How To Use

1) Create Albums

Start by creating your first album from the main library view. Simply tap the plus button and give your album a name. Albums are your primary way of organizing photos - think of them as your curated collections. You can create as many albums as you need, whether for projects, trips, inspiration boards, or any other collection you want to keep together.

2) Add Photos

Once inside an album, tap ‘Edit’ to enter edit mode where you can add photos from your device. (Tip - Drag a folder here on Mac and it will automagically rename itself and add contents). Photos are displayed in a beautiful masonry layout that adapts to each image’s aspect ratio, giving you a Pinterest-style gallery that makes the most of your screen space. You can reorder photos by dragging them around, and set a cover image for your album by long-pressing any photo and selecting ‘Set as Cover’.

Double-tap any photo to mark it as a favourite - these special photos can be quickly accessed later from the dedicated Favourites view.

3) Powerful Tagging System

One neat feature is the flexible tagging system. You can tag individual photos or entire albums with custom tags. In the sidebar, you’ll see all your tags listed - simply tap any tag to filter your view to only photos with that tag. You can select multiple tags to create AND filters (photos must have all selected tags to appear).

Tag Albums are dynamic collections that automatically show photos matching specific tags. Create a Tag Album by tapping the plus button and selecting ‘New Tag Album’. Choose which tags to include, and the Tag Album will always display photos that have all those tags, no matter which album they’re stored in. It’s perfect for cross-cutting views like “Summer + Beach” or “Portfolio + Completed”.

4) Slideshow View

Tap any photo to enter the immersive slideshow view where you can swipe through your collection. Double-tap to zoom in and pan around high-resolution images. The slideshow respects your current filters, so if you’ve selected specific tags, you’ll only swipe through photos matching those tags. Swipe from the left or right edges to navigate between photos smoothly.

5) Favourites View

Access your favourites from the sidebar navigation. This special view groups all your favourited photos by album, making it easy to find your best shots. Tap any album header to view just the favourites from that album, or tap a photo to start a slideshow of favourites. Perfect for quickly sharing your highlights or reviewing your top picks.

6) Export & Share

Export individual photos or entire albums with ease. Long-press any photo and select ‘Export’ to save it to your device. For albums, use the context menu to ‘Export All Photos’ - perfect for backing up collections or preparing them for other apps. (Tip - You can export photos from Tag Albums too). Photos are exported with their original filenames and quality preserved.

Support

I hope you enjoy using the app, if you have any feedback for features you’d love to see or require any other assistance please get in touch.

tankers_chat0v@icloud.com

Try It Out!

Organise your photos your way, and enjoy them in peace.  App Store.

No blocking. No guilt. Just a moment of space between impulse and action.

How to Use

Pause is a lightweight Safari extension that gives you a moment of reflection before visiting distracting websites. Start by adding the sites you want to pause, then customize your delay and messages to create a mindful browsing experience.

Adding Sites

From the main view, you can add websites to your pause list. Enter the domain or URL in the input field — for example, “twitter.com” or “www.reddit.com”. Choose whether to match the entire domain or just the exact URL, then tap “Add Site” to add it to your paused sites list.

Once added, your paused sites will appear in a list below. Each entry shows whether it’s matching the entire domain or an exact URL. You can remove any site by tapping the red “Remove” button on the right side of each entry.

Settings

Switch to the Settings tab to customize your pause experience. Here you can adjust the global delay timer and manage your splash messages.

Global Delay

Set how long the pause countdown should last. Enter the number of seconds in the delay field — the default is 10 seconds — and tap “Save Delay” to apply your changes.

Splash Messages

Add personalized mindfulness messages that will appear during the pause. These gentle reminders help you take a moment to breathe and reconsider before continuing. Enter your custom message in the text field and tap “Add Message” to add it to your collection. You can add multiple messages, and they’ll be shown in succession during pauses. To remove a message, simply tap the red “Remove” button next to it.

Support

I hope you enjoy using Pause to create more mindful moments in your day. For any other issues, please get in touch with the following email.

tankers_chat0v@icloud.com

Try It Out!

A little pause can change your day.  App Store.

How to Use

Chapters is a minimalist writing tool. It’s purposefully simple to allow you to focus on writing without distraction. Start by tapping ‘Create Book’ from the library view. Here you add your title, and optionally a subtitle or even some cover art for inspiration.

