Devlog 1. Introducing myself and Swingmeter mechanics

Hi all!

The page for ”Guardians of Gridvale” has been up for two weeks now and I think this is the perfect time to introduce myself!

My name is Luis and I'm the sole developer of this game. I am 40 years old (yeah I know 😂), have a wife, two small kids & two small cats plus a day job where I program iOS apps. What little spare time I have is mostly poured into the development of this game. A game I hope you guys are as excited about as I am! “Guardians of Gridvale” is pretty far from done so don’t be afraid to give me your opinions about things since your feedback will help shape the end product and is of great help to me!

I’m gonna try to post regular updates here going into details about what I'm working on but first I want to talk about a feature that I knew would be divisive: the swingmeter.

The feature The swingmeter appears when the heroes perform some types of attacks. It’s a moving slider that is stopped when you click the mouse and is one of the many factors that decides how much damage an attack makes. It’s important to note that attacks don’t “miss” so even if you perform poorly on the swingmeter mini-game you will still do damage albeit slightly lower. You can score a critical, a normal or a poor hit.

The "controversy"Some players absolutely hate timing mechanics and feel that one of the main reasons for playing tactical turn based games is because they are games about thinking and not reacting. They tend to assume that mechanics that test your reflexes in this sorts of games are more important than tactical thinking but that's not true at all in this case.

The details about how damage works There are multiple factors affecting your damage output in the game: equipped weapons & armor, passive and active skills, tile bonuses, tile penalties, defense bonuses from allies… I’ll talk more about all of these at some other time but the takeaway is that the swingmeter adds a damage bonus/penalty after ALL of these factors have been applied and it won’t be an exaggerated factor. Maybe +/-25% or something. The timing mini-game was always meant to be a bonus, NOT a requirement!

The fallback If you happen to be one of the player’s who isn’t too happy about the swingmeter I just want to make it clear that the feature can be turned off in the options. The damage bonus/penalty will then be applied randomly and function the same as in most traditional turn based games. Just random damage in other words. It will also be possible to tweak the speed of the swingmeter if you like it but find it too challenging.

All of this will need lots of balancing and iterating and might change a lot before the final version though once people start testing the game 😅

Until next time and thanks a lot for following my progress!