I vowed recently on the development log to spend two more working days on combat and then share a playtestable prototype. Well, I took a little vacation, I had to wrap up another project, and then there was the holiday, so I finally reached my goal today after an estimated four solid engineering days within that broad time interval.

So that’s good news! This is an iOS project that ought to work equally well on iPhones and on iPads. I’ll be distributing this build using the Testflight app, so please visit this link to get registered and send me your device’s unique identifier.

This month’s (well, last month’s) prototype covers the core combat of Vikingr. In practice, it would be situated in a larger, more strategic game of viking household management and political simulation, forming an intense, risky, and uncertain means to fame and fortune. Raiding—or being raided against—is one of the emotional high points of Vikingr. Please keep in mind that all art and UI are temporary, and the introductory screen is best thought of as a “debug menu”. One notable difference between this prototype and my future goals is that not all visits to other households should be raids: even in the context of viking raids, a smart raider would prefer to trade with a household that seemed too tough a fight to pick.

Vikingr requires the use of Apple’s Game Center service. Before you launch this game, please log out of Game Center using Apple’s Game Center app. Vikingr will ask you to log in to a special “Sandbox” version of Game Center, and you should create a new user account for this “Sandbox”.

You’ll need someone else to be playing on their device at the same time; alternately, you can choose “Fake Attack” or “Fake Defense” to play both sides locally. If you do play on the network, I highly recommend WiFi over 3G connections—I haven’t put much effort into resolving bugs with 3G multiplayer yet.

For now, everyone is in Iceland and the only valid attack location is Iceland. If the UI tells you that there’s no one to raid in Iceland, go ahead and “Fake” it.

Once your raid begins (or once someone raids you!), tap one of your four vikings (with the green circle at their feet and green names) to activate him. Once active, you can change the direction he’s facing with the arrow buttons or change his combat stance to “Reckless (Attack)”, “Prudent (Attack)”, or “Cautious (Defense)”. There are also two buttons behind the character; the grey one surrenders and the red one flees. In either case you lose control of your viking, but they might escape the fight with their hide intact. Viking culture looks down on retreat—even though your viking’s surrender may be rejected by your opponent (with deadly consequence), at least he won’t live with a reputation as a craven coward.

To move one of your vikings, drag him with your finger. Valid movement destinations will light up blue. Move your finger to another hex and release it to start him moving. After this movement, you may notice that a number on top of the viking is slowly decreasing; this viking cannot move again until this “fatigue” counter returns to zero.

A viking in an attacking stance will strike at anyone in front of him and will turn to face any attacker. As he deals wounds to others (or as he is wounded!), combat messages will appear. Don’t get too distracted by individual encounters—you can use the many vikings at your disposal to gang up on an individual enemy or to split up brawls into less dangerous skirmishes.

If a viking receives too much damage to one of his six body parts (head, torso, left arm, right arm, left leg, or right leg) it will become crippled and then ruined. A ruined left arm prevents a viking from blocking with his shield, and a ruined right arm keeps him from attacking. A viking with no arms will surrender automatically. Damage to the legs will reduce the viking’s movement radius, and ruination of the torso or head will result in death.

The raid is over when all vikings on a side are fled, surrendered, or killed. Afterwards you may read a textual summary of the battle’s outcomes sorted by each viking’s perspective.

A future prototype will target these combat results. It will recognize patterns in the combat and movement record and grant vikings titles, epithets, stats, personality traits, and other narrative outcomes based on their relationships to each other and to their enemies, and present them in a more exciting format.

Recently, I shared this design log with my industry advisor. His response suggested that I focus less on the intricacies of a detailed combat system and more on the important narrative goals of the project, abstracting combat as necessary. As I understand it, the concern is that if there are too many choices in and too much design emphasis on combat, it will overshadow the rest of the game in the players’ (and possibly the designer’s) minds.

That said, I want to take this opportunity to justify my design-time expenditure on combat. The importance of feeling like a Viking and the need for compelling low-level gameplay are clear, but perhaps an examination of the perceived need for a robust simulation of raiding is in order. My goal for Vikingr’s combat mechanics is to drive home the sense that fighting is both glamorous and dangerous, drawing a contrast between the slow, steady, safe progression of farming, trading, and political games with the meteoric rise and precarious position of the raider. To that aesthetic end, maybe there is a more abstract interpretation for conflicts between two groups.