Chapters

Once created, tap to head into the main editing view. On the left you’ll see your chapters, which you can add, edit, reorder and delete with a few simple controls. Swipe right to delete. Swipe left to change the chapter name and also add your own notes.

The text editing part itself is pure text with no formatting.

Stats

In the stats panel you can see your overall progress, we use a simple 250 words per page calculation. Within here there is a little goal tool that you use to help you make regular progress on your next amazing story. Just select the page count you’re aiming for and hit begin.

Now in the main editing view, at the bottom, you’ll see a small progress bar that fills in as you type. With a beautiful and gentle completion effect to indicate you’re done without overly distracting you if you are in the flow.

File

Your book is backed up with iCloud if you’re signed in with Apple and syncs across your devices seamlessly. However if you’re writing a major work you can also enjoy the additional safety of exporting the book as a backup. Note the file is simple .json and you can open that in any other text editor.

Once you’re finished with masterpiece you are likely to want to save it for final formatting. Simply ‘Save as text’ and you’ll get a lovingly setup text file with your chapter names and notes, along with some simple text tags to search for to create the final story.

Support

I hope you enjoy using the app, good luck with your next story. For any other issues, please get in touch with the following email.

tankers_chat0v@icloud.com

Try It Out!

Start writing your next great story now —  App Store.

How to Use

Tap the dice buttons at the bottom of the screen to add dice. Delete using the little trash can, it removes dice from last added. To roll, just tap away at the screen. If you want different colored dice long press on the button for options.

To add and remove board use the little + & - icons in the top right corner. A quick tap on the plus adds the default board. You can long press to load an empty one or a saved board.

Defaults & Saving a board

Tap the ‘cog’ in the top left corner to bring up the settings menu. At the very top it tells you what the current board is and the dice in play. You can save that board to reuse it later. Tap no any of the saved boards and they will be created as a new one.

If you want to delete a save board just swipe to the right. Swiping to the left to set a board as the default. Swipe the current default board to the right to reset it back, the regular default is two D6. Enjoy!

Support

I hope you enjoy using the app, for any other issues you get in touch with the following email.

tankers_chat0v@icloud.com

Try It Out!

Never without dice again. Roll, save your boards, and get back to the game.  App Store.

How To Use

Create a folder - Folders allow you to group ratings together, e.g. movies, local restaurants or snacks.

Add a rating - Give it a name and a rating of course. Add any notes that you want to add. Lastly provide some tags for filtering.

Tags - These can be added simply be seperating them with spaces. For example “movie scifi spielberg” would create three tags that you can filter by in the main ratings list.

Personalise - Don’t like the default range? No problem, go to settings (gear icon) and you can alter the prefered range and add a decimal. Changing the range doesn’t alter the rating values.

Tips - Swipe left ← to delete ratings. Swipe right → to duplicate a rating and its tags, useful for similar items.

Here is a short walkthrough :)

Support

I hope you enjoy using the app. If you have any feedback or need assistance, please get in touch.

tankers_chat0v@icloud.com

Try It Out!

Rate it, remember it.  App Store.

Support

I hope you enjoy using the app, if you have any feedback for features you’d love to see of require any other assistance please get in touch. There is a handy feedback form within the app or you can email me below.

tankers_chat0v@icloud.com

How To Use

1) Create your Exercises

Go to the Exercises tab. From here you can create different exercises for your gym workout. You can allocate an icon for the general type.

• All
• Upper
• Lower
• Core
• Cardio

Then choose 1 or 2 things you’d like to track. For most equipment this will weight and reps. For cardio, (e.g. treadmill) this will be distance and time.

2) Start your Workout

From the Workout tab you can start your workout or create a routine from the exercises you’ve created if you want to re-use the same set of exercises. From within a workout you have access to a simple rest timer. Simply fill in the details of your sets as you go.

End of Workout - you’ll see the achievements you gained for that workout and a short summary of your sets and any new personal bests.

3) Achievements

Each Achievement season is three months split throughout the year, so the first season is Jan, Feb and Mar. Within each season you have 20 achievemnents you can collect.

Day 1 to 5 - For each workout you do during a week you will earn these achievements, so the first workout you do earns you day 1, 2nd workout day 2 etc. The week begins on a Monday. You can collect this achievement multiple times throughout a season.

Week 1 to 12 - The first time you do a workout for a new week in the season you will earn these badges. There are 12 to collect and most seasons are 13 weeks look so if you need to take a break to recover you can do so, they do not need to be done sequentially.

