Why Bootsnake Tactics?

TURN BASED LOVE

We’ve been fans of turn based tactical games for as long as we remember. Not just a couple of them. Pretty much all of em. Final Fantasy Tactics, Silent Storm, Fallout (1, 2, and Tactics), Heroes of Might and Magic, Jagged Alliance, XCOM, and many more.

I know what you’re thinking. “Really bold stand. Loving some of the industries most beloved titles. Really going out on a limb, Bootsnake.” So true, random non-crazy Internet person. But there’s a reason so many love these games. They’re so damn fun and tickle your brain all the right ways.

At Castle Bootsnake, we play a lot of board and miniature games. (Yeah, we nerds.) We’ve played a bunch of Games Workshop games like Warhammer 40000 and Necromunda. We’ve been playing WARMACHINE and HORDES for years. There are stacks of rulebooks scattered around our halls for all sorts of games.

We knew a long time before Bootsnake was even a glimmer in our handsome eyes that we wanted to make a turn based combat game. It was just figuring out when.

BOOTSNAKE COMPANY PHILOSOPHY

We began Bootsnake to make small, fast, awesome games. And make a bunch of them. We failed at this.

Hard.

Originally, Containment didn’t have a campaign. Then people thought it would be cool to do this one thing. Then that thing. Then the other thing. And it got too damn big. We were way past our initial schedule. But we realized something in that process. We want to make bigger games. Bigger than our britches in some ways. Whatevs. Its fun and gets us going. A few times a year we find something that is going to be really really hard and we say, “Fuck it. Let’s just do it anyway.”

That led to Containment being awesome and polished. 15 hand built levels, 150 hand built blocks, dozens of physics based kills, boss fights, and more. Come to think of it, we probably should have had the kitchen sink be one of the random items that drop just to fit the metaphor.

POST CONTAINMENT

We weren’t going to make another puzzle game next. Not because we don’t love them (we pretty much bet our entire lives on a puzzle game), but because we love lots and lots of games. We need to see Bootsnake tackle another genre. Now we need to figure out our new hotness.

We had a bunch of design talks, wrote down some ideas, started working on an idea, ate some gyros, and repeated the process. We had a few ideas we really liked. We just had to pick one.

Making a tactics game is going to be a lot of work. We talked about making some games in other genres that we had prototyped. Our final chat had us deciding to make a different game than tactics, then saying “Fuck it. Let’s just do this. We might not get a chance to make another game at Bootsnake.”

GOING BIG

So here we are. We are making a game in one of our favorite genres. We are doing it in our own way by making it big in our own way. And we are building it knowing it could be our last game.

This game will be fun. It will be unique. It will be awesome. It will be Bootsnake.

Talk to you guys soon,

Bootsnake

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Postscript. Here are some images of the prototype we took to PAX East.