The rules are simple. Place Tokens on a map to gain as much area as possible, fight your opponents Tokens to steal their area, and make use of Forts and Features to push your opponent back!

You can win by either controlling the most area at the end of the game (once everyone's tokens are used up), or taking out your opponent's base!

It's a casual multiplayer strategy game, with a focus on simple rules and accessibility (both for people new to strategy games, or people who have trouble playing other strategy games).

The focus on accessibility has meant a move away from timers and overall speed that competitive games are known for. While this can be viewed as a negative, it opens up a lot more design space for FUN!

Randomness

When designing a competitive game, you need to take into account how you can keep things even. For example, historically, the player who goes first has a pretty significant advantage in games (In Chess, for example, White has around a 55% win rate). When making a quick, casual game, this becomes less of a problem, because over time, provided the player who goes first is randomised, the playing field evens out.

As part of designing this game, I had an interest in adding random elements, so as to not make the advantage so obvious. The end result is two-fold, and both rely on randomness.

Asymmetric Maps

Randomly generated "features" on the map present different scenarios for players, as well as create unique opportunities for players to overcome the implicit "first move" advantage. While it may seem obvious when a map is "good" or "bad", in practice, it varies depending on player strategies. A blocked in area may force one player to rush to get ground on the area race, but gives them an extremely defensible position to play from. A large open area gives a player an opportunity to collect area easily, but leaves them open to attack.

Forts

Evenly spread across the map are Forts with different effects. These Forts are randomised, and have pretty powerful effects. These are unpredictable, and not necessarily balanced, meaning that one player may gain a significant advantage by collecting an early Fort. They are, however, able to be attacked and a player will need to fight to keep any advantage they gain from holding a Fort.

As part of designing these, there was emphasis put on making the Forts not inherently defensible as well, so spending the resources early may give an early advantage, but cost a player later in the game.

Data

One of the key pieces of this whole process is collecting DATA! As people play the game, we can check the results and effects of the Forts and Features, as well as see how much the first player advantage comes into play. This will allow us to make meaningful changes to reduce the impact of any one piece.

So, lets answer a few questions about who we are and what we're doing:

Who are we?

For now, "we" is actually... me! I'm a solo indie developer from Brisbane, Australia. I'm just creating games for the fun of it, and have been doing so for over 20 years. I started messing around in GameMaker when I was quite young in around 2000, and subsequently moved over to Unity, and now Godot!

I'm a professional software developer by trade, mainly dealing with large scale web applications. I love the challenges that come up from Game Development, which is my main driver for creating games.

What kind of games do you want to make?

I want to make games that I want to play! As I've gotten older, I've been less interested in competitive games, and more into games that are just silly or fun. I also mainly like playing games with my friends, so the games I make try to fill that gap.

I also try to make my games accessible, the more people who can play them, the better! That leads to a few design decisions that I'll talk about in a bit more detail in future blogs.

What is Quantum Conquest?

Quantum Conquest is a 2-player minimal strategy game, focusing on maintaining control over areas on a map. It kinda plays like a board game, with a few cool automated tricks to give it a little more life. It's easy to learn, but difficult to master!

I'll go a bit more into detail in future blog posts!

I'll be back soon to give a bit more info on the game as it approaches release, and talk more about what the process looks like (from both a development point of view, as well as marketing/release)!