Month 1 to 3 - The first workout performed for a month earns you this achievement. Seasons are Jan - Mar, Apr - Jun, Jul - Sep, Oct - Dec.

4) Profile

See the record of your workouts from here, you can tap on any of them to get more details or the workout performed. There are also a suite of useful tools to check out. A handy feedback form for feature requests.

Sticker Shop - Want to refresh the look of the achievements? Buy some more stickers from the shop here and enjoy checking out collection in the achievements page :)

Try It Out!

Your fitness journey, your data. Good luck collecting those achievement badges.  App Store.

Improving the swift data has been a learning process. Originally each photo object held a little bit of metadata, e.g. sorting and filename, as well as the thumbnail data and the original image data marked as external storage. The way I thougth this would work is that only when needed would it get the full image data, but my understanding was wrong. It grabs it even when not needed, so on my lower end ipad the app would crash going into certain views as it was trying load all these full resolution images into memory just to do something small like sort or find tags.

As the app is now live it’s a little bit tricky to alter a data mode, so what i’ve done is link the full resolution image as a seperate object to the photo. So now it’s just a little bit of metadata and the small thumbnail, on my low end ipad i see much better performance now across the board and no more crashing on certain view. You’ll need to do a one time migration if you’ve got any current images. Tap ‘Migrate Photo Asset Data’ then wait while it goes through your images. Then just give it some time to sync on iCloud across your devices and that’s it.

 Folios by TzYi on the App Store.

On the cover image, this was interesting bit of SwiftUI. If no cover iamge is set, I sort and pick the first one from the list. Seems straightforward enough right, but in order to sort it has get that blob data first not just the ‘sort’ property, so it can be quite slow. This little piece of code below is all it was.

Here’s an interesting glitch I found in SwiftUI. Setting the cover image explicitly means I don’t have to sort at all and it’s way faster. So clever me I put this little change in, where if we don’t have one set just set it as the first.

Here’s the catch though, I discovered if the iCloud data is syncing, so you’re getting say 100 images for a new album, this code can trigger early and break the sync. It was quite a sneaky bug. So thankfully I caught it before release and now there is simply a little button in the settings menu that sets any albums that don’t have a cover image to the first. It’s not needed, but if you have a large collection it really improves scrolling the main albums views. Enjoy!

 Folios by TzYi on the App Store.

That expand/collapse was suprisingly difficult to get working in SwiftUI, seems that a List view doesn’t nicely support animating the size well, it looked super glitchy so instead I had to trigger a redraw of that sectoin anytime it changes, that’s why the toggle is instant as opposed to a nice gently animation.

There’s also a little bit of polish on the layout, the alignment and spacing of the chapter text and stats is improved. Next feature I’ll tweak is the page goal to make it easier to ‘repeat’ while you’re in the flow. Still debating in my head whether to have a settings page for font to offer a monospace option, I quite like that there is no settings at all though.

Check out v0.3 of  Chapters - in the App Store. If you’re using Chapters to write your next amazing story I’d love to hear about it!

Another small quality of life feature, when you create a tag album, if you don’t give it your own name it will just use the tags you select as the album title which is nice, and you can now pick a cover image for the tag album seperately. I’m thinking about adding more than just ‘and’ logic into tag albums so you could create an album that is all of one person but not wearing black for example. Might be fun to have.

This image organasing app is largely for my own needs as I wanted something simple to sort various images into albums and tag them. Apple photos is amazing but it now has years of photos that I will never get around to sorting and archiving properly, and google photos was getting more distracting with it’s features and desire to basically replace Apple photos.

 Folios by TzYi on the App Store.

If your exercises are missing, close the app and restart

With some help from Claude, I think this is fixed or at the very least should show up less often. A future proof bit of work for this is to move over to SwiftData, which didn’t exists when I oringally developed it, but it’s a pretty major refactor and tricky to handle the migration. But it is on my mind.

Anyway hope you enjoy using the app and find it even more reliable and helpful for your fitness journey.

 Fitness by TzYi on the App Store.

It has 3 presets you can adjust, with a customisable countdown too to give you time to get in position. Between each interval I added some little sound effects and haptic feedback as I figure you’re likely to put your phone on the floor or pocket. Check it out the latest version on the app store now.

 Fitness by TzYi on the App Store.

Try It Out!

Download it now for free on the  App Store.

