I have played Advance Wars, Advance Wars Black Hole Rising, Advance Wars Duel Strike, and Advance Wars Days of Ruin, you guessed it, I love this series.

I am a big fan of bright light-hearted strategy games with quirky characters and beefy soundtracks. Well, Days of Ruin is a bit different but that’s another story.

And then, it kinda… died?

I mean there were no more Advance Wars games and Nintendo kinda went along with Fire Emblem which ain’t bad but I kinda missed those games.

Up until now, I have gotten into so many other games but I only recently, got this game called Into The Breach for free on the Epic store. And let me just tell you, it is… freaking good! You should play that.

I have ended it like three times already and still get an itch for it.

It reminded me of Advance Wars… again… after such… a long time. And surprisingly enough, Nintendo is coming up with a new Advance Wars game. A remaster of Advance Wars 1 and 2 called Reboot Camp. It is really cool and I love the new look but I don’t like the fact that it is JUST a remaster.

And there you go ladies and gentlemen… that’s where I realized that I gotta do it! Indie me has been developing games as a hobby for a couple of years. And finally, I wanna step up and develop my first true professional commercial game inspired by Advance Wars.

The game engine of choice is Unity. And yeah, big fan of this default look. Always gets on my nerve every time I see this default skybox.

Obviously, I don’t want to make the SAME advance wars. I sort