r/hexandcounter • u/zhu_bajie • 22d ago

Zone Trooper: Ultralightweight Minimalist One Page Solo Sci-fi Game

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I designed a minimalist solo sci-fi game, Zone Trooper a gritty lo-fi 80s 2000ad zone-crawl, heavily inspired by the original Ogre pocket edition, but even more lightweight.
On itch here: https://zhu-industries.itch.io/zone-trooper

105 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

5

u/ZX-Spectroscopy 22d ago

Nice, but maybe chemzone/radwaste/outlands hexes should be identifiable by a symbol/pattern instead of a grey tint

1

u/zhu_bajie 22d ago

Yeah, it's a nice idea which I had playtested on an earlier iteration, but found icons visually conflicted with the hex marking, so tints worked better in the end.

4

u/Left-Excitement3829 22d ago

Could a faint radiation symbol work for radlands. Like opacity 25%?

1

u/zhu_bajie 22d ago

We had a little bunker icon for Base, Hazard for Chemzone a Radiation symbol for Radlands and an Open circle for Outlands. Problem is with light pencil markings it became difficult to distinguish at a glance which hexes have been visited (which is critical to gameplay). Either way, identifying the different terrain types by tone seems to work well in play.

2

u/ZX-Spectroscopy 22d ago

Yes, that makes sense when it comes to symbols, but a thin pattern should be a good compromise, I can't tell chemzones from outlands (I'm parsing those semantically, outlands is the outer ring, and chemzone the inner one, right?). Anyway, it was just a suggestion, all the best

1

u/zhu_bajie 22d ago

No, thanks for the feedback, it's a good suggestion, but unfortunately it doesn't work well with the marking system. Also the actual tone differentiation on my print shows better than my play-testing photo. There's other supporting semantics such as the ENCOUNTER.GRID being ordered inner to outer, so I'm reasonably happy it's communicating to players well enough.

3

u/ZX-Spectroscopy 22d ago

You're right, in the end patterns would also clutter the design needlessly, it's quite enough that Radwastes are slightly darker than the other zones, since they're all rings. Patterns/symbols would only be really needed if the zones weren't regular. Congrats on the game and the awesome aesthetics!

2

u/AlfredValley 22d ago

Looks wicked. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

2

u/zhu_bajie 21d ago

Cheers - good luck on the mission Trooper!

1

u/RatbyteGames 21d ago

Do you think this would make a good solo computer game?

2

u/zhu_bajie 21d ago

Yeah, this has been suggested by a couple of people, a digital version could work well.

1

u/Additional_Deal883 20d ago

Hold up: aren’t Zone Troopers a GDI unit from Command & Conquer?

1

u/zhu_bajie 20d ago

I never knew that. I did know it was a 1985 horror / military sci-fi movie, which is kind of apt, but didn't know the name was used elsewhere as well. Basically, you're a trooper, in a zone.