Cross Platform

It’s also my first cross platform app, available on iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS. Your data syncs seamlessly with iCloud (using SwiftData under the hood). So if an idea hits you while you’re out and about, you can quickly tap it out on your phone, then settle in with a coffee and iPad later to bring it to life.

Write on iPhone. Continue on iPad. Finish on Mac.

So how was using SwiftUI for cross platform? Few interesting issue cropped up during development. The ‘sheet’ popups on the Mac had a fun bug where they where tiny, on iOS sheets get automatic sizing and look lovely but I found on the Mac you had to specify some size.

SwiftUI textfields are suprisingly bad. The actual editor part itself I thought was going to be a breeze, just use a simple SwiftUI ‘TextField’ component I thought…nope. They are great for small text inputs but on larger fields they actually have a ton of issues so I had to revert to native UIKit implementations.

I love the iPad

I think my favourite version is the iPad. I think the iPad is such cool device and wonderful form factor. If you pair it with a nice bluetooth keyboard I think you;ll find Chapters is a perfect companion if you’re into minimalist editors.

What’s the Deal?

This little web app helps you build Midjourney prompts by breaking them down into bite-sized pieces. Think of it as a prompt sandwich maker - you just pick your ingredients (subject, style, lighting, etc.), and it assembles everything into a tasty prompt that Midjourney will love. You can import/export the file as json if you want to use it again another time.

The Tech Stack

I built this using PetiteVue, which is like Vue.js but on a diet - super lightweight and perfect for small projects. It’s amazing how much functionality you can pack into just a few kilobytes! Here’s what makes it tick:

• PetiteVue: For all the reactive magic (and it’s seriously tiny - like 6kb tiny!)
• Skeleton CSS: It’s a pretty old micro css framework, but it’s tiny and awesome.
• Surge.sh: For hosting (because who needs a complicated deployment setup?)

The whole thing is just a single HTML file with some JavaScript sprinkled in. No build process, no bundling, just pure simplicity. There’s a great appeal to just simplifying development down to such a simple little process.

Try It Out!

Head over to midjourney-prompt.surge.sh and give it a whirl.

…“millions of different maps for maximum replayability.”

So how do you go about generating maps? If you search in google there are a number of approaches available, commonly based on noise functions. But as we are using a square grid system I found a slightly different technique, cave generation with cellular automata, that seemed like a great fit.

How the Algorithm Works

It’s a fairly simple algorithm and produces some pretty nice landmasses. In cellular automata a cell can either be on or off, often refered to as alive or dead. When counting neighbours it refers to all the cells that surround that particular one, and in this case we count those that are alive.

• Create a grid of cells of the desired size
• For each cell in the grid, it has a ‘%’ chance to start alive.
• Then run the following simulation step to smooth out the result and generate the land masses.
• For each cell in the grid we’re going to count the number of alive ’neighbours’ at each step…
  • If alive and neighbours < death limit, this cell will become dead on the next simulation
  • If dead and neighbours > birth limit, this cell will become alive on the next simulation

Each time you run the simulation step it starts to form the land masses themselves and eliminate some of the rougher edges resulting a massive set of nice maps to play on.

Unity Editor Tools

When you want to play around with these values, like we do in the above gifs, it’s incredibly useful to use sliders and also be able to see the results immediately without having to either restart or setup some manual refresh. This is conveniently quite easy todo in Unity. To set up the nice range sliders you just need a wee header attribute like so.

[Range(0, 100)]
public int chanceToStartAlive;

To make it interactive, you can use an in build method in MonoBehaviours called OnValidate to run code whenever an attribute is changed in the editor, like the smooth count or death rate above. This is as simple as…

private void OnValidate()
{
     RegenerateMap();   
}

With this simple setup, we where able to start experimenting with the values until we got fairly consistent results for different type of maps. In our case we’ve found a few awesome presets that we are experimenting with. We have smaller mosftly filled maps that allow for more action packed games. Nice medium sized maps that offer a great balance between the gameplay styles. And larger maps that require more exploration and risky ocean crossings for players that enjoy a challenge.

We look foward to welcoming you to explore the lands of Mantle Nan Ceiltach soon. Please bookmark and follow us on social media to stay updated for more behind the scenes logs.

We’re back with another blog post covering the third and final Celtic Goddess featured in our upcoming 4X Strategy title. If you’ve missed our previous posts regarding the other two Goddesses you can check them out here (Fand - Goddess of Mist) and here (Morrigan - Goddess of War & Fate). The article covering Fand also explains the role that these characters will play in our upcoming title.

