Now that I’ve gotten together a body of sources to work from, it’s time to assemble a few basic principles around which I can actually design this game around. These will be important touchstones going forward, and should inform the individual design decisions I make through the process of actual development. By establishing these early, I’ll be able to create something of an internal vision of how Shadow of the Eagles should feel for the player – and it’ll let me think about how to design individual mechanics and systems in ways that work together to convey that feeling.
In addition, having these design principles will also serve to help me determine what features are necessary and what might be superfluous. When making a game like this, there’s always an urge to try and do everything, to deliver the full life simulation experience, to let the player touch every blade of grass and drink every glass of wine. That’s the kind of thing that gets us into making these sorts of games in the first place – but it’s also the kind of thing that makes sure we never finish one if we let it run rampant. As a result, design principles will help me prioritise the features that are important to build the vibe that Shadow of the Eagles is going for, in a way which means I’ll be able to accomplish it before the heat death of the universe.
So, with that explanation out of the way, here are the core design pillars I’ve come up with:
Private to Marshal
One of the most emblematic phenomena of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was the way in which a lot of ordinary soldiers rose to high rank through a combination of luck and skill. The armies of the Ancien Regime carefully limited the advancement prospects of any soldier not of noble birth, which meant the Revolution suddenly opened a lot of doors for both talented amateurs, and professional soldiers who would have been stuck in relatively junior positions otherwise. This dynamic is the core gameplay pillar of Shadow of the Eagles. I want to let the player’s character rise as high as they can, from a common soldier to Marshal of the Empire – or even higher.
Rank Hath Its Consequences
That being said, I don’t want a player to get the same experience as a Sous-Lieutenant as they would as a General of Division, or a Marshal of the Empire. Gameplay has to meaningfully change when the player character reaches higher rank. Naturally, this is a major stumbling block for most games – gameplay models which work for commanding a company don’t hold up when commanding a corps – but I’ve got an idea on how to fix that…
Not Set in Stone
Another thing which is going to be a major problem is the fact that as the player character advances in rank, they’ll have more and more power – which means more and more ability to change the course of history. I’d really like to give the player the power to really mess with the timeline here, but that’s a lot more work than even traditional branching narrative can pull off. Instead, I’ve decided that there’ll be points where the player will have the ability to deviate from the historical timeline in ways which should have minimal knock-on effects – with a one or two very big exceptions. It’ll hurt to constrain the player this heavily, but I actually have kind of an ally here – Napoleon himself tended to make decisions without the input of his Marshals (Berthier being the major exception), which means the path of his career and his policy as General, First Consul, and later Emperor will kinda keep things on the rails.
A Tour of History – With Napoleon as Tour Guide
Speaking of Napoleon, we can’t really deny that he really was sort of the main protagonist of this part of the world during this time period. That means that a lot of the story and gameplay is going to revolve around him, and the conditions which he lived in. I want to try to get this right as much as possible, because I think conveying the historical conditions of a time and place accurately also helps us understand why the people of that time and place made the decisions they did – and in turn helps us understand how the decisions they made lead to the world we live in. With Shadow of the Eagles, a lot of this is going to revolve around Napoleon, both his military and political career, and the consequences of the decisions he made in those spheres. That means the player is going to spend almost all of the game in his “orbit”, so to speak – but it also means that the player character will have a chance to be present at all the “stations” of Napoleon’s career, from the Siege of Toulon to the Battle of Waterloo.
A Cast of Millions
That being said, Napoleon himself didn’t stand on his own. One of the great consequences of the French Revolution was the mass political and military mobilisation of millions of ordinary people. Without this change, Napoleon could have never raised the armies which won him his victories – or galvanised the common people who armed, equipped, and paid for those armies. Beyond that, there are a vast number of other extraordinary individuals who contributed their talents to the success of Napoleon’s campaigns and government. There were also a long list of brilliant revolutionary generals who could have easily taken Napoleon’s place in history if not for bad fortune or an acute attack of principle. I’ll be trying to give these figures their due as well – especially since the player character might well become one of them too.
Life Simulation
However, that doesn’t mean I won’t be giving players options to create their own story here. While I won’t have the resources or the ability to create a fully fledged life simulator, there should be elements of gameplay which allow the player to make decisions for their character outside their military career – especially when it comes to spheres which made the time period of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars so interesting in the first place. That means giving them the ability to build a reputation, amass a fortune, choose sides in ongoing political disputes, and make friends or enemies of some of the most fascinating figures of the age – ones which might in turn affect the player character’s fortunes. Shadow of the Eagles should be more than just a string of battles, and I’d like to try to deliver at least some taste of what it would have been to live – as well as fight – in those times.
Broad Scope
This necessarily means Shadow of the Eagles won’t be as in-depth in a lot of ways. Napoleon fought something like 60 major battles. His Marshals fought dozens more. I want to be able to let the player be a veteran of at least two or three dozen of those battles, and more than two decades they span. This will naturally mean skimping on details in a few places, and glossing over a few elements. Timeskips between major campaigns will have to be a necessary evil – necessary because it’ll be what lets me write something which covers so much in anything like a timely fashion.
Luck and Skill
The life of a soldier in the age of Napoleon involved a lot of risk – not just for the common infantry soldier or cavalry trooper, but for officers as well. More than one of Napoleon’s Marshals died in battle – and more than a few of their opposite numbers likewise fell in combat. Likewise, a lot of those same Marshals rose as high as they did not just because of the skill their possessed, but because they were in the right place and the right time to leverage those skills to their advantage. This synergy is going to be a something which is going to form the mechanical core of Shadow of the Eagles.
As opposed to my previous work – which has been heavily deterministic – I plan on adding major elements of randomisation to Shadow of the Eagles. Dice rolls will play a major part in resolving skill challenges and determining the player’s circumstances. At the same time, there’ll be several ways to mitigate the risk of choosing one option or another. While I want every decision to carry some degree of risk with it, I also want players to be able to minimise that risk with careful planning and decision-making. That means in theory, a player who chooses carefully will likely meet with more success than one who doesn’t – but the former might still catch an unlucky musket ball at the wrong time, and the latter might catch a series of lucky breaks which takes them further than they’d otherwise go. I think this will give each playthrough its own unique character, with the careers and lives of player characters often resting on a single throw of the dice.
Accessibility
This is what’s going to underpin basically all of the other design principles I’m working with. I want Shadow of the Eagles to be fun. I want it to be as historically authentic and as ambitious in scope and as much of a representation of the career of a Revolutionary and Napoleonic soldier as I can get it – but at the same time, I want it to be as simple to understand and play as I can make it. That means keeping systems simple and intuitive, providing as much feedback when it comes to event resolution as possible, and ensuring that terms which might be unfamiliar to the casual player can be looked up or explained effortlessly. In many ways, Twine gives me a lot more tools than Choicescript with which to tweak user experience. I’m going to try to use those tools to make Shadow of the Eagles as friendly to new players as possible, both to learn and to play.
Now that I’ve set down some design principles, it’s time to actually start putting them into action. Next time, I’ll be iterating on these principles to create two outlines:
A Mechanical Outline to frame the core systems in specific terms – as well as how the game will actually play.
A Narrative Outline, to give me a basic idea of the game’s basic structure from the prologue to the final act.
After that, it might be time to actually start working on this thing.
Paul Wang 