Call of the Lowland Hundred

Call of the Lowland Hundred is a short Tactics RPG game where the player fights through encounters of deep-sea beasts while utilizing hourglasses to time travel which can undo moves and take turns early. By commanding their 3 characters “The Athlete”, “The Doctor”, and “The Mechanic”, the player will have to devise strategic approaches to the dangerous encounters while using their hourglasses carefully.

Conception

When the team conceptualized Call of the Lowland Hundred we knew only one thing, we wanted to make a little RPG game. The team used a random game idea generator to quickly set us on a path that inspired us, and we decided on the prompt “A war game where you explore underwater cities over a few thousand years”. We conceptualized a mix between timed overworld traveling and timed tactics gameplay combined with a time travel mechanic that allows players to travel forward and backward in time by thousands of years. We had to cut overworld mechanics but outside of the lack of overworld, what we ended up with was a solid chunk of what we had planned. Thematically we considered how to make the visual direction interesting and we thought a very dark palette was necessary as the environment was deep underwater but we also wanted our character designs to be eye-catching and so we took inspiration from old and unusual-looking diving suits to express our character purposes.

Development

This project was a test run for my team of 5 where we worked on a constrained short-term project to test out how well our theoretical team worked together. Fortunately for us we believe this project was a great success and this group stuck together for our final game project at Sheridan. My responsibility for this project was primarily to work on the creation of our A.I. logic that combats our players. A.I. was the one part of the project that no one else wanted to do so I decided that I’d work on it. When I designed the A.I. the design was purposely made to be possible to scale down should we run low on time and I unfortunately did have to cut some advanced functionality but I was aware of that possibility and the final product was still very good in my opinion. This challenge didn’t come without its share of roadblocks though, a memorable problem that was solved happened when trying to tell the A.I. to pathfind to a space it already occupies. This problem of getting the A.I. to stay in place became troublesome because it would lock up the state machine into thinking that the pathfinding algorithm can not give a path for the selected unit to stay in place. This error was solved with a bit of creative thinking as instead of revising our pathfinding algorithm to view staying in place as a valid path, I realized that it would be much easier to temporarily declare the tile of the A.I.’s selected unit to be unoccupied before finding its potential paths. This fix prevented us from having to revise the pathfinding algorithm which would have cost us a lot of time. If you’re interested in trying out this game, you can download Call of the Lowland Hundred here.