Think you have what it takes to overcome hordes of vampires as your slayer squad battles through Dracula's castle in this turn based tactics strategy?
Inspired by the deep gameplay that resulted from simple rules of my childhood experiences of playing Space Hulk™ this Android mobile phone and tablet game attempts to emulate the feeling of controlling a squad of people around a map despite the threat of seemingly insurmountable odds.
You can grab the game from the Android App Market (this link will only work from your device) or use the qr-code shown on this page.
If you are looking for help on the game then take a look at the hints and tips or game rules summary.
Get involved and please give me some feedback so I can improve the game and make it more enjoyable to play for you and others.
Overview
You take a squad of slayers around various maps, moving one at a time, until you complete, or unable to complete, the map objective.
When you have finished moving, the vampires take their turn. First by entering into the map as puffs of mist even lurking in the safety of these areas biding their time ready to pounce on you when you least expect it. They move around just like you but their agility means they can travel further and can perform more complex moves in less time. As mist they can travel in pacts only revealing their try numbers when they plan to attack or you catch sight of them.
- Three types of slayer: leader, standard and demolition
- Six modes of play: escape, hold, survival, destroy, extract and reach
- Three difficulty levels
- Unique game play
- Battle Count Dracula's army of vampires
- Destructible scenery
- Fond innovative strategies to beat the AI
- Tutorial maps and hints
- Van Helsing and Dracula banter with each other
Level Editor
If I get enough interest I might release the (Microsoft Windows only, sorry) level editor that I built and used to create the maps for the game. I will then look to enable uploading to this website so people can submit and share their creations.
Jamie said...
I like the new updates. I've been thinking more about how hard level 9 is, and the issue is really about getting through a long narrow hallway, especially if there is a corner behind which the vamps hide. There don't seem to be any choices at that point, and it becomes entirely about luck (which is not on your side in Normal difficulty). Not sure how to improve, tho. I'll keep scratching my head.
It's a tricky one I'll agree. I'll spend some time playing that over and over and see if there is anything I can do to swing the odds a little.
I don't want to risk making it that easy though ;-)
Take It Easy
16 Jan 2011 23:52
Albert said...
Downloadedvto my Galaxy S yesterday. A space hulk clon, and a great one, with decent graphics, and good sense of humor.
Nice one Albert, I wouldn't have gotten away with calling it Space Hulk me thinks! Also it gave me license to modify the rules to suit the style of game without getting grief from purists.
It is closer to 1st edition rules than anything else. Had GWS produced a proper version for Android I'd never have written this.
Take It Easy
18 Jan 2011 23:06
Jamie said...
Hello. Me again.
Two general ideas that keep coming back to me:
1. You can side-step forwards and side-step backwards, but you can't actually side-step sideways. I realize that adding this would mess up the nice user interface for movement that appears around a slayer when you activate him, but it seems both illogical and in some cases annoying. If I want to move one square to the side with a normal slayer and still go on alert, I must go forward or back. Actually going one square sideways and facing the same direction requires 3 movement points. It would be great if you could do a 2-point side-step directly sideways.
2. I think it would be cool if you had some kind of command point pool that you could draw on to give additonal movement points to slayers during a level. You could have an extra button, that if you click it, it subtracts one from your pool and gives it to the currently active slayer. You'd set this low, probably just one or two points for a normal level, but it would provide a fun extra tactical option to consider. I feel like old Space Hulk had something similar, but I haven't played that game in almost 15 years, so I could be wrong.
I haven't had a chance to play all the new levels yet, but I really enjoyed level 11. Looking forward to trying out the demolition slayer in the latest update.
Hey Jamie,
1. You're not the first to say this. I prevented side-stepping because the original Space Hulk rules didn't have it and I was concerned that making too many changes to the rules might lose the balance that the inspiration had. I actually have side-stepping in the code but just don't allow for it in the UI. I think the UI can handle the extra buttons by pushing the turning ones outwards and putting the strafe left/right in their place.
2. Well I really wanted to put this in but felt it would complicate the player turn phase. It was a key feature of Space Hulk and you could use the points within the enemy turn. I tried to balance this by added the leader slayers that have an additional 2 actions per turn. Your suggestion of how it could work seems really intuitive so I will look to add this and see how it works.
Thanks again for your input :)
Take It Easy
20 Jan 2011 16:37
Jamie said...
