Something to Lose
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By Aprone


I tossed together a small idea and am just testing it to see how people handle the game.  I've been playing it, but I use visuals to show me everything that is happening, and when done only in audio the game may be too confusing and no fun to actually play.  I'm probably going to change and adjust a ton of things from this test program, but this will hopefully give me some good suggestions.

The basic idea of the game is that you control 1 or more vigilantes who are fighting crime in the city.  The game is a turn based strategy game, taking place on a grid.  Multiple people can be on the same grid space at the same time, since the grids represent more general ideas such as being near someone or being far.  Normally, each person (good or bad) is able to perform a simple move, and then some extra action, such as a type of attack.  At the time I'm typing this, actions that would normally require a direction (like throw something) just prompt you to enter N, S, E, or W to represent north, south, east, and west.  It's super crude, but works for the moment because I don't want to code in anything more complicated until I'm sure how I want the controls to actually work.

While playing you press Spacebar to switch between viewing mode and controlling mode.  When viewing, you can arrow around the map seeing where things are.  In control mode you are controlling one of your vigilantes.  Pressing N will switch you to the next vigilante if you have more than 1.

When you've done all you want to do on your turn, press Shift E to end your turn.  At this time the enemies will all move and do their actions, which are almost always warned about during your turn.  Your number 1 advantage as you play is that enemies announce what they intend to do on their next turn.  If a big casino bouncer picks up a chair, it will tell you he intends to hurl it west, giving you your turn to deal with that situation.  Perhaps you'll move or attack him so he drops the chair, but when enemies say their intentions it's to give you your current turn to avoid them.

Each of your vigilantes has an inventory of abilities or tools they can use during the battle, but at the time I'm typing this I don't have a way for you to see how many of each ability you have left.  I'll fix that, but like the direction prompts it's something I haven't wanted to sink much time into before I figure out how I actually want it to work.  In short, each time you pick up a bad guy and toss him into his buddies... it may be the last time your guy can do that, haha!  Unless of course someone plays this several times and memorizes how many throws you actually start with.

The menus and story prompts are pretty clunky at the moment, but will hopefully work well enough for people to test.

The first test mission is very easy and is meant to help you get the idea of the game.  You start by creating a character with a very basic set of abilities. 
The second test mission uses 2 pre-made vigilantes who are well stocked with abilities.  The enemies they face are considerably stronger and I can see it being a challenge for many players to survive it.  So this current test of the game has a very easy and a very hard mission to try.  In a perfect world I'd have made something in the middle, lol.

I've noticed that when using Sapi, the mission and turn summary screens don't read the messages.  I'll work on that.

When you are hearing what enemies plan to do on their next turn, ocassionally there are spots where I don't have the game properly translating it into plain english.  It may say something like "Mobster Joe is planning to Loaded" next turn when it means he is planning to load his gun.  Little stuff like that which may sound strange and/or be confusing.

Oh yeah, I don't have any sounds in the game so you can ignore the debuglog griping about them.

Controls:

You can press L during the mission to bring back up the current log of what has happened.
When in the mission log, pressing Escape or Enter closes it.

Z gives a generic list of all of your characters and where they are.
X gives a generic list of all enemies and where they are.
C gives a generic list of all furnature and where it is.
V gives more detailed information about the enemies on the selected location.  Pressing again cycles if there are more than 1 enemies here.
M cycles between enemies on the current tile.  It's extremely similar to what V does... it turned out I had already coded this feature when I was tired, then recoded it entirely from scratch the next day!  When using M you actually get better information about the fighting skill of enemies.  I'll figure out which one I'll keep and which I'll remove later.
N cycles between any heroes you have.
Shift + Escape forces you out of a mission and back to the main menu.  This cancels the mission you were on, so don't use it if you're halfway through a great battle and want to finish it.
Tab cycles through screen reader stuff.

