Hello, this is the Private Military Manager development team.
Playtesting, Game Experience
It's been two weeks since we've shared any news. We've been so busy making the game that we haven't been able to share updates as often as we'd like. We've had more people sign up for the playtest than we ever thought possible. Thank you to everyone who signed up.
Now that we've cleaned up the build, we're ready to start playtesting. Before we get to the playtest, we wanted to give you a quick overview of what kind of game we're making, what kind of experience we wanted to give you with this build, and what we have planned for the future.
Gameplay
In Private Military Manager, you play as the owner of a mercenary company and you have to run the company and complete your missions. The game is divided into two main parts: the combat part (core gameplay) and the operations part (loop gameplay).
The core gameplay consists of loadouts, mission planning, and combat. In combat, the player sees how the mercenaries participate and contribute to the battle. They must imagine how they can change their loadouts and operational plans to meet the challenges presented to them, and refine them to help their mercenaries perform better in combat and, as a result, complete the mission. Depending on the situation and environment of the mission, you'll need to decide which role you want to deploy your mercenaries in (we currently have five roles), how you want to equip each mercenary, and how you want to utilize their abilities and resources. The experience of successfully completing a mission is a rewarding one, as you struggle to solve the mission and solve the problems that arise while preparing for it.
Combat is an important part of the game, but running your company and preparing your squad to perform well in combat is just as important: You'll need to decide which mercenaries to recruit and how to train and develop them. Mercenaries can be developed through daily training, and perks can be used to make them more effective in specific situations. We want players to think about how to invest their limited resources, including cash and credit, to complete missions.
Over the course of a mission, players will encounter a variety of events and make a series of choices, some of which will help them run their company and advance the mission, but many of which will present new management and operational issues and challenges for players to solve. Just like in real life, unexpected issues may arise just before a mission, or your squad may not build up in the way you initially envisioned. We hope you'll find it exciting and challenging to control or deal with the risks and uncertainties as you complete the mission.
You can familiarize yourself with the game and learn the basic rules of gameplay through the Scenario Mode, which can be started via the "New Game" button. In Scenario Mode, you play as the owner of a mercenary company in a 90s South American setting, taking on multiple assignments. Recruit talented mercenaries, buy weapons, and develop them to fit their roles and characteristics. Observe how your mercenaries perform in battle and plan your tactics to succeed in your missions.
Future plans
A lot more work needs to be done to realize the gameplay experience we envisioned when we first started the project. I'd like to share some of the high-priority things the team would like to do in the future.
- Replayable, or replayable gameplay: In addition to the scenario mode that you can start with a "new game", we're working on gameplay modes that allow you to play the game over and over again and grow your company. We're experimenting with a number of ideas and can't wait to bring them to life.
- In-game interactions: We want to allow players to make simple in-game actions that can affect the outcome of battles. We've prototyped a few ideas, but we don't like them enough to include them in the current build.
I'll also share some smaller, gameplay experience improvements we're working on.
- Failure of management issues, recognition of failure, and retrying: When playing a game for the first time, it's sometimes hard for players to recognize if they're making good progress or if they've reached a point where they're virtually unable to continue. We want to make the game's failure states clear, so that players can see what bad choices they made (or game systems they didn't consider) that caused the problem, and feel like they can do better if they play the game again.
- More interesting routine progression: The training schedule feels pretty interesting at the beginning of the game, but it's not polished enough to make it interesting to play for long periods of time. We want to improve the progression of the schedule from week to week so that it feels more interesting and gives you something to think about.
- UI improvements: We've been working on UI improvements, and we realize that the style and flow of the UI throughout the game is not very organized and we want to improve it.
We've tried to polish the game in a short amount of time, but even the playtest build still leaves a lot to be desired. Over the next few weeks, we'll be gradually giving access to the build to those who signed up for the playtest. Your feedback on the game will be very helpful to our development. We look forward to your feedback.
Thank you.