Realm Rush Design Document : Vouchsafe Our Survival

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#1

Vouchsafe Our Survival

Theme :

• Medieval fantasy, limited technological advancements.

Your duchy is a major bulwark for your kingdom, with several fortified choke points to prevent the advance of any potential enemies. Recently, the previous king has suffered an untimely demise, and his foolish little tyrant of an heir has inherited the throne. Within months, he was known far and wide as a foolish, weak king. Now, with your resources diminished, invaders have begun to make their move. Although you have no love for the fool king, it is still your realm, and you must defend your people.

Style :

• Low-Poly
• Serious Colors/Tones

Player Experience :

• Strategy and tactics.
• Sense of uncertainty and dread.
• Worry over resources.

Core Mechanic :

• Make use of limited resources.
• Position your assets well to cripple the enemy advance.
• If your walls receive reach 0 health, it’s game over.

Game Loop :

• Survive for as long as possible using the assets at your disposal.
• The level reloads once you reach game over, or if you go into debt.

Specs :

• PC / Mac / Linux
• Mouse Input Focus
• 16:9 Aspect Ratio

Stretch Goals :

• Enemy dynamic pathfinding
• Tower build over time
• Garrison management. Unassigned units in your garrison will defend your walls.
• Towers don’t spawn units inside of them, and instead you must designate units from your garrison to enter the towers. Alongside this, units can attack enemies directly without the help of a tower. Units are capable of dynamic pathfinding. Some structures do not need units to function.
• You can plead to the king for additional resources, but the fool will most likely be as stubborn as possible, even in wartime. Be careful not to annoy him too much, or he may hinder you instead.
• Upgrade your walls and other facilities to make your life easier.
• You can safely leave an area behind and defend other areas of your realm after gaining a high enough Defense Score. Defense score is a percentage that is modified by how much damage you have taken, how much damage you’ve dealt, and how many waves you’ve survived. It will not raise past a certain point unless you reach the minimum wave for that area, and each area you go to defend raises the minimum wave by 5.
• You gain currency to unlock more structures with after you defend an area, even if you fail. The amount you get is dependent on the wave you reached.

2 Likes
#2

You’ve put a lot of thought in this and I really really like the mechanic of the King’s personality and mood affecting your ability to get additional resources. It’s like you’re managing not just your troops, buildings and money, but also managing the King’s emotions. In real life, human emotions is just as much a strategic resource/challenge as money and items, so I think this is a great idea.

My only concern is with the idea of having to manually assign units, it would be more smooth to play if units assigned themselves to whichever tower is lacking in staff support (with maybe the option to manually take them out and put them somewhere else). In games like Banished and Theme Park World, your staff/villages/troops try to be useful on their own without your guidance, although you can manually pick them up and move if you so wish. This gives the player the ability to play more relaxed and automated, and focus on the long term strategy, while also allowing them to make quick time decisions in the heat of the moment.

#3

Thanks for the reply! Ideally it would be nice to reduce the amount of micromanagement the player would have to engage in for this sort of thing, as many RTS games really do have quite a lot of it. As commanding troops isn’t the main focus of this game, it would be nice if I could implement a way for troops to mostly manage themselves while you focused on strategy. It may also be interesting to consider having little control over them as someone such as a marshal actually handled most of the commanding while trying to stay true to your strategy. It would be simpler to just automatically assign a random unit (as they likely wouldn’t have an extensive individual statistics system in this game but rather would be sorted by unit type) to a tower, and you could command them to abandon the tower (retreat) if you didn’t want to lose another unit from your limited garrison.

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