Squad Selection?

[sabre1]

Can you pick your squad or is it assigned already?

Thanks!

[beserko]

assigned it seems. Maybe later on someone will join <NPC> I seem to remember a girl in the screen shots but don't quote me LOL

[sabre1]

I'm just old school, soldiers = guys. I don't want women in my squad.

[PhilSST]

The squad are assigned automatically. The game relies heavily on a lot of dialogue between characters, and cobbling together some kind of dynamic system to switch conversations dependant upon which characters were in your team seemed like it was likely to end up with a very buggy game that was hard to debug. Bioware managed it with Mass Effect 2, but I don't have their budget.. yet.

There is another character who joins the team mid-way through the game.

[Pratzen]

Oh. This game is some sort of role-playing non-sense?

Excuse me!

[PhilSST]

I wouldn't go as far as to call it role-playing. It's just that - as a developer and to a lesser extent as a gamer - it's usually narrative that drives me&nbsp;forward. I find that I have a different attitude towards a game when I care about the characters and I care what happens next. I wanted to have that same sense in SST too, so I always developed with a coherent narrative in mind. As you say, this is a common feature in RPGs, particularly the Japanese tactical RPGs but I wanted to see if I could make it work for a traditional western turn-based tactics game as well. It does seem to have surprised quite a lot of people so perhaps it was a risky thing for me to do, but I hope that - if people give it a chance - they find that the story and the characters help to drive the gameplay.

[sabre1]

PhilSST,

Your game design is probably very similar to Dawn of War II, complete the mission, get goodies, improve squad stats?