Unveiling Heresy – my new RTS/RPG hybrid project

After a long period of gamedev hiatus I am ready to announce my new project tentatively called Heresy. It is an RTS/RPG hybrid. I actually started laying the foundations at the end of November 2022. Many of the systems, like combat, movement, building and unit production are designed and prototyped. In this article I would like to share some introductory information about the game as well as the combat system.

Basic information

If I had to do an elevator pitch for the project, it would go like this:

“A tactical RTS/RPG hybrid with fluid and dynamic combat that resembles Total War games, but in a micro scale”.

The game currently features:

• base building,
• resource gathering,
• unit production,
• dynamic replacement of equipment for units,
• dynamic combat system,
• different AI types e.g. Passive, Autonomous, Range, Guardian, Worker.

More information about the design direction will be provided in the following articles.

Combat presentation

The following clip shows the combat sequence between two units. Some basic information for context:

• Hit is based on attack skill of attacker and dodge skill of defender, modified by e.g. weapon stats.
• Armor offers a percentage based damage reduction.
• Animation system takes into account the attack animation and provides proper reaction (hit or dodge). If attacker aims at the head, a head damage animation will be played and the blood will be generated from the head area.
• Weapons are dropped on death and can be picked. This is of course reflected in units’ combat effectiveness.

Without further ado, here is the clip:

In the following weeks I plan to provide additional articles. I would like to go into details about the games that influenced the design of this project. I also want to describe the different systems I designed and how they have been implemented in the Unity3D engine.