Hello Indie Devs!  
I have been working on a turn based tactics game for a while now. The current name I've settled on is Barrel Breach Wizards, though that might change as the project progresses. The general idea takes inspiration from Into The Breach and combines it with the barrels in Divinity Original Sin, then sprinkles some dice on top.

[Prototype build](https://minimumviablefun.itch.io/minimum-viable-fun-untitled-crpg) here is a link to my [Itch.io](http://itch.io/) page!

The first image is what the game looks like currently. It has gone through several iterations included in the later screenshots.

At first, I wanted to make a story driven CRPG, that takes inspiration from Malazan's first book, Gardens of the Moon. The god of luck in that book starts some shenanigans and characters start hearing a spinning coin whenever significant events occur. I wanted to take that idea and replace it with dice and make a story about a character getting forced into a sequence of events determined by the roll of dice. That idea however got canned(at least as a game) because I quickly realised a few things, such as having no writing chops and also the scope being impossible to complete for a first time solo developer.

So i decided to narrow things down and make a turn based tactics dungeon crawler. The second image shows the first iteration of trying to make this game. It relied very heavily on dice and walking around to collect them from the map, in order to boost your attacks to defeat a very vague D20 check that favoured the defender, so the attacker is forced to collect dice. It took me some time to understand why games in that genre follow certain conventions, such as fairly predictable combat maths and visualizing walking and attack range.

After playtesting with friends and realising this was a horrible idea i decided to start adding some more predictability to attacks and damage, some displacement mechanics and elements that damage or heal characters on the ground. This is the third image in this post. It was definitely closer to a "game" but still not quite there. The desire to also include some form of story in the game was still there and i kept kind of clinging to trying to

I had watched an Indie Game Clinic video where Doc Joe talked about deciding and not being afraid to pivot his game into something more approachable and fun, even if the original idea was more interesting on paper. That was the point where I reached the decision to drop the story, focus solely on gameplay and make it all about barrels, spells and elemental goo. The dice in the game are still present as a tactical element but there is definitely a more reliable tactical element and the current build, despite being a very rough prototype with various readability and UX issues, conveys the general idea.

Have a play and i'd love to hear what you think!

Barrel Breach Wizards Prototype and learnings from 1 year of solo dev