A blog!? or Introducing: Paludale

Yup! This is where we'll be putting more in-depth looks into our development, our plans, and announcing new content. Ahem, so:

Hi! Welcome to our humble little corner of the Internet. KoiKup is a very new, very small team; there's six of us, spread around the US and Canada, working on Paludale! The game just reached alpha testing earlier this month and, after a lot of work, we have a working prototype of all the features mentioned in this blog post. As you can imagine, that's a lot of tasks for each of us to juggle to make an entire game. We'll save introductions for another time, though! So, what exactly is Paludale? You might've read by now that Paludale is a creature tactics game, but let's take a moment to examine what that means. First, a bit of general information: a match in Paludale takes place on a field of hexes, or six-sided tiles. Each player enters the match with a team of palu and, judging from the opponent's lineup, picks which ones will be used in the match. The rest plays out like a tactics game, with a few twists!

Simultaneous Action

One of the things that makes Paludale so exciting as a tactics game is that both players' turns are resolved simultaneously. What we mean by that is that if two palu make a move, their speed is compared and then they act in sequence. The most interesting action happens when two palu have the same speed; the palu move at the same time and their abilities go through a set of resolution phases to make sure they don't conflict with each other. That brings up interesting questions! For example, what happens if two palu try to step onto the same hex? Or if one dashes towards the other, but an obstacle appears in its path simultaneously? It might seem a bit intimidating, but we're constantly iterating on how we resolve these situations to keep things as intuitive as possible!

Elemental Interaction

Elements are a big part of creature collection games and we wanted to make them a core part of the tactics involved in Paludale, where our elements are fire, water, plant, earth, wind, and lightning. Each element has a unique set of interactions with the rest and elemental abilities can place hexes of their element on the field. These elemental hexes are used by palu to make use of stronger abilities and give themselves strategic advantages. Some interactions are destructive; using a water ability on a fire hex will replace the fire with water. On the other hand, some are constructive; using a plant ability on a water hex will leave the water, but add to it a stronger variant of our normal plant hex. This kind of interaction allows us to give each element a unique playstyle.

No Randomness

This one is pretty straightforward and might seem like a bit less of a critical component of the game, but we want to make a point to completely avoid randomness. This way the only unknowns on the field when a player is planning out their move is what the opponent will do. Strategy becomes the most important part of the game when it's the only variable!

Hope that gives you a bit of an idea of the game we're making! We really hope you'll tag along with us as we work towards a more polished game for you to play.