The Game
Spies & Soldiers is a fast paced strategy game that plays out across beautiful watercolor maps of a procedurally generated kingdom. Seize control of castles and cities as your empire expands across each new world, but be sure to keep in mind the balance of power. While your soldiers’ swords may conquer the land, it could be your network of hidden spies that wins you the game.
This online multiplayer digital boardgame focuses on simple mechanics from which complex strategies can grow, where the dual forces of military might and subterfuge must be carefully balanced.
Key Features:
- Turn Based
- Online
- Fast Paced
- Simple Mechanics
- Procedural Maps
- Multiplayer
- Diverse Tactics
The Team
We are two brothers, Jim and Ben Batt, and have been making games together for as long as we can remember, from boardgames to videogames to the kind that involve hitting each other with sticks and hiding from things nobody else can see. Both of us have years of experience in the game industry, but it’s time to do our own thing. We share a fascination with both the elegant simplicity of boardgame mechanics and the world building that is possible with procedurally generated videogames, and it’s our plan to bring these two things together in an unholy conjunction that will shake the heavens. Or at least, be fun.
Ben has wizardly coding skills and often solves complex mathematics in his sleep. For most of recent history he has worked on the FMOD audio middleware, which is used in a startlingly large percentage of the world’s games. He now operates as a freelance code mercenary and most of his life is [redacted].
Jim is a game designer, writes real good, and doesn’t seem to sleep at all. He honed his skills working at various big name studios, then struck out and formed a freelance design consultancy well before that was the cool thing to do. He also practices the black art of stopmotion animation and directs films.
The Plan
Having consulted various signs and portents, we realized that the time had come for us to start releasing our own games. So we decided to go back to the kinds of things that got us excited in the first place. The seeds of our design philosophy have been growing since those first games we hacked together as kids, whether it was from cardboard tokens and watercolor maps, or the excitement of programming ASCII simulations on the green monochrome of our first computer. Fuelled by these inspirations, we started working on Spies & Soldiers – the first in a series of games we want to develop, exploring the cross-pollination of procedurally generated elements and digital boardgames.
One thing that has always been great about boardgames is how expansions work – a small box that comes with a few extra pieces and some additional gameplay mechanics that can be added to the base game, or even combined with other expansions. We want to explore this model with our releases. Rather than hide away in secret, working on a complex game that will take years to be finished, we want to try releasing a series of smaller games and expansions that will slowly build toward something bigger. To try a modular approach to design, keeping each release simple and engaging while building on the previous developments.
Spies & Soldiers is a touchstone for the kinds of games we want to explore, a first step in an ongoing adventure.