As cliché as the saying might be, it’s an indisputable fact that most stories should best be told from the beginning, so I decided that, before going into any details and dissecting particular features of the game, it would make most sense to tell the story of how things came together in the first place.
2020 had been a rough year for me. I had recently quit my daytime job of 14 years with no new job opportunities inside. At the same time, the construction of our own house was delayed, so we had to move into my best friend’s basement flat at the end of the year as we had already cancelled the rent on our old flat.
However, all that unexpected free time reignited something in me – a desire I had been carrying around since my early teens and my time with AMOS Professional on the Amiga. This, I told myself, was the perfect time to finally get behind Unity and start a proper game! The choice of genre was relatively easy for me – my love of hex strategy games has existed since Battle Isle 2, and was burned inextricably into my brain with Sid Meier’s Civilization 5.
However, working with placeholders didn’t promise too much fun, so I browsed the Unity Asset Store for a suitable graphics set and decided on the hand-drawn individual pieces from the ‘Isle Of Lore 2’ series by German artist Steven Colling.
Even just adding the individual sprites to an otherwise blank scene in Unity gave me plenty of ideas already, making the gears in my mind move and come up with gameplay features. It was the first time I knew I was onto something.
Armed with Steven’s art and following the hex map tutorials shared by Jasper Flick on his Catlike Coding website, Flatlings started out as top-down 2D strategy game called ‘Hexotic Lands’, fully embracing its hexagonal roots by dipping deep into the well of puns. An early version of the first (somewhat) playable build even found its way onto YouTube.
I didn’t have a proper game loop in place – for the time being, all you could do is place different types of locations on a fully randomized grid. But even then some of the basic game mechanisms had already been introduced: certain buildings required specific land types to be placed upon, and locations could be individually expanded by purchasing expansions.
I made some good progress during the first few weeks, adding purchaseable units and a barebones combat system to pit them against each other, pathfinding, a better world map build algorithm. However, development slowed down to a crawl as I started a new job while moving houses at the same time, though luckily it never completely stopped.
One of the major milestones in the making of Flatlings happened in October 2021, though, when I decided to try and see what the game might look like when tilting the world map a couple degrees, and it was nothing short of mindblowing.
I was in love! The flat landmap I had been staring at for the past couple of months had suddenly transformed into a proper world, with its denizens popping out of the landscape like real people (or skeletons). Most of the map was still made up of flat terrain tiles at that point, but I knew there was no way I would go back to the old top-down perspective after I had gotten a taste of that sweet faux-3D look.
During the following months I added new features, some of which I will go into detail in some of the upcoming dev logs, though most importantly I finally dropped the working title and settled on a proper name for my game in May 2021, eventually turning ‘Untitled Hex Strategy Game’ into Flatlings.
There is still enough work to do, but things have never looked better for this small hexagonal world and all its flat inhabitants.
Hey! This looks, at least graphically, interesting. Are you planning to have any kind of early access or a demo?
Hey Jandro, thanks for your feedback! 🙂 Both is planned at some stage, but I will need to get the AI working before that so it will be at least somewhat interesting. Will definitely post an announcement here and on Twitter when that happens.