Grit and Grace

Hi everyone, been a while! I'm making an isometric tactics game called NOMIA.

What's the summary?

It's Final Fantasy Tactics meets Slay the Spire.
It's about the characters I've been drawing, navigating a dreamlike world where things that fade from the collective memory coalesce into places and creatures. It's an exercise in making a cozy fantasy setting that explores lesser-seen worldbuilding elements.

What makes this unique?

I'm focusing on three things that I hope will make for a fun and unique experience.

1. Your hand has two halves.

The left side of your hand represents your Actions, which persist between turns, but have charges and cooldowns.
The right side of your hand represents your Gambits, which are drawn from a deck of cards each turn, and are discarded when played.
You can add to both decks over the course of a run, expressing your playstyle through character building as well as deckbuilding.

2. Your party has two heroes.

You'll always pick two at the start of each expedition -- a Mighty and a Magical.

The Mighty has more Actions.
The Magical has more Gambits.

Each has a unique deck of possible cards.

3. Your enemies have tells.

Enemy intents are shown on your turn, rewarding clever defense.

Intents are adjusted when you play cards, but not randomly; enemies have a goal in mind and will do their best to achieve it, allowing you to counterplay.

You can make enemies reconsider their target by attacking them. A character can play tank for their partner if they're in a pinch.

What am I working on?

I've spent roughly the last four months laying the groundwork for the card battle system, and figuring out a card creation pipeline and art style that would make it feasible for me, one (1) person, to make hundreds of unique and interesting cards.

I hope to achieve a sense of multiplicative game design -- that is, each aspect of the game creates synergies with the others, creating many possibilities and stories.

Next, I'll be working on run progression, and unique map/enemy generation for the different biomes I have in my head.

Thanks for taking the time to read my devlog!

...

(What does NOMIA stand for?

It stands for No One Makes It Alone. I am, ironically, making this alone. But I also like to think of it as a meditation on the fact that even in this situation, I'm benefiting from the work of countless people who have inspired me and laid the groundwork for what I'm trying to do.)

coloured my expression studies

expressions/angles practice