Couple of questions about Demolition Slayers:
1. I tried to attack a vamp in hand-to-hand with a demolition slayer, and the game force-closed. Is the demo-slayer supposed to be able to attack in hand-to-hand, or did the game crash because I was trying something that shouldn't have been legal.
2. Demo-slayers don't seem to force mist clouds to materialize as vamps due to line of sight at range. Is this intended? It seems odd.
3. Are demos better in hand-to-hand than other slayers? I had one that got caught in a jam and he killed like 3 or 4 vamps in a row that got in his face. Is this normal, or did he just get really, really lucky?
1. Eik, not sure what was going on here. The hand-to-hand is automatic when they attack you so I think something else was going wrong here. I've not seen the error log in the developer console so will wait and see what it says, it can take 24+ hours to filter through.
2. My bad, I'll be pushing an update on later today to fix this. I've already put an update on about 3 hours ago so if you see an update right away, it's not going to have this fix in! Check the Recent Updates bit in the market page and you'll see.
3. The only thing that effects melee is when Easy difficulty is selected. He must have got very lucky!
Take It Easy
23 Jan 2011 15:33
Joe Bryant said...
I'm a big Space Hulk fan. Really love this game, thanks for the hard work you must have put into it.
One suggestion - Space Hulk rules calculate LOS for move-and-shoot actions from the destination square, rather than the starting square. E.g. you can turn towards a vampire and shoot him in the face, all in one move. This seems more fun than the way you have it, where the LOS is calculated from your starting position. Any chance of changing this for we Space Hulk purists?
From a UI point of view, I think I'd allow the player to target anything that the slayer could conceivably hit after a move/turn, and then obviously only actually fire if the LOS matches after the action.
Love the game either way, thanks again.
Thanks Joe, it's taking time to get things right but it's tricky finding the spare time at the moment!
Take It Easy
10 Jun 2011 09:56
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Jamie said...
I really like this game concept--it has great potential. A couple of things that I think would improve it A LOT are:
1) Confirmation of End Turn: For some reason, I have a bad habit of accidentally hitting the End Turn button, when I'm either trying to hit the "Go on Alert" button, or sometimes just because I'm moving on from one slayer to the next. And, of course, accidentally ending the turn when your not ready usually ruins the level and forces me to start over. I'd love it if the game asked "are you sure?" after I hit the End Turn button.
2) Faster animations: The game takes WAY too long in between turns, moving clouds and vampires around and watching stakes float along after being shot by slayers on alert. Towards the end of big levels, the waiting for the next turn to begin is almost unbearable. I guess the best thing would be if there was a setting for this, but absent that, just make them all faster. I'll still be able to keep up with what's happening. The waiting is awful.
Otherwise, this game rocks. Keep up the good work, and keep working on those force-close issues. The last update improved things a lot (kudos!), but it still force-closes sometimes when I hit the "Restart Level" button.
Wow, thanks Jamie for your kinds words and taking the time to give me some feedback.
1) I think this is a great idea and something that I will put into the next update for sure, for all of the 5 minutes it'll take to add this feature I know how annoying it can be to hit the wrong button, it really is game over when that happens. I will also be looking to add a 'fat fingers' mode where the action buttons appear larger and easier to hit, people have commented on that too, myself included!
2) You know, in the TODO list for the game "Tweak camera speed" is there but I really wasn't going to bother too much about it. Your comments have pushed that up the list ;) I gotta say I was worried about people missing the actions. The vamps used to begin moving before the camera even reached them but that would mean you'd completely miss some moves. I think some of the delay cannot be avoided as the number of paths the vamp AI look at can take some time to calculate but the AI routines need improving and with that will come quicker methods of kicking the slayers arse I hope.
Because everyone has a different opinion on what they would like I'll be adding a preferences screen so people can choose whether confirmation boxes appear and maybe even a camera speed slider. It will be a place where I can put other settings as they become apparent.
I'll have some more maps ready and tested shortly plus some tweaked graphics too. I'm fearing the map changes because I will need to reset everyones progress back to level 5 at some point. The current crop of maps (beyond the tutorials) are just a random selection and in no particular order.
I hope to have squashed the FC issues now, it was actually pushing the limits of the memory due to the way I was trying to optimise the rendering and path finding. I've completely changed this now so it uses far less, that said I don't think I can make maps any bigger than you have seen in the beta.
Take It Easy
11 Jan 2011 19:07