Floppy Knights – Designing an accessible tactical game

Hi! My name is Christian Scandariato. I’m the lead game designer at Floppy Knights, a tactical card battle developed by Rose City Games. The original concepts for Floppy Knights were rooted in games we grew up with, but we wanted to create something new and different that would help the game stand out by combining tactical gameplay with map strategy elements. Let’s see how that turned out!

“What if we did pre-warsbut with maps?”

Our starting point was riffing on our favorite retro games, such as pre-wars and Final Fantasy Tactics, with a slightly newer design into the breach. A key feature in pre-wars is to have all the information at your fingertips, easily see the entire battlefield and reinforce your army to win battles. The drawing of a hand of cards is random, so I was most interested in the challenge behind the genre mix.

The goal for Floppy Knights allowed a player to plan a perfect round with a random series of actions. This prevents players from planning more than two rounds in advance, which in turn makes the game more accessible and exciting! We also knew we wanted the graphics to be a big draw for the game, using Creative Director Marlowe Dobbe’s strong character designs to represent the armies’ personalities.

Based on our inspirations, I decided on our first combination: A group of unique, individual characters with their own abilities and the ability to strengthen your army. To maintain accessibility, we adopted the idea of ​​a simple army that uses powerful buffs and upgrade cards to introduce the player to the game. This was the focus for our very first army: the plant deck.

The paper prototype

This is where the cards come in! When everything from actions to commanders is made up of cards, we can assign unique abilities to each unit card that generate more action cards. My biggest goal when making games is to always design for things that only video games can do. Generating cards from cards would be really difficult in a physical deck, but easily manageable in digital form.

The best thing about creating a deck is that you can test almost all of the core parts without having to code anything. So I took the core concept (play units, get cards, play more cards) and presented it to the team on paper. After a few months of paper prototyping, this was at its most sluggish Floppy Knights ever was, we solidified the core mechanics and got to the code.

Revision of the mix

Mixing genres brought many strengths, as did concepts that didn’t make it into the final draft. Our focus wasn’t on mixing genres evenly, but on delivering the concepts that showcase the game’s strengths. We wanted to be sure Floppy Knights had enough flexibility to create fun decks that encourage individual playstyles, but not so complicated that players would get confused with too many options.

Being able to move units consistently was the main concern during over two years of development. Playtesters consistently reported feeling that their movement options were restricted, or that they drew entire hands of cards without moving. The easy answer has always been to only allow each unit to move once during its turn, but we felt that doing so would make playing card actions feel less important each turn and wanted to avoid that.

After months of playtesting, we ended up developing a system for our leader units, Commanders, to generate a card in the player’s hand each turn that allowed for a unique move. This gives the player the option of one very powerful card per turn and brings the focus back to personal, unique units. After testing, we ended up getting a round of play testing with no feedback on movement. Success!

By focusing on our core mechanics and always returning to our original inspirations, we wanted to create something unique that will hopefully serve as a first tactical game for younger players and a refreshing look for seasoned veterans.

Floppy Knights is now available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S (via backwards compatibility), Xbox and PC Game Pass! I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed working on it.