Vaneeza Usman

Astral Armada

Astral Armada is a tactical RPG combat game where the player commands a fleet of up to four ships as they attempt to traverse a procedurally generated galaxy and return home. The player must fight off hostile enemy encounters on a 2D grid using resourcefulness and strategy in a game where many aspects are determined by dice roll, leading to many scrappy, edge-of-your-seat situations. Astral Armada was developed collaboratively with two other dedicated team members. Our collective effort and passion for game development are showcased in this immersive and engaging game experience that we worked together to bring to life.

“We started off with a relatively open idea of a strategy game that introduced dice to try to mitigate some of the monotonies of other grid-based tactical strategy games. While the concept was attractive, it was evident that we had trouble visualizing the concept when only presented in written form, and we found challenges when piecing together a comprehensive concept document that felt complete, exacerbated by the complicated ruleset that a strategy game naturally embodies.What did help was mocking up and running a crude playtest very early so that everyone could at least align on a consistent idea of the game, even if that idea was far from final. The playtests were notably successful, largely due to our innovative approach of using a shared Google Sheet document as the game board. This allowed for easy manipulation during playtests, with another team member controlling the opponent from a separate device, all within the same document.Having a team member simulate the opponent's actions and physically manipulate the ships on the graph allowed the player to focus solely on strategy. This approach facilitated our observations and enabled efficient iteration between testing sessions.This turned out to be quite crucial to determining the exact role the dice would play in the game. Previously, we had mixed ideas on the dice mechanics and would resemble something more like a traditional western RPG “roll for initiative” system. Through these mock playtests, though, we found that the ability to choose and assign dice rolls made for a compelling mechanic that was at once more accessible than a more stats-heavy approach while preserving a good degree of strategy and problem-solving gameplay. This ended up being reinforced in the official playtest sessions where other play testers found the mechanic compelling.”