Today we’re showcasing the art we have for the Goddess that governs Commerce, Áine:

As with all of our Goddesses, we initially commissioned a black & white concept piece for each to get the design right. The art brief that we provided for Áine is provided below:

Aine, Midsummer’s Light (Commerce)

Goddess of Wealth, Love and Fertility

Should give off an alluring ethereal feel.

Red, slightly curly hair gently blowing the wind. Wearing a wreath/crown made of heather. Facing the viewer.

Wearing a long dress with a wrapped bodice around her waist. One leg showing and bare feet.

In her hands, holding Scottish wild flowers, a Scottish thistle. The stem could have fabric wrapped around it to make it seem more luxurious.

With the domains of Exploration and Conflict covered by Fand and The Morrigan respectively, we looked to Celtic goddesses associated with prosperity and growth for our final domain, Commerce. Áine was the obvious choice, an Irish goddess associated with the summer sun, wealth and prosperity.

Áine is also associated with Midsummer, a celebration stemming from pagan traditions in many places throughout Europe, held around the Summer Solstice.

This time we were happy with the original colouring that we received for Áine and moved straight onto commissioning the background colouring for her. The brief for that was as follows:

Scene: Standing in a meadow filled with heather in midday/bright lighting.

Colouring: Brighter, summery colours.

We kept our request short and sweet, requesting Áine be stood in a verdant meadow featuring heather, a common and iconic plant in the highlands of Scotland.

Happy with how the initial background turned out, we decided to press forward and get the piece finalised. We felt this was a perfect final piece to complete our trio of goddesses, and the Celtic glyphs and patterns added in the background of each of the three really tied them together.

With our trio of goddesses standing ready, we’re excited to continue showing you more of what we’ve been working on! Please keep your eyes peeled for more content as we continue our wee adventure in making a Celtic strategy game!

This is our second article focusing on showcasing some of the art we have for our upcoming turn-based strategy title. If you missed our previous look at our first deity, you may want to check that article out (Fand - Goddess of Mist), where we explain the original concept of including Celtic goddesses in our game, and their incorporation into our skill tree system.

Today we’re showcasing the art we have for the Goddess that governs Conflict, Morrigan:

As with Fand, we initially commissioned a black & white concept piece of each of our Goddesses. The art brief we provided for Morrigan is below:

Morrigan - Phantom Queen (Conflict)

Goddess of War & Fate

Woman facing the viewer wearing a deep cowl, a smirk visible on her otherwise shrouded face.

Want her to give off a vibe of allure, power, seduction/temptation.

Two hands extended, palms upwards as if offering a choice.

Above one hand floats skulls, weaponry, arrows, anything related with war and conflict.

Above the other hand floats shreds of paper covered in celtic runes, prophetic objects (crystals/orbs?), and small ravens/crows.

While our previous Goddess Fand was a relatively minor figure in Celtic Mythology, Morrigan plays a much more central role. Often referred to as “The Morrigan”, she often takes the appearance of a crow, a bird associated with omens and foretelling. She features in both the Ulster Cycle and the Mythological Cycle in Irish Mythology as a harbinger of war and fate, interacting with many key figures, including Cúchulainn as Fand did.

We initially received a more red-toned version of Morrigan, and while it looked good, we wanted a slightly darker tone for our Goddess, incorporating purples and a darker hair colour while also fleshing out the background.

This was the final piece that we decided to go with. We loved how different the colour piece of Morrigan turned out when compared and contrasted with Fand. The striking differences between the two give them their own distinct identity.

Mechanically each of these skill trees is tied to a different aspect of gameplay, Combat, Commerce and Exploration. We liked the idea of each of these trees having a Celtic Goddess governing it, and the investment in skill points being akin to deepening your bond with them.

Today we’re showcasing the art we have for the Goddess that governs Exploration, Fand:

We initially commissioned a black & white concept piece of each of our Goddesses. The art brief we provided is below:

Fand/Fann - Mists (Exploration)

Goddess of Flight

A frail looking woman with dark hair facing the viewer. Attached to her by thin silver chains are small sea birds (Terns).

Her shoulders are bared, and celtic-style tattoos depicting ocean waves and clouds are visible on them.

