Groovy Games SDK: Finite Systems isn’t a cookie cutter solution for tactics and strategy games. It goes above and beyond to do things that no other strategy game engine does.
It Doesn’t Get in Your Way
The entire SDK is engine-agnostic. We recognize that you may want to run your game online using a server. Our powerful SDK will let you write your game’s core simulation without tying it to an engine, making it trivial to deploy the same code to your server instances and your game client.
True Voxel Pathfinding
The pathfinding in every tactics games gets the job done, but Finite Systems lets you do much more. It has all of the standard mechanics including difficult terrain and height traversal, but it also lets you implement much more interesting motion mechanics. Tiles can be turned into teleporters, one way doors, can force your actors to move in a particular direction, and more. In addition, while other engines force your characters to stay on top of the tiles, our paths use all six sides of a cube voxel, letting your characters cling to walls, hang from the ceiling and even walk in interesting gravity.
Line of Sight Built Different
Line of sight comes into play for ranged fighters in tactics games, but most tactics games treat the battle arena the same: you can see where everyone is at all times. Our line of sight solution does things differently, turning your map’s terrain into gameplay opportunities. Trees and walls can actually block sight entirely, giving your players entirely new stealth mechanics that other tactics games don’t have. The line of sight is also built to be very dynamic. You can simulate things like fog effects that gradually cause vision to fade over distance, and each side of a voxel can affect sight differently, enabling effects like one-way glass. Imagine a new kind of mage who can create sandstorms not to deal damage, but to hide troop movement.
Size Matters
Tactics and strategy games are usually built the same at their core: humanoids, monsters and halflings may be given different models, but they still each occupy the 1×1 tile that they are standing on. Our system is different and lets you give your actors different sizes measured in voxels. Your game can have a massive ogre that stands 2×2. It can have a spider creature whose 8 legs occupy different voxels. It can have halflings that are actually half the height as other humanoids. These arbitrary sizes and shapes work with the pathfinding and line of sight systems, and you can even let your actors change their shape mid-motion. Imagine a human going prone in the middle of walking to crawl through a narrow tunnel. Imagine a gigantic spider monster shifting its center of gravity by moving only two of its legs. We are excited to see what kinds of things creative game teams can do with these systems.
Saving Artists and Designers Time
Lowering costs is at the heart of what Found Media Games aims to do. Using Unity’s editor you can create graybox versions of the maps you want to use in your tactics game. These grayboxes will let your artists render the final terrain models, your engineers build game systems and your designers play with gameplay mechanics without needing to wait on one another.
Head to the Unity Asset Store to check out this powerful game kit. Join our Discord and follow our socials to learn more about our games and tools and connect with other talented developers.