My plan at the moment is to spend two more engineering days on the system I’ve already paper-prototyped (and spent some time programming), taking the shortest route from what I’ve got (matchmaking, movement, networking) to a start-to-finish combat scenario with some narrative outputs. Specifically, I’m thinking of some acknowledgements of recognizable patterns: combat style preferences, turnabouts, cowardly or brave acts, and so on–or at least the seeds of these kinds of reports.

If, after two days of design and engineering effort, combat looks like it will continue to be a timesink, I’ll put in some hack and get on with things. That, too, is something I need to learn.

The latest incarnation of Vikingr is on the iPad. I’m now designing from the bottom up rather than the top down, thinking about the nuts and bolts of a satisfying core combat loop rather than the abstract motivations of narrative. Combat in Vikingr is risky and in no way a default decision, just as in the historical record (trade was a wiser move when the opponent was formidable, though less glamorous). To provide a less micro-managey outer loop, players will control a whole household rather than an individual, and this change should also help mitigate the displeasure that comes from loss of life. Once the decision to raid is made, the player selects a target (one of the Viking lands: Denmark, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden) and a match is made with another active player through Apple’s Game Center service.

During a raid, each player directs a group of Vikings in battle by adjusting their stance (reckless, prudent, cautious, or cowardly) and moving them around a hex grid in soft real-time. Characters may act whenever their fatigue counter reaches 0. Any action increases fatigue, and fatigue decreases on its own over time. When a character in an attacking stance comes near an enemy, they fight until one of them dies or moves out of the way.

On average, reckless attacks beat a conservative, prudent attack; prudent strikes best a cautious defense; and a cautious defense finds opportunity in a reckless offensive. Battle is not about probable outcomes, however: an attacker who strikes from behind or merely gets a lucky hit can pull out a victory despite a poor choice of stance. The Valkyries don’t always choose the best man to win the fight; sometimes they want him in Valhalla. Cowardly flight will lose to any attack, and it provides a much greater mobility along with its social stigma.

Vikingr's basic movement interface

On the life simulation side, the fine-grained week structure may be replaced with twelve months or four seasons per real-world day or, possibly, a system where characters become occupied and undirectable for a certain number of real-world hours while undertaking tasks such as farming, crafting, or travel.

I hope to implement the core risk/reward activity of combat and the basics of the other elements needed to support it (deciding when and where to raid and the basics of the life simulation interface) by the end of the month.

Originally, I designed Vikingr as a sort of “Viking Wars”—a turn-based, asynchronous social game in the vein of BBS or text-heavy web games (e.g. Legend of the Red Dragon, Archmage) or, more recently, hybridized graphical games like Mafia Wars. This would progress at a pace of one year per day, granting players 52 turns per day, and subject characters to the ravages of age and permanent death so that players would move on to a new character roughly once per month. I would also introduce additional limitations to emphasize the quotidian nature of most of Viking life: For example, raiding and long-distance trade expeditions had to be conducted when little could be done at home, so activities like farming would be performed during springtime turns and the expeditions would take place in summer.

My goal was to take the above, sprinkle in some social mechanics, and play up the fact that everyone was contributing to one massive shared history with their gameplay actions. By giving players a little context for these histories, we could be off to the races with a novel web-game that doesn’t just permit player-generated stories to emerge but acknowledges them and incorporates them into its gameplay.

Unfortunately for me, when I started prototyping all this—a website, a server in my programming language of choice, a bunch of equations and formulae, decisions made for scalability’s sake, research into hosting and APIs and this and that, lists of features to implement—I realized that I was thinking like an engineer, not a game designer. So I went to paper and did a sort of simulation RPG about budgeting one’s time between preparing for raids and going on them. This felt far more like accountancy or event planning than viking, so it forced me to reexamine my base assumptions.

Ultimately, I came to an inescapable conclusion: “Take a new technology and apply it to an existing genre in an uncommon fictional context” is an incremental way of thinking. There’s a time and a place for incremental improvement, but a 12-month MFA thesis is emphatically not it. So I went back to the drawing board: If I wanted players to create and share stories about being Vikings (and to use my game and my technology to do it), what must I help them to feel? The answer to that had to merge historical reality with literary fantasy.