Motivation For the Game

Tiny Epic Kingdoms is one of my favorite boardgames to pick up and play. I love big strategy games but often don't have the time or the people for a massive game of Twilight Imperium (Sardaak N'orr all the way!). I really like that Tiny Epic is a game I can play in less than an hour that gives a similar experience to something like Twilight Imperium or Dune or any other grand strategy boardgame without dedicating a whole day to it.

Deciding to make this Tiny Epic Kingdoms into a Pico 8 cart came from playing the solo variant at a coffee shop while I was killing some time and realizing it would be fairly simple to implement it into Pico 8.

Development

80% of the development was done within the Pico 8 engine with some of the development done on my little Pico 8 mac with a Raspberry Pi 3 inside! I jumped into VSCode in the last stretch for Debugging the AI and cleaning up tokens. It makes things convenient when you need to mass rename something or look at two parts of code quickly. I still enjoy using the Pico 8 internal editor the most. It's so cozy and nice to be able to do everything in the little program.

Infinite While Loop Debug

I found out I could set a variable within a loop to break out after a set amount of tries. That way I could test a while loop that was running infinitely and print some text without having to change the entire structure of the code.

   while true or i_thing>50 do
   [stuff]
   i_thing+=1
   end

Order of Operations

This project in particular required implementing some features before others. For example the battle system required having the day/night and at least the Patrol action before it would make sense.

Sound Design

This project I learned a little bit more about sound design. Because actions are done quickly by the AI and it is difficult to telegraph the movements, I ended up adding a specific sound to each action the AI could do to try to help players know what was going on if their eyes missed the movement or numbers change.

Other Art

Above are a few pictures I thought could have been cool as a cart image. I especially liked the color one. I opted to keep the cover art simple though. Regardless, here they are!

Things I wish I Could Have Included

One concept that I especially love in Tiny Epic is the explore tokens. They give a sense of randomness and life to the world. I like to pictures how the explore token and the region mix together. Like having a bandit in the plains could mean they are a roaming warband of horse warriors, or something like that. Exploration is a concept often missing from many games in the 4X genre (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) and I really appreciate that they are included in Tiny Epic Kingdoms.
There are a few other things that could have been cool to include, especially more factions, but explore tokens were the ones I would have liked to have included the most.

Final Thoughts

I am really excited to have finished this project and am really happy with how it turned out. I am also excited with my ideas for future projects!