Alpha Centari: A Galaxy at War

Development Summary:

• Engine: Microsoft Excel

• Development Time: 1 Week

• Platform: Mobile

• Genre: Turn-based, RPG

Design Goals:

• Create a simple, mobile role-playing game that stands out among other mobile titles

• Offer a roleplaying experience that has a high amount of depth while still being easy to approach

• Craft a unique IP where players are offered an interesting narrative worth exploring

• Craft a simple, easy to use User Interface for combat and other gameplay screens

• Design a collection of fun missions and maps players can explore

• Offer several methods of monetization to insure the game’s success

Development Summary:

A few months ago, a company challenged me to develop a game design document for a simple Away From Keyboard (AFK) mobile game. Having never built such a game before, the first thing I did was take a look at several potential competitors, see what they were doing, and thought about how I might make my own game stand out. After looking at such games as AFK Arena, Raid: Shadowlegends, and Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, I came up with a list of observations for what I wanted:

1) The AFK RPG market’s top sellers are primarily fantasy games. One way to make the game stand out would be to make the theme Science-Fiction, preferably a new IP that can offer players a new experience instead of the same old story of save the good kingdom from the corrupting force of darkness.

2) The goal of many AFK games is for the player to eventually build a team that can go and do multiple runs of a dungeon without the player’s input. While this idea would be the core of the game, I also wanted to provide players the option for deeper gameplay, if they wanted it. As such, I looked to add additional depth to the gameplay, allowing players to manually activate their characters and make unique tactical decisions

3) Lastly, while I have always believed in the idea that a good, well designed product will pay for itself, one of the key aspects of mobile development is finding ways to monetize. However, I also knew I did not want the monetization methods to disrupt a player’s experience.

After some thought and planning, I decided to develop a title that took the best parts of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and Warframe, and combined them into simple, yet powerful mobile game that would draw in fans of tactical gameplay wrapped in a mystery and discovery narrative.

Backstory:

Starting some time after the Unification Wars on Earth and the development of the first near-Faster than Light drives, the Earth’s Sphere Alliance received a message from Alpha Centari, inviting humans to come and talk. The player takes on the role of the commander on a scouting expedition to assess the nature of the alien civilization and discover their intentions. Upon arriving, nearly a decade later, the player finds the once proud races of Alpha Centari in a desperate struggle for dominance, with each faction desiring to win the humans over to their side in hopes of finally securing an advantage. The player must build their squad, explore the ravaged worlds of the system, upgrade their gear, fight various threats ranging from spacers and pirates, to violent slaves and rebels, the fading armies of the empire, to genetically modified monsters, and discern which faction will trust all before the true human forces arrive.

Major Systems:

Core Gameplay Loop:

At its core, Alpha Centari: A Galaxy at War is an Isometric, Tactical, Looting game where players go on various missions, complete objectives, earn rewards, and upgrade their gear so they can upgrade their gear, to go on tougher missions, to earn better rewards, and thus the cycle continues. This type of loop is used throughout various games to give players almost endless gameplay as players grind out resources, items, and rare drops in order to get what they need to make the next big weapon or suit upgrade. Borrowing from Warframe, with Alpha Centari: A Galaxy at War, players would have a series of systems to explore, each system offering unique planets, biomes, mission types, loot tables, and rewards.

Combat system:

The combat system for Alpha Centari runs off a D100 system. When a character’s turn comes up, the player can take control of the character and move them a portion of squares equal to their movement and attack or use an ability. When a player makes an attack roll against an enemy, both the player and enemy make rolls to try and roll under their attack and dodge abilities. If the player succeeds on the attack roll and the enemy fails on their dodge, the enemy takes the hit. If the player fails their attack roll, the attack misses. If both the player and enemy succeed at their attack and dodge rolls respectively, then it comes down degrees of success. For example, if the player has an attack skill of 35, the enemy’s dodge skill is 25, and both roll a 10, then the player hits the enemy because the difference between their roll and their goal is greater, 25 and 15 respectively. However, if the player rolls a 30 and the enemy rolls a 15, then the enemy dodges the attack because 10 is greater than 5. If both degrees of success are equal, then it becomes a grazing hit and the enemy takes half damage.

