Over the last few months, much of my time has been put towards a generic strategic/tactical grid based engine for creating a range of TBS games.  Primarily it was created to support the development of Lost Company and it’s doing a fantastic job of modelling the rules there, but it’s always had the ability to do much more.

When coming back to Isochron after working on the engine for so long, I took a stocktake of what could be upgraded in Isochron to make use of the new technology.  The bad news was that nearly everything needed to be updated to utilise the new tech – the tactical engine, the pathfinding, the LOS engine, the GUI, and the non-existent AI to name a few.  So I started rewriting Isochron from scratch and pulled relevant bits from the old project.

The good news is that with the new features of the game engine, I was up and running with a tactical prototype tool that provides a playable Isochron + AI opponents in about a weekend.

So you can move around, the Line Of Sight updates as you go, you use up TUs and can shoot at enemies (with accuracy calculations that make it harder to hit units further away).

When you end your turn the AI will hunt down anyone who gets too close.  And the levels are generated by piecing together parts from the Isochron Module editor (a download is still coming, but waiting on some art first).

There are still a few vital pieces missing to make it a bit more engaging, but it’s now very close.  When I have time in between Lost Company work over the next few weeks I’ll be porting them across or implementing them.  Some of the things are : Redo the unit equip screen so you can choose weapons, Implement opportunity fire for when units move in your field of view (currently only happens on melee attacks), doors that can open/close and bullets that hit surrounding terrain/units when they miss (the physics based bullets aren’t moved over yet so each unit can only hit or miss).