For the last few months I've been working on a new project which for the moment I'm calling Tiny Strike, a Counter Strike themed auto battler.

I've been playing CS since Source and have racked up a diagnosable 3900 hours in Global Offensive. I've also been playing League of Legends for far longer than I care to admit, and particularly love their TFT game mode. I wanted to combine these two games into one and see what would come out the other side.

You manage a team of 5 Counter Strike players. These CS players have different traits - some might be better aimers, others are more intelligent etc. In a CS game (abridged to maybe best of 10 rounds) you would manage your teams economy and strategy. You would buy utility/ weapons to best suit your CS players traits, buying more advanced equipment as your earns more money from winning rounds.

After your team wins or loses a CS game, you're brought into a player management area where you're able to buy new players to improve your roster. These new players might be better aimers, make better choices, or have traits that mesh well with your existing team's traits - think TFT meets Football manager.

Tech specs

I'm designing this game as a server authoritative multiplayer game with all of the backend logic written in Golang. I've not got a lot of experience with Go but it's a nice learning opportunity. Long term I'm planning on making the frontend with Godot, streaming over a Go web socket. With a bit of leeway we can call this stack Go Go Godot. Fun!

For debugging, I've cobbled together a pretty nasty looking frontend in React (which you can see in the gif above) so I can see how the operations/ logic play out. You might say this is duplicating the amount of work I have to do, as I'm basically making two frontends. I would agree with you.

What I've got so far

• We've got a tile map version of a couple of maps (I'd like to mention that I brought Cache back before Valve did)
• Players can place characters on the map on spawn tiles (CTs are basically just static turrets and Ts run to a bomb site like idiots)
• If they can see each other, Ts and CTs will shoot each other
• There is a loose notion of carrying/ planting a bomb
• Combat's pretty bad
• Pathfinding's pretty good

Next Steps

I need to finish off the internal gameplay loop of CS players playing a round out. Goals for this are:

• Round phases (pre plant/ post plant)
• Informed, goal driven movement - "I need to retake the site" instead of "I need to walk to cell (15, 43)"
• This is an easy one to get bogged down in so I'm happy to accept a dumb version of this
• Items
• Economy

After those are done the focus becomes more on the wrapper gameplay loop of managing a team in between games. For all of these areas it's important to accept the minimum working version and move on to the next. It's quite easy to get bogged down in complexity but it'll take ages to do this if I focus on vertical development rather than horizontal. Corpo wanker, what happened to you?