Bestiary

A cross between investigative puzzle solving and turn-based tactical gameplay. Escorted by a group of hired mercenaries, you explore a dark forest and document everything you can about its monsters.

• Role: Solo developer

• Context: Master’s thesis project

• Tools: Unity, C#, Photoshop

• Status: Prototype for a thesis project, planned for continued development

Featured in the Prototype

• Turn-based, tactical combat on a square grid.

• Utility AI for all characters, choosing movement and actions based on context

• Elaborate note-taking system called the Bestiary for recording monster details.

• Dynamic and responsive interface that adapts to information recorded by the player.

• Content slice: 6 playable classes, 5 monsters.

Features designed for continued development

• Tavern Hub. Recruit mercenaries, spend currency on supplies, advance narrative.

• Forest Exploration. Navigate a map of the forest, subdivided into distinct biomes like swampland, taiga, and caves, each with unique monsters.

• Node-based Exploration. Traverse the forest by moving from node to node. Each node represents events, encounters, monsters, and more.

• Deeper Monster Taxonomy. New details to discover about monsters, like genus, territory, and behavior patterns, to make the player truly think like a bestiary writer.

What to Notice in video/build

• Reactive Interface. Adding details to the Bestiary immediately updates the combat UI.

• You can choose “suboptimal” tactics to expose monster behavior, then use that knowledge to win later.

• Symmetric design facilitates learning. The monsters behave in the exact same way as mercenaries; you just can’t choose how they move. Experimenting with mercenaries and their actions, and reading their Bestiary entries, lets the player learn at their own pace.

Context

• Player Goal: Fill a Bestiary with information about monsters in a forest by hiring mercenaries to track them down and fight them.

• Core Loop: The player arranges their mercenaries on the battlefield to cause them to use specific action, or to affect the outcomes of the monsters’ actions. They allow the round of combat to play out, and make note of new information about the monsters in the Bestiary. Then the next round starts.

• What makes it distinct: Unlike other tactical games, the point of a combat encounter is not to kill the monsters, but to learn as much as possible about them. That means placing mercenaries in compromised positions, causing them to get hit so you can learn what the monster attack does, or causing their own attacks to fail to keep the monsters alive longer.

Design goals

• Make “learning the system” the main reward. The player should feel motivated to seek information for its own sake, instead of chasing an arbitrary checklist or extrinsic rewards.

• Make the player’s internal process of creating a mental model the game’s main mechanic, using an elaborate and responsive note-taking system.

• Make note-taking conflict with and support combat. The player should feel encouraged to make questionable tactical choices to expose information, which in turn makes future encounters easier.

Constraints

• The experience has to balance two intertwined difficulties: acquiring information vs defeating monsters, while keeping the interface out of the way.

• Difficulty is structurally volatile because information quality (none/partial/perfect/wrong) dramatically changes encounter outcomes.