Fand is a relatively minor figure in Celtic Mythology. She features most prominently in a tale within the Ulster Cycle, Serglige Con Culainn (“The Sickbed of Cúchulainn”). She takes the form of an otherworldly sea bird and flies alongside a flock that are tethered to her with silver chains.

In the story, Cúchulainn attacks Fand and her sister by throwing stones at them in their bird forms. For this, they whip him to the point of near-death, incapacitating him for a year. Eventually Cúchulainn atones for his actions by aiding Fand in defending her otherworldly home, and the two become lovers.

While Fand is fairly vengeful in this story, we liked her ability to shapeshift and travel as part of a flock. This made her the ideal fit for a goddess to govern our Exploration skill tree. The artist we worked with made some alterations to the initial brief, and we eventually worked our way to a more worldly traveller vibe for our take on Fand.

As we went through the process, we worked with our artist to make small alterations to the colour scheme. We wanted a darker green in the background than was initially provided, which led us to a version of Fand that we thought was pretty perfect.

Presenting - Paper Jumper! - Play now on itch.io!

It’s a very simple wee platformer and was fun to put together, please have a go and leave your thoughts over at itch.io.

Godot early thoughts

It’s tiny and great! - Coming from Unity, which is a pretty massive install and now needs it’s own launcher to handle all the different versions, Godot was a breath of fresh air. It’s download size is <100Mb and the install size isn’t much bigger.

The in built scripting language and editor, GDScript, I also quite liked. The syntax was easy enough to pick up. The lack of brackets and semi-colons, once I got used to it, is now something I wish C# had as I like the brevity. Having the code editor built-in is rad and it’s pretty good too with autocomplete. I did miss coding in VSCode and it’s more powerful editing, and apparently you can get that setup so I might try that for the next gamejam.

For 2D pixel art games it’s clearly a great fit. For Unity you’d want to install a couple of packages for a 2d platformer (in particular I’m thinking of the tile system and I think there’s a pixel perfect camera too). Godot has all of these ready to go, and the 2D nodes and tools feel more native to 2D, i.e. the units are pixel based … It’s all very nice.

Couple of concepts I struggled with…there is scene graph in godot but I couldn’t easily disable/enable a node like you can a GameObject in Unity. Instead I had to remove it from the scene, save it in a variable, and reinstate it when needed…not sure if I’m missing a better approach there.

When I was setting up the one-way platforms I was duplicating the node (a StaticBody with a CollisionShape child) but I always had to set the rectangle collider with ‘make unique’ otherwise changing one would alter the others? I’m not sure what’s going on there at all. Using different scenes in Godot, which work like prefabs in Unity, the shared properties made sense, this did not.

Waiting for Godot 4.0

There’s a big new version in alpha and looks to have tons of improvements, I noticed the tile system has been reworked and updates to the 3d renderer, but will be a breaking change from 3. I wouldn’t abandon Unity for our current project, largely as I’m so proficient and familiar with it and C#. Once the new version comes out though I’ll definitely give it a look and as time permits I’ll continue learning about the engine on the side.

While going through the design process we came up with two different styles of combat. The first was an Advance Wars-esque system which you’ll be testing here today!

The idea of this test is to give us enough raw data regarding how the combat “feels” in this system to decide if we should continue as we are or pivot to the other system we had in mind.

In order to participate in the test, follow the link below!

https://tzyi.itch.io/gaiabattletest

When beginning this combat test you’ll be shown 5 different combat scenarios, ordered in difficulty and complexity from left to right.

In each of these scenarios you’ll be asked to field an army of units to defeat the opposing army of units. Each unit has its own strengths and weaknesses that are displayed both on the unit card and on the “combat triangle”.

Once you’ve assembled your army of units, select which type of unit to buff on your side in the top left and click “playBattle” to engage in a round of combat. Repeat this process until one side is victorious!

We look forward to hearing your feedback!

Update

The BattleTest has now been removed from itch.io. Many thanks for those of you that participated and provided feedback. :)

As mentioned in the previous post, we’d decided to make a 4X game with enough depth to satisfy our own desire for complex systems, but with a lot of other aspects of the genre trimmed back and streamlined.

Combat

Combat was a major sticking point for us, we felt that combat in other 4X games tended to get a bit bogged down, so we wanted to make a system that combined more arcade-y aspects with unit management aspects. We looked to Advance Wars for the streamlined approach, but expanded that out across multiple units within each army clashing in combat rounds, with breaks in-between rounds for the player to take action.

