When I set about creating Galactic Idle Star Vindicators I went thru a set of design decisions I made in bringing about the final vision of the game. Here they are and why I did them.

Autofiring and controls – The turret on your ship autofires which takes away the need for the player to manually press a firing button / flick a switch / etc in order to do those actions… In the future I may implement a switch to turn firing off if we go deeper into the faction system and such but as of now if something flies within range of your weapons it gets blasted away. I decided on this because I wanted to make the game more accessible to people who usually don’t play these types of games (lower ease of entry). By lowering the amount of controls to manage from 2 (moving, firnig) to 1 (moving) it makes the game accessible to anyone who can swipe.

Also I believe the controls for a game are a huge determinant in how enjoyable a game is (or conversely awkward controls may be a dealbreaker for most people no matter how good the underlying game is (i.e. Dwarf Fortress)). Most games of this genre I’ve seen on Android use the standard virtual joystick setup which requires the phone to be tilted to the side. I did not want to go this route because to make the game more accessible and easy to swap in and out of I wanted the player to be able to play the game without having to rotate the phone sideways. Naturally since most phones are rectangular we hold the phones with the tall side up because that’s how they are designed to be held. Side tilting though possible forces the wrist into an unnatural position (especially if for long periods of time) or forces the phone to lie flat on a surface instead of being held. Intuitively most people I’ve seen use their phones keep it tall side up and never rotate it if making a call or using it for a function which isn’t movie watching. I ride public transit a lot and basically I wanted a game I could play with the minimal amount of fuss – especially if standing in a subway car or the like. The fact this game is a hybrid idle game also plays into this concept of not needing to micromanage controls and have pinpoint bullet hell flying accuracy. With that alternate control schemes are not out of the picture as many players coming in from the virtual joystick genres may want to apply their skills in a new world :). Also I am considering adding tilt controls for 1 handed play in the subway situation for instance. Lastly I will add simple auto flight routines such as a circle or figure 8 for those who want to get intimate with the space portion but not want to manage controls (especially when blasting away ships which are much weaker than the player but not weak enough to just park in one place).

Basically I wanted to make the game more casual (without making the gameplay depth trivial).

The idea for autofire came from a custom Warcraft 3 MOBA map called Battleships which spawned a series of hundreds of derivative maps. It was basically a naval MOBA where you controlled a ship that could be upgraded and swapped with each ship having different skills and weapon layouts etc. Like every other MOBA the ships had skills on cooldown you could execute against the opposing team but unlike other MOBA’s I’ve seen the on board ship weapons (auto attacks) would automatically fire off at the nearest enemy or randomly at an in range enemy. Thus to focus fire on specific targets you had to either relocate your ship to reduce the number of acquirable targets (since they were picked at random) or use line of sight tactics to either block your own line of sight or block your opponent from seeing you. Line of sight tactics let you blast away an enemy ship for instance if you were behind a tall cliff and could see them due to having allies on the other side and they could not retaliate back if they didn’t line of sight you. I found this concept fascinating as it enhanced an aspect of the game (positioning / line of sight) into being a stand alone mechanic while taking away the user’s need to aim and execute auto attacks.