Tactics Zen was my first try at designing an RTS that could be made by a small team, in a reasonable amount of time. I had studied all the other indie RTSs/RTTs out there, and found that most of them tried to cut the work load by chopping out most of the gameplay features.

This seemed to result in a game that was less fun to play, but still looked good (Tribal Trouble or Trash for example). Conversely, some RTSs stayed 2D, used only singleplayer and used simple or cartoon graphics (even stickfigures). However, these tended to be more fun to play (Super-Energy-Apocalypse).

With this in mind, I decided to design an art style that would require much less work, and lower the costs/time of the game development.

I did like the unit designs and interactions, and the art style, but decided that it would take too long to build an RTS to test them in. So I built TacticsZen as a RTT.

That helped a lot, fleshing out the emergent gameplay (like the heavy tank's shields) and quite a bit of this project carried over into Strategy Zen.

I built the first version of this prototype in seven days, and so I uploaded it to
experimental gameplay.com, where it has stayed within the top 21 games for several months now.

Press F1 and F2 for help in the game. Download here.