

Basic gameplay should always be clear and immediately rewarding. Can you play our game without understanding much more than swipe to move, tap to activate? Yes.

Second, fast and responsive gameplay should be accessible to everyone, but reward those who dive deep. Our games have a lot of underlying systems and interlocking factors, so our UI needs to let you intuitively access a lot of information without overwhelming you or bogging you down.


UI design is very important to this quick, responsive feeling. All together, the feel should be fast and snappy, with you in control. The response to your swipes and taps should be immediate. There’s no lag even if poison envelopes some of your fighters while air support drops in reinforcements. One of your units might be killed and his death animation will play, at the same time that another unit moves into position. What we do here is make a lot of things happen at the same time, instead of serially. We don’t want you to have to abandon an exciting match because your name was finally called in the waiting room. We don’t want you to lose a fight because you looked up from your phone to see if the train was near your stop. (See this article about “every-day gamers” for more details). We don’t think that speed should be directly related to time in most of our game modes, because that’s not the right choice for a Snowprint player. We want that, too, but we also want to make it feel fast no matter how much time you spend. A turn-based game does not always make people think “fast paced and exciting.” After all, the virtue of these games is that you can take all the time you need to decide on your next move. That sounds inspiring, but what exactly does that mean to us? We’ve decided that to be THE turn based tactical game on mobile, we need three things:įirst, the gameplay needs to be quick and responsive. ONE: We want to put THE definitive turn based tactics game in your pocket. Today, we’d like to share with you the first of these guideposts for Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus. We’re driving hard to nail down dozens of heroes and special abilities, polishing their animations and special effects, along with developing all sorts of maps with different types of terrain, and, hey, how does all of those abilities and terrain types play out in PVE versus PVP, anyway? In this hurricane of details, we would be pulled to pieces without having a focus, a set of guideposts we keep in mind every step of the way.
