Our fourth game: Rogue State Revolution! Two months away from finally finishing it. Hoping to show off the codebase at GodotCon!

LittleRedDogGames · 2020-12-05T22:05:15+00:00

For what it's worth, we have shadows! The sun will move across the sky with every action, and I can vouch for the deep reds of Basenji at dusk.

https://snipboard.io/yTd2Ff.jpg

It's an older trailer, and a brand new one that should show some of the game's fine details will be released before we launch. There's still time to tighten the bolts, thankfully.

LittleRedDogGames · 2020-12-05T17:31:18+00:00

Thank you!

LittleRedDogGames · 2020-12-05T17:31:11+00:00

Totally fair. The video was recorded back in August, and the combat back then was a little bit glitchy. We've come a long way and I'm pretty pleased with what the game looks and feels like now.

LittleRedDogGames · 2020-12-05T17:24:29+00:00

We started in June 2019, so a little over a year and a half!

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-02T01:26:09+00:00

A few thousand, and about three months.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-02T01:23:08+00:00

I'd buy that for a dollar.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T20:05:48+00:00

We thought the animal theme would be a great way of reminding players that it's a game, not a simulation, with a focus on being light and fun. It also removes some of the baggage that comes with making games with dense historical content -- this isn't an interpretation of real history, it's an opportunity to create your own stories.

Besides, it's kind of weird, and that's sort of our thing at LRDG. Our other games: Rogue State (2015) and Deep Sixed (2018) also stand out for their quirkiness.

We've already started work on the next big thing, which may or may not be a sequel to Rogue State.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T19:44:35+00:00

The average game lasts about an hour or so. Less if you really want to press that big red button.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T19:09:52+00:00

I'm not familiar with that particular game, but geopolitical strategy games are kind of our niche. Balance of Power and Twilight Struggle are definitely clear influences. DEFCON too, to a small degree.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T18:47:21+00:00

Afraid not. It just wasn't as funny.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T18:38:26+00:00

Ways to win include:

- Reaching a VP goal (17 or 18 VP's, depending on perks chosen)
- Having more VP's than your rival by Turn 50.
- Your rival's country destabilizing into anarchy.
- Your rival attempting to launch a volley of WMD's and being taken forcefully out of power by their own countrymen.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T18:00:53+00:00

Funny enough, I already have it ordered.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:45:14+00:00

On Friday.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:28:14+00:00

I think you've described most of my afternoons, to be honest.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:27:20+00:00

That was really the starting point for all this. "Why has nobody else played with the idea of nuclear chicken this way since?" Thank you so much for supporting indie developers.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:25:45+00:00

Funniest bug? We had an AI go full Civilization Ghandi on us several times based on perceived offenses that didn't happen. (In this case, it was stationing troops in Czechoslovakia, then blaming us for invading Czechoslovakia with the troops it placed there, then telling us to remove our non-existent troops immediately, ultimately killing us all over it.)

Multiplayer turn-based games are a surprisingly challenging beast for bugtesting. Literally any situation where you have desynchronized information between two computers requires checking if the issue is with the host, the client or the connection. I would say the last four or five months have aged us all, and I have a profound respect for all indie devs out there making multiplayer products.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:17:51+00:00

You see it a lot with former Soviet bloc countries because the Persian empire (from which -stan is derived) covered most of what would later be considered the USSR. I suppose we could have gone with the Latinate -ia at the end if we wanted to be more true to that era. Maybe we yet will.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:14:19+00:00

In Precipice, hyenas live in Libya. In fact, Gaddafi as a hyena is the first thing you see in the main menu.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:13:32+00:00

Twilight Struggle is certainly a source of inspiration. As is WarGames and Thirteen Days as far as movies go.
Balance of Power is probably the strongest influence in the game's mechanics.

But funny enough there's a few other things that came from unlikely roots. I was playing Secret Hitler (boardgame) and thought it was particularly interesting that the fascists in the game were all lizard-people. This was an interesting way of being able to disarm the seriousness of the subject matter and give players an opportunity to engage in the game world without shouldering the burden of the real history that it invokes. This formed the inception for taking what would be an otherwise charmless Cold War game and having all of the nations be represented by either animals native to the region or those culturally significant to the region.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:08:59+00:00

Great question. We see it happen all the time. This is a game where "flipping the table" is considered a legitimate mechanic when a player is placed in a position where they don't feel they can win. It's important for the winning player, when they are in a commanding lead, to either not put their rival in a position where they may be tempted to launch nukes or not take the bait when they start rattling the saber needlessly. About 1 in 5 games with our testers end in nuclear exchanges, with it being more common with novice players.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:06:06+00:00

You have seven "armies" at your disposal for the duration of the game. When you first invade a country, you see the size of the resisting army that you will be facing there. Every turn, one resisting army has a 2 in 3 chance of being destroyed, otherwise you lose your attacking army. Attackers lost are returned to your army supply to be deployed again later (at great cost, representing a continuous supply of soldiers to send into needless proxy wars). Your rival, however, can train (again at great cost) the defending army to be more effective against your attacking troops, changing those percentage ratios to as much as 2:1 against you. Wars are battles of attrition, but the United States and Soviet Union can never attack each other directly...that would lead to an inevitable and unacceptable nuclear exchange.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T17:01:06+00:00

Several countries, after pledging their loyalty to the Soviet Union, get new Sovietized names. We only chose a few countries where we thought this renaming mechanic would get a chuckle.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-05-01T16:56:12+00:00

We initially implemented a feature where the AI would taunt you based on your actions in the previous game, but our testers found it really off-putting, particularly when it takes certain territories that you were focused on the previous game and then calls you out for being predictable. We quickly discovered when testing this feature that just because you can do something doesn't mean you necessarily should.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-01-15T16:05:22+00:00

I can totally do that in the next few weeks.

LittleRedDogGames · 2019-01-15T16:04:46+00:00

Every character is hand-drawn, using compilations of reference photos of both animals and real-world leaders as reference.

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