Echo Tactics

Echo Tactics was a team project developed in late 2016 at RIT's Game Design and Development Masters program. Nathaniel Blair produced. Jon Pulsipher designed. Akshay Rachapudi and Rahul Madyan programmed. Hat-swapping was common.

You play as survivors of a botched experiment that left miles of the surrounding area connected with a hostile alien world. Trek through your world and theirs, fending off grotesque abominations to survive.

Echo Tactics sprang from two questions: "What would it be like to play Chess on both sides of the board?" and "Have you seen Stranger Things yet?" Many on the team had played and enjoyed Turn-based Tactics like X-Com and Final Fantasy Tactics. We were also excited by the challenge of making a player view that could display both sides of the board simultaneously.

In developing the game, we chose to draw inspiration from Rogue-like survival games like FTL. Players are pressured to move forward by a wave of fatal static that advances each turn. They can choose to walk on the safer earth-side or more dangerous alien-side, but can be forced to choose danger to chase after pieces of the key to the next level.

Early designs of the game were communicated through a shared wiki, but we found it more convenient to write up targeted miniature design docs for each milestone. I've uploaded our final mini design doc.