The conclusion of The Eighth Day’s mechanical and story backstory! This is Andre Hernandez once again to tell the tale!

When I ended Pony Tactics, it was with the intention of going straight into an original title. Several My Little Pony fangames at the time were being sent cease and desist letters from Hasbro so that also helped the decision. I had several ideas for an original story, most of them involving sci-fi settings with some fantasy elements. This was a pretty far cry from the medieval fantasy settings that Pony Tactics was going to be set it but I felt confident in it.

The original story for The Eighth Day, which at the time was being called Spectrum Tactics, was that: in the far future an intergalactic war between several alien races escalated to the point where they started doing crazy genetic experiments on their soldiers in an attempt to one up each other. These soldiers eventually won one side victory, but after the conflict they were so scared of these guys they tried to kill them all. Fast forward a bunch of years and we have the main character, an alien cop of a space colony, uncovering that there are still several of these super soldiers alive. They then start infecting normal people with their abilities so they have abilities too, including the main character. The rest of the story involves the main character trying to find out the main motivations behind these events.

I knew that I wanted to do something different with the mechanics of Spectrum Tactics. I had been playing a lot of Dota 2 at the time and the idea of abilities being linked to a cooldown instead of a mana bar in tactics games enticed me. This, I felt, would allow us to make larger levels since, in theory, the cooldowns for abilities would be shorter than the time it took to recharge your mana enough to use the ability again. I had played a ton of tactics games with smaller level designs already and wanted something that felt grander, kind of like how XCOM’s levels felt. I think I had also played Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume at that time and that played a part in it as well. I wouldn’t say the levels in that game were huge but they were a bit larger than what I usually saw in the genre. Bleach: The Third Phantom also had slightly larger and more complex level designs, but I actually beat Valkyrie Profile (I actually beat Valkyrie Profile like five times because it was an extremely short game with multiple endings and your unlocked abilities would carry over to the new game so it was completely built around the idea of replaying the game over and over (as another side note: I NEVER replay games, so the fact I replayed that one says loads about how good I felt its story and mechanics were)).

All of that said: “Spectrum Tactics” didn’t get very far. I had no money to put into it, I had one part time programmer, and I was once again trying to get art for a game I didn’t even have a complete story to yet. You can check out some of that art below!

Very early concept art for the wolf alien race

Very early concept art for the lizard alien race

Very early environment concept art

This went on and on for about a year before I realized the project was making absolutely no meaningful progress whatsoever. What I mean by that is there was not a clear development plan nor clear story nor clear mechanics. I had lots of vague ideas for everything but I never sat down and really documented everything. This was the core problem with every project I had helmed to this point: I simply do not sit down and do the detailed work required to make the complicated projects I imagine actually work. And this would have been the reason Spectrum Tactics would have failed as well, if I hadn’t done the one thing I needed to do all along.

I asked for help.

It was difficult for me to bring others onto the team after the disaster that was Pony Tactics, but I realized that without others working on the project it simply would not progress.

I found a co-writer I respected and would call me out on plot points or elements that weren’t working. Working with someone who I didn’t want to let down made me do the detailed work that needed to be done, and together we’ve outlined the entire story for the game along with the mechanics. As we developed it, a new title emerged: The Eighth Day. Without my co-writer the story would not be as well developed as it is today.

I then found someone to help me with the business side, who worked with me to outline clear goals and deadlines and focused the development down to what we could handle. He picked up the slack where I couldn’t and I owe much of the success of the development to him.

These two decisions are the main reasons Spectrum Tactics evolved into The Eighth Day and the development continues to this day. This concludes the backstory of the mechanics and story for The Eighth Day! Next week I’ll be going into the art and story direction for the game and how it changed over time to get to where it is today!