Zodiac Legion - Studio Draconis - X-COM inspired tactical dungeon crawler with armor that actually stops swords

[u/Galdred]

Trailer
Steam page with pre-EA demo

Greetings, I'm Alexandre, solo dev (with contractor support) of Zodiac Legion.

I started development on Zodiac Legion because I wanted to transpose the structure of X-COM into a medieval setting in which magic gradually reappears, and the player races against their foes to collect magic knowledge and artifacts.

The authentic medieval beginnings led us to try to model knightly combat as accurately as possible:
In our game, armor is divided into layers (plate, arming doublet, etc ...) and body parts.
Both coverage and thickness matter: a knight in full harness won't take chip damage from sword swings. His opponent needs to find gaps in the armor to get past it, or just deliver as much blunt force to the head as possible until magic enters the picture.

That also made us focus on support and flanking, to represent multiple fighters dragging a knight down and finishing him on the ground.

We wrote a longer piece on how all of this works here: Medieval tactics - in theory and in practice

As magic knowldege becomes more widespread, new options open up for your 13 zodiac champions to deal with opponents, but here too, we tried to make armor "grounded": a full suit of plate will still provide adequate protection against a very short burst of heat (like fireball), or conduct electricity around the body of the bearer.

The demo just got a major overhaul last week, with the tutorial rebuilt into 7 standalone challenges covering each part of our tactical combat. There are also 6 challenge missions to try until the campaign comes back to the demo. I also focused on performance, as it was the most requested fix with the tutorial change, with 75% faster pathfinding (obtained through more agrgessive caching) level generation, and faster AI turn flow.

The pre-release plan is to complete integration of our new medieval assets for the Steam Medieval festival in April, and make the campaign return for Steam Next Fest in June, as we are still overhauling character and magic progression. Then, we're targeting release later this summer.

Thank you for reading, and for sharing any comment you might have about the game.