Star Cadre: Combat Class: From the Dev Diary

Tuesday, 23rd July 2024

Star Cadre: Combat Class was conceived as a simple proof of concept for possible future tactical combat games. Like Ossuary, the idea was to distil the most elementary concepts of the genre into a playable game that I could build upon in future to add more depth. I wasn't sure whether the game would be fast enough on an 8088 processor, particularly since it would need line-of-sight calculations, so an uncomplicated game would prove one way or another whether the idea was practical, without wasting too much effort.

The first planning was put down in 2020. Before much if any code was written, a game jam came along, and I knew that Star Cadre: Combat Class wouldn't be ready in time. So I switched my attention to what I thought would be a simpler project, Barren Planet. Barren Planet was to be a straight port of a game I'd developed previously for another platform, so I thought that it would be brief distraction from Star Cadre: Combat Class. But Barren Planet turned out to be much more than a simple port, and took two and a half years!

Barren Planet itself gave way to other distractions like The Anarchic Kingdom and Team Droid, which did turn out to be more suitable for 1-month game jams, and so I eventually finished Barren Planet. After working on another ongoing project which came to a halt, I was finally able to turn my attention back to Star Cadre: Combat Class in the spring of 2024. From that point it took a few months to finish, test and release the game.

The name Star Cadre: Combat Class is in two parts, as I conceive Star Cadre to be the start of a series of games; if that goes ahead then Combat Class is the first instalment. The fact that the game runs at a reasonable speed on the IBM PC makes it more likely that I'll take this forward in the future.