Another aspect of play I wanted to work with was the idea of initiative verse action points. Essentially, every character has an initiative rate that increments every second until it reaches 10, then it is that character’s turn to go. At which point, players can move their character and perform a skill or fire their weapon. However, characters also have action points that they generate based on their class and the gear they have equipped and the points are generated every few seconds. Characters that obtain enough action points can use their action immediately, even when it is not their turn. However, using an ability outside of their turn increases their chance to fail by 30%. This chance of failure can be mitigated by gear and other characters abilities, but I believe this adds an interesting choice to a player’s options. Do they go for the grenade and hope it finishes off the big bad before its next turn, or does the player wait and see if they can survive the big bad’s hit and guarantee a win?

To continue with the depth of the combat there were two other major additions. The first was the inclusion of walls and cover. This addition does two important things. 1) it breaks up a typical encounter, providing even low level characters a chance to survive and do some real damage. 2) it helps to break up and otherwise flat and uninteresting board into tactical points and no mans lands, forcing players to think critically.

Lastly, I added in 4 different health bars, Health, Armor, Shields, and Barriers. Health is just a character’s standard health pool represented in Red. Armor is a character’s thick hide or armor plating, represented by yellow and reduces all damage a character would take by 20%. Armor can be repaired, but it would usually require a unique skill or even a character’s action over a few turns. Shields are represented by Blue and essentially exist as an additional pool of hit points with no damage reduction, but if the character goes undamaged for a round, they can regain some shields at a constant rate. Lastly, Barriers, represented by purple, reduce damage by 10% and can regain 5% of their total health if left undamaged for a round. With the addition of these armor and health types, each type can have advantages and disadvantages, which in turn encourages players to explore different builds and team loadouts to meet the mission’s major threats and be properly equipped to handle what each mission throws at them.

Squad and Gear Upgrades:

I believe that if you give players a game with depth that is worth exploring, they will explore it to the extreme and before long they will be doing things that even you did not think possible. I have seen this with my own playstyle in games like Warframe where so many pieces of gear, abilities, and other parts come together to give players the chance to do cool and exciting things. I felt that a similar system would work well for same Alpha Centari, though simplified significantly. With this system, the player can assign members to their squad, augment and upgrade them, and equip and upgrade their weapons. Augments to the squadmate focus on two major aspects, improving the squad member’s

survivability or their abilities even go so far as to change them slightly to make them usable against other types of enemies. For example, Jethrow’s grenade ability could have upgrades that increase the damage amount, blast radius, turn it into a trip mine, take away the damage in exchange for a massive knockback to knock enemies out of cover, or change the damage type making it effective against different types of enemies. As a squadmate’s armor only has four slots for upgrades and a limited capacity on top of that, players will have to think carefully about which upgrades they apply and how it works alongside their other squadmembers abilities. On the other side are the gun upgrades. Here players can select which weapon a squadmate brings into battle and adjust certain aspect of the gun’s stats such as its accuracy, the cost to fire it, critical chance, and damage.

Factions and Black Market:

Another aspect of Alpha Centari that I wanted to explore, but actually had to cut from my initial presentation to the company due to length of time, was the idea of Factions and the Black Market. One of the key aspects of these types of grinding games whether it is Warframe, Destiny, or some other title, is joining one of many factions. These factions usually have their own unique story and goals, offer players unique faction specific equipment and gear, and maybe even offer truly exclusive rewards like weapons that players want to trade to others in the community. Factions are an interesting way to help build out a game as they help to add depth to the in game world, give players the ability to somewhat customize their experience, and can be a source of goals and progression for players to pursue.