The Advance Wars battle screen, both sides exchange a volley and take casualties in around 2-3 seconds

We’re in the middle of testing a few different ideas for combat, two competing systems that we think would both work well in different ways. Keep your eyes peeled for a future blog post where we delve into the whole process in-depth!

Tech Tree

No 4X game would be complete without a Tech Tree style system! Normal progression through a 4X title usually involves researching different technologies over a number of turns that unlock various units and buildings when completed. These then branch off down a sprawling tree, creating a “critical path” that you must traverse in order to unlock later technologies.

The Civilization V tech tree, completed technologies in gold, available technologies in green

As we’re looking to scale back a lot of the sprawling elements of other 4X titles, we discussed some more compact ways of handling a tech tree. We wanted to preserve some aspect of a critical path without forcing the player into a long slog to unlock a particular technology that they liked the look of. We discussed other games that have done similar systems in the past, and settled on a system somewhat like the “Talent Trees” from World of Warcraft. This functions more like a skill tree than a traditional tech tree, allowing players to specialise in a particular aspect of gameplay.

The three aspects we’re focusing on are Conflict, Commerce and Exploration. Each skill tree will reward deep investment through powerful unlocks towards the end, but also allow easy access to hybrid choices. If a player feels that half investment in each of the three trees is better for their playstyle than full investment in one and partial in a second, then we want to incentivise that experimentation to a degree.

An example of talent trees from Classic World of Warcraft, allowing the player to allocate points in each tree

With this system, we’ve opted to go for a “Skill Point” system instead of a more traditional research-based one. Players will receive a skill point for accomplishing certain early-game tasks, such as winning a small battle, fully exploring their starting region, upgrading their town etc. Once this list of early-game tasks has been exhausted, a steady flow of points will be provided, every positive player action filling up a progress bar to award more points.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief overview of some of the systems that we’re developing for the game. Next time we’ll discuss Pantheons and goddesses, complete with some art that we think you’ll love!

Naturally when talking about 4X strategy games (which stands for Exterminate, Exploit, Exploration, Expand, all core pillars of the genre), one of the first to come up is Sid Meier’s Civilization. As much as spelling Civilisation with a Z vexes me in particular, these games and our experiences with them provided a great jumping-off point to discuss particulars.

Very quickly we decided that our personal favourite parts of a Civ experience were the early and mid-game portions, agreeing that the endgame tended to get bogged down with a lot of micromanagement (especially if leaning heavily on the Exterminate aspect). The early game has a lot of charm that stems from Exploration and Expansion, and the mid-game still retains some of these elements while putting your ability to Exploit your gathered resources (basic and luxury) to the test.

As games in the genre start to reach the endgame, a lot of what we consider “the fun stuff” has dried up. The early game flexibility has left, and you’re likely committed to a specific course of action. That’s not necessarily a bad thing of course, seeing your plans come to fruition can be immensely satisfying, but I am often guilty of booting up a new save file and re-doing the early and mid-game instead of plowing through the remaining 150-200 turns on my original save.

We agreed that the time investment of 4Xs endgames can be a bit daunting when you’re just looking to have a quick bit of fun. You could have a fantastic early and mid-game, but eventually you’re going to have to pick a lane and stick to it for quite some time to see your payoff.

And so we thought…

What if you could have that dynamic early and mid-game experience with a punchy “blitz” of an endgame to round everything off? What if you could play a game that gave you a Civ-like feeling of discovery and decision making during day’s commute? Edinburgh to Glasgow in the morning (a 1hr 10m commute roughly) giving you time to set up and reach the mid-game, and Glasgow to Edinburgh in the evening letting you finish your preparations for an almighty endgame clash before you pull into the station?

A miniaturised 4X game that can be played in 2-3 hours, no daunting days-long commitments to finish the perfect game, and playable on mobile devices to-boot? It sounded exactly like something we’d all play.

And so we sat down and started working.

What

My current focus is on native iOS and iPadOS apps using SwiftUI. But you might also see some web or other stuff.

Past

We were Richard and Matt, working hard to make a wee wonderful turn based strategy game, called Mantle of the Celts. With numerous years of experience in the industry between us we got together and decided that we’d love to make a retro inspired turn based game with modern design elements. Despite our hard work it wasn’t progressing as we’d liked. As the saying goes, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. One day we’ll shake off the dust and try again for sure.