Would you believe me if I told you that REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat was a game nearly 5 years in the making?
Though its come a long way since the idea was first developed, and hopefully has a longer way to go, making REDLINE into the card game it is today has had plenty of ups and downs along its journey. Today I want to focus on the development path of the game starting from its origins as a mobile game (of all things) and ending with the expandable card game it morphed into. Next week I will dive into detail on the design inspirations for REDLINE and how they impacted gameplay.
For REDLINE, as you will see, is the amalgamation of many wild dreams and games far greater than the sum of its parts.
A long time ago in a galaxy far away…
It was all the way back in late 2015 when I had played my first game of Fantasy Flight’s X-Wing Miniatures. A family member had bought into the game and being a huge Star Wars nut, especially for its spaceships, I had been wanting to play since I first saw the game’s beautiful plastic models at my local game shop. Though I lost my first match, I was instantly hooked by the fast and tight gameplay centered around the game’s use of hidden dials for maneuvers. And even though it was a space dogfighting game, the gameplay reminded of tabletop Battletech, which was a bit of a childhood obsession of mine as you will see next week. Being able to plan and execute X-Wing movements in secret and simultaneously felt a lot like playing double blind Battletech to me. Double blind Btech was a complicated system of play that required two identical maps and a judge of all things. The judge’s job was to act as a referee to coordinate the unseen movements between the players playing on each map and recreated the fog of war during battle. It was an awesome way to play, but the setup required was lengthy and games took even longer to finish. Still, it was always a blast to experience.
The main problem I faced was, as much as I loved X-Wing, I was also dead broke at the time and so unable to purchase the models needed to create and upgrade my own fleet of A-wings and X-wings. Gaming sessions with it were few and far between, but I had been bitten by the bug and devoured game content online to get my fix of it as a poor substitute for space dogfighting.
It was while I was at work one day on break that I had the idea to see if I might find an online mobile alternative that would allow for the free flowing maneuvers of X-Wing in a small turn based tactical setting. I was bored and jonesing for some X-Wing goodness plus the idea for such a game seemed like a no brainer to me. Even if it wasn’t spaceships, surely something like that had to exist in the app store that could become my version of X-Wing lite.
The problem is, there wasn’t anything close. And for some reason this really angered me. It seemed so obvious that a mobile device would make a great platform for a simple swipe to move combat game, yet none I could find existed. And trust me, I spent days looking. Sure a lot of games with hex or square based maps, but none had the free flowing movement I envisioned. Eventually my frustration/obsession grew to such a level that I reached that dangerous departure point and famous last word of many, “if you want something done right, you might as well do it yourself.”
And just like that, I decided to make a mobile game. With no experience. No coding background. No art assets. No connections. Just dumb ambition.
I mean, how hard could it be?
REDLINE Mobile
The idea is still a simple one. Make a little turn based 3d mobile game where instead of hexes or a checkerboard, you swipe movement paths for your units to follow. Think of a scaled down and turn based League of Legends is how I always described it. That’s really all the REDLINE mobile game was supposed to be.
The problem was how do you make something like that with no video game design experience at all? And as you just read earlier, no budget to speak of either as I was too broke to buy even a TIE fighter.
Well geez, this would be trickier than I thought.
So, with nothing except an idea to go off of, I did the one thing I was semi-decent at, writing. I spent weeks writing pages upon pages of design documents to detail what REDLINE the mobile game should be. Immediately I knew the game would be built around mechs as my first impressions of X-Wing gave me fond memories of ordering giant plodding robots into combat. Plus that setting seemed a better fit for a turn based game than zippy space combat. In this game, players could win or purchase packs of cards to upgrade their robots (not yet efreets) with better weapons in a deep customization system that would have been a mini game onto itself. Simple, but very cool stuff.
By taking the time to write and describe the vison for what I wanted REDLINE to be, I was soon able to share it with and find a small team of hobbyists online with the skills I lacked to actually make a video game. I got incredibly lucky early on when I stumbled across Stephen Huda who already had a portfolio of amazing looking mech designs online and had actually worked on Btech in the past. With him on board (and I still don’t know exactly why except that Stephen LOVES to make mechs) we churned out some initial efreet designs that in turn attracted artists which then attracted modelers and coders and soon, we had a little indie game studio. Saving Throw Studios was born.
The problem was, and it should have been apparent day one, but stubborn ambition blinds you to many things, making a mobile game was incredibly difficult work! It takes time and dedication and expertise and money to put anything on the app store. And although we actually had a playable prototype of REDLINE made with animated Rabbit efreets shooting missiles at each other, we had pretty much reached our breaking point. Without funding to get to the next level, a prototype is all the REDLINE mobile game would ever be.