In the initial version of the game design document that I wanted to propose, there were going to be essentially three major starting factions, with the option to add more as expansions and updates through the course of the game’s life. The first faction the Nomorian Resistance, a collection of organized resistance cells made up of large lizard like aliens who were once slaves to the dominate race of Alpha Centari known as the Uldari. While not fully defined in the initial design document, I saw this faction focusing more on brute force and armor. Meaning characters in this faction would have higher health pools than average, tend to have armor, and would focus more on explosives and concusive warfare like grenades, shotguns, and melee weapons all with loot and upgrades that make those types of weapons better.

The next faction I wanted to explore would be the Uldari Collection, essentially the remnants of the Uldari empire that initially contacted Earth. I saw this species as being powerful psychics, able to lift heavy objects with their minds, communicate telepathically, and potentially even mind control their opponents. Their major themes would focus around barriers, enemy and board manipulation, and mental status effects like slowing, stunning, or delaying the enemy.

The final initial faction I was planning would be the Cerebrum Alliance, a collection of scientists and free thinkers who were held back by the Uldari. They have since focused on developing a large collection of drone and automated warriors to fight their battles for them so they can continue to experiment freely and discover whole new ways to destroy, explode, and burn the world. While focusing primarily on shields as their major health pool, the Cerebrum Alliance would focus on status effects like lighting characters on fire, freezing them solid, electrifying them, with some drone mechanics as well.

After some time, players would unlock the ability to ally themselves with one of these three factions and unlock faction specific missions to help the player boost their reputation within their chosen faction. Players would then spend their reputation within the faction to buy faction specific gear and augments, allowing them to further diversify and refine their builds. That said, having often found myself in the situation of the grass always being greener, I wanted to give players the option to obtain some of the other factions’ augments and rewards so if players just want to keep to themselves or if the community for the title is just not strong enough, they can still get those other fun faction options. That is where the Black Market comes into play. Run by the Alyium Syndicate, another potential future faction, the Black Market allows players to buy an ever revolving selection of mods, upgrades, and even account boosts for real world money or for a large amount of in game resources and currency.

Monetization:

Due to the sheer volume of mobile games, many developers have had to find various ways to make money with their games so that if the game only has a few dedicated players that those few players will have the means to progress quickly while also supporting the company. While there are many ways to do this, some more ethical than others, I sought to look at simple ways Alpha Centari could be monetized that would add value to the game and not disrupt a player’s gaming session. As such there are a few primary ways Alpha Centari has been modified for the player’s benefit. The first is through First Aid. If a player is on a mission and happens to get a run of bad luck, the player can help heal their team by using first aid medicine and gear. These packs can be purchased at various rates and heal or revive the entire team, insuring players feel they get their money’s worth and help them complete the dungeon. The second method of monetization comes down to boosters. Boosters are bonuses that players can buy and can be given to players as part of holiday or special events. These boosters last a significant amount of time, from 12 hours to 3 days, and increase the player’s rate of experience gain, amount of currency they earn, amount of resources they find, and increase the drop chance of rare or mythic resources. Two other ways to monetize would be the purchasing of crew quarters and expansions to the armory. Additional crew quarters allows players to house more squad members and additional armory space lets players store more weapons. Players can also craft or purchase what are known as I.E.A.S. or Improved External Armored Suits which are similar to a character’s normal armored suit, but have double the capacity allowing players to add more upgrades and explore yet more builds.

Conclusion:

Alpha Centari: a Galaxy at War is a title that seeks to do more with the mobile space. With every other company putting out a match three title, a plajinko game, word game, or a slot machine trying desperately to attract the scarce mobile-game dollar, some mobile games can be dead before they even launch their app store page. In order to stand out in the sea of potential games, developers must look to mobile games as just a smaller extension of computer gaming. And while certain performance issues and battery life will need to be kept in mind and designed for, phones and mobile devices are ready for a true, exciting AAA game that is more than just a cash grab. By providing players and in-depth, valuable experience, games like Alpha Centari: a Galaxy at War can stand out above the crowds of other titles, attract the following it needs to be profitable, and above all provide players an experience that is worth investing in.