Pseudo-Real Time
A top down turn based brawler in which the turns are not always 1-to-1
The Project
Pseudo-Real Time was one of my earliest digital projects and was done for my Introduction to Game Development Class during my Freshman year in the Spring Semester of 2016. For it we were assigned to think up a game idea and work the entire semester on our own towards its completion. I was inspired by turn based systems similar to The Banner Saga and the Telepath RPG web games that I played a lot of when I was a kid. Working with that mechanic base I was wanted to include a story for a fantasy world that I was world building at the time and use it to inspire the specific abilities that you could use.
Experimenting with a Mechanic
Looking back Pseudo-Real Time is best thought of as an experimentation with the mechanics of a genre and its name is a nod to that. Each player has a Speed Bar which fills up over time. When it is filled, it is your turn. Combine this with the ability to increase the rate it fills up as one of the options on your turn and the fact that some of the battlefield slows this rate means that sometimes you may get to take several turns before your opponent does. This was to be the core that sets it apart from similar games as it wasn't really turn based nor a real time game.
A Lesson in Scaling
Fourteen weeks is not a long time, especially not when I was doing a lot of things for the first time. The story I had originally wanted never got past a basic outline and the game shifted from controlling a party versus AI into a 1-on-1 combat. However, hints to the dream still lie within the game, the characters that each player uses were originally intended to be the party members that you could encounter, and I actually had started the sprites on two others but scrapped the need for them before I got around to their animations. Even after I had moved off of the campaign idea the hope was to give different classes for the players to use but that never came to fruition either. In short I had set myself for a goal that I quickly realized I wouldn't reach so I constantly re-scoped.
There was a lot I did get to do. While I had handled some Unity UI before I got to experiment more with them. Not to mention this was my first foray into sound design and music composition. It was also the first time I incorporated animations into Unity, not the first time I animated though. It ended up bringing about some bugs that by the time they came up I had trouble fixing them before the deadline. Since then I have realized many of my errors and could improve this game as their needs to be a better combat mechanics to truly make this game interesting. Regardless I learned a lot making this game and still think that many parts of it look very good.
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