Hey everybardy!
I've been playing games for at least 20 years now (I'm 24), and I've always found myself inventing new variations on the rules. The earliest concoctions I can remember from grade school are Dual Monopoly (figure 8 path with 2 monopoly boards) and Free-Form Scattergories (each player takes one timer-length to come up with categories, then players swap lists and go for another timer-length; whoever gets the most laughs wins.) Eventually I discovered games like MtG with an open structure that easily allow for game customization or rule variants.
It wasn't until about a year ago, when I started living with a very creative group of individuals, that I began looking at game design from the ground up. What started as sporadic conversations about "Why isn't there a game where ____?", turned into pages of notes on what such a game would entail. After compiling a list of about a dozen game ideas, we sat down and decided it was time to actually make one.
The pick of the litter, (codename: Fantasy Battle Deluxe), has gone through many draft stages over the past 10 months, although there was a large hiatus from Sept-Jan. When we recently resumed work, I realized we really had something special and achievable on our hands, but there were definitely going to be some obstacles that required outside opinion. The ensuing forum hunt landed me here (among other places), and my first impression is that I'm in the right place.
A lot of what were doing is reverse engineering. This whole project was largely started as a fusion of existing games. Demigod (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demigod_%28video_game%29) was the first, from which we took the Hero w/minion army idea. The second was Djambi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djambi), a 4-player chess variant, from which we borrowed the gridded map and general notion of an alternative turn structure. We've also borrowed bits and pieces from other games along the way. (MtG, Starcraft, FF Tactics, there's even one character with a Portal gun.)
Originally FBD was a 2D board game, and we playtested it with a makeshift cardboard setup. (We had 3 or 4 players and a board measuring 15x15 to 20x20.) The addition of more unit stats and the Turn Queue added an interesting dynamic, but slowed the pace to a grudge, so we decided to enslave a computer to do all the hard work.
We started with GameMaker Pro, which is great for 2D single player games, but definitely has some limits. However, being forced to translate all our ideas into code really helped clarify any of the ambiguous rules we intuited as humans of the gaming variety. Eventually, we got frustrated with GM's limits and took a hiatus until we started messing around with the Unity engine, which is really designed for full 3D shooter games and the like. (Way more complex stuff than we'll be attempting.)
When we embarked on FBD, I had a separate idea for a chess-on-a-cube boardgame, with a board using some trippy projection to capture as much of the cube as possible in 2D. As I found out a while ago, there is no way to capture more than half a cube in a 2D image, while still providing intuitive game play. Unity, however, allowed us to integrate a 3D world into FBD with negligible rule modifications (just more complex algorithms behind the scenes). So after some tinkering with the camera in Unity, we've gotten a pretty good projection that allows a player to see about half the cube at a time, with seamless panning. The idea is to maintain a 2D boardgamey feel, just with a Mobius board. No corners to get trapped or hide in. (No Australia, for the Risk players.)
There will be different size cubes available depending on how many players you're playing with. For 2 players, a 6x6x6 (about 180 spaces) cube should be nice and cozy; in an ultimate 8 player free-for-all, 12x12x12 (800ish spaces) will give everyone a little breathing room, but not enough to get comfortable. Obviously these numbers will be ironed out once we get the thing built.
Right now were trying to get familiar with coding in Unity, so we can transcribe all of our GameMaker functions, but with some serious improvements in efficiency and flexibility that our dress rehearsal brought to light.