Land of Legends has some very unlikely influences -- great games that you should play if you're not familiar with them.
The core gameplay is based on the genre of the old ASCII game Empire and its amazing gameplay descendants, Military Madness and Advance Wars. Frankly, I'm surprised there haven't been more games based on this sub-genre of turn-based strategy -- I've always found it elegant, accessible, and challenging. And it lets you play games faster than traditional 4X-style games.
Paper Mario showed us that small numbers are *great*. The smaller the numbers in a game, the most each point becomes significant. In most games, +1 to some stat has little or no effect on the game as a whole, and players rarely pay attention to each stat's value in the first place. But Paper Mario showed that by using few statistics and small numbers, +1 can become a critical factor in the player's decisions, and that each bonus can become important and sacred. It made me realize: Why have bonuses that don't actually matter? Why have statistics that no one pays attention to? Why not make a game that's just as deep, yet trims off all the meaningless fat?
Master of Magic, and its spiritual successor Age of Wonders, inspired Land of Legends' race-based approach, with each unit having special abilities that made that unit (and race) unique. We worked hard to give each unit and race its own distinct personality by having unique combinations of abilities and requiring different strategies to be used to their fullest.
I wanted Land of Legends to be playable online, and I wanted that experience to be easy, fun, fast and fair. To this end, we've included a built-in lobby so that players can quickly and easily find opponents to play against.
I wanted to create a game that was intuitive, fun, and easy to control. This meant simplifying controls while increasing the importance and opportunity of every move. This, in turn, meant making a game that told you how to play it, and that tried to answer your questions before they even
occurred to you. We invested a lot of time into this, and I feel like we did a good job accomplishing this goal.
Lastly, I wanted to create a unique 'feel' for Land of Legends. Fantasy is quite possibly the most popular setting for strategy games, and yet few games bring anything new to the table with the genre. Most games take themselves way too seriously, creating their own mythologies filled with impossible-to-remember names and meaningless histories. While Land of Legends' campaign tells a good story, we've kept it simple and fun. We had a blast taking the traditional fantasy archetypes and adding our own unique twists to each. And we've used a cartoonish, anime-inspired art style to help remind the players that games are supposed to be fun!
I hope you enjoy playing and exploring Land of Legends. I think we've made a unique and entertaining game, largely because our goal from the beginning was to give players something new and most importantly, something fun.
Scott Lantz
Designer: Land of Legends
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