the game constantly, that way we can reach both casual and hardcore gamers, creating two different styles of matches which take in consideration the availability of the users.