So we launched a stealth Kickstarter to try and get funding as that seemed to be what all the cool kids were doing back in 2016. And to no real surprise, it was a total failure. Looking back, asking for donations for a free mobile game was probably a bridge too far, lol. To no ones surprise, we canceled the project a few days after launch having blown up spectacularly on the launch pad for nobody to see.
Post Kickstarter Blues
Though we tried to keep the mobile game alive after the Kickstarter, it fell apart and for that I will solely put the blame on myself. Looking back at the time, my personal life was falling apart and though I was proud of the work and time the REDLINE team had put in to make the idea behind it a reality, I wasn’t able to hold it together.
And so as these things so often do, the mobile project slowly eroded away into nothing What we built and should have been something to be proud of instead came to feel like an embarrassment to me. The project had come so far having started from virtually nothing and know would go back to nothing when all was said and done.
But what really kept me salty though, more than anything else, was what a waste it had all been. Through it all, REDLINE was turning into a really cool near future world that looked interesting and unqiue. The efreet designs and the early game art we had on hand all looked amazing. There was an identity to REDLINE, small as it was, and it just felt like such a waste to have it all end up as nothing. Deep down, I hoped that one day another push could be made with the efreets and do them justice, though when that would be and what it would even look like I had no idea.
The Fog Of War
In the years since the original Kickstarter failure I had become more engrained into playing Magic: The Gathering. My collection of cards became modest now that I had more personal stability and my gaming group and I would regularly duel Friday nights or anytime really their wives would let them. Like with X-Wing before, I devoured MTG content like articles and podcasts to get my fix even when I wasn’t playing and really loved the game for everything it was. Again, I was obsessed with something.
Fast forward to early in 2020 and REDLINE was heavy on my mind again. When thinking of ways to bring the game back I had toyed frequently with the idea of making it a card game. It didn’t hurt REDLINE already had a ton of high quality art on hand from mobile game development so a card game always was a natural fit. But without any way to make it feel and play unique, I had little interest in pursing the idea. However, what I did have interest in wondering was what would a card game would look like with simultaneous combat. And an actual map to play on that would open up room for actual maneuvers. Could you incorporate the fog of war into a card game with justice? What about a game with a fold out paper map players could move cards around on like they were plastic miniatures? Or a miniature game but with cards for stats instead of paper character sheets? Ultimately it boiled down to the idea of if you could you merge the mechanics of a card game with the feel of a tabletop wargame and do justice to each? That was really the genesis of the idea behind what REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat would be.
So, I mulled and turned those ideas over in my head slowly as the core mechanics behind this new version of REDLINE started to form. However I didn’t have long to sit on them , as in just a few weeks the COVID-19 lockdowns began.
Social Distancing
REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat is very much a Corona baby. While stuck indoors with little else to do when social distancing I got to work and was able to crank out prototypes of what REDLINE would look and play like now as a card game. In just a few months of lockdown we were able to refine the core gaming concepts that would have easily taken a year otherwise. COVID strange as it sounds, was a blessing in disguise, or if nothing else, an opportunity that would no go wasted. And as with the mobile experience before, the game snowballed. Every bit of work put in allowed us to expand and grow with new talent and artists to add to the dev team.
It wasn’t long before we were ready to share our project with the world again on Kickstarter, but this time I would go slow and build and and hype the project up right instead of launching out of the blue as before. Even though the original failed, I had learned those lessons and taken to heart just how much work is involved in marketing a game successfully. Doing so was easily as much work as creating Tactical Card Combat itself and again, if not for the social distancing of the Corona pandemic, any idea of Kickstarting when we did would be nearly impossible. There were also some reservations we had about launching a crowdfunding project in the middle of the pandemic, but what we had felt strong enough that I thought we had a good chance. For even though REDLINE was an indie game project, we never wanted it to look or feel like one. Or, that was the goal at least.
REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat launched on Kickstarter on August 3rd, 2020 and successfully funded 32 days later on September 4th. Easily it was one of the best highlights to my 2020 and an overall amazing experience to share with so many awesome fans and supporters who came along to join us for the ride and understood what we were trying to make. It was really humbling to see the positive reactions from our backers.
And in many ways, our funding was a bittersweet return I felt, to where REDLINE first began, and failed, as an idea nearly five years ago. If at first you don’t succeed…
In next week’s article, I’ll dive deeper into the design inspirations that helped to shape REDLINE: Tactical Card Combat into the game it is today.
Dreams don’t come with an expiration date.