I'm happy to show off the first gameplay for the game I've been building with the help of Claude Code, currently codenamed "SPL Tactics".
It's basically @Splinterlands meets Tactical RPG on a chess board.
The core game loop is:
(1) You draft a team (currently composed of starter units I've built who have a subset of the abilities they have in the core Splinterlands game)
(2) You battle on a 10x10 board against your opponent in a turn-based tactical battle; a turn order determines when each unit acts, and the objective is to kill the enemy team before they kill you
I updated the art style to be simpler / more "board-like". Keep the focus on the cards and the strategy.
So far I've implemented the following:
- Team selection: each side selects 6 units from the available starters
- Turn order determined by speed, attack type, and rarity (like in Splinterlands)
- Units have 3 attack types (melee, ranged, magic) which function similarly to how they do in Splinterlands
- Several abilities, including Life Leech, Dodge, Enfeeble, Impede, and Heal
- Several conditions including Burning and Poisoned
- Debilitations, such as Electrified (affects friendly units within 3 squares)
- Basic terrains (give traversing unit poisoned/burning, heal/cleanse, give power/range boost, block movement)
- Music track & player
- Basic effects (attack, miss)
- Action log
- Graveyard
- Basic AI (aggressive, has basic understanding of all implemented abilities and terrain types)
Stuff that's on the to-do list over the next few weeks:
- Implement way more cards and abilities
- Timer (require player to take their turn within X seconds)
- Obtain cards & stats directly from SPL API (right now I hardcoded them)
- Hive connection (auth will be required for players to select cards from their collection and to play against each other)
- Player vs Player (requires lots of different things including matchmaking)
- Campaign mode (thinking of something like 10 levels with progressive difficulty against the AI), maybe some kind of simple story
There's actually a ton more, but those are some of the big ones.
Looking forward to hearing what you guys think. What would you call this game btw? Any cool ideas? And are there any features you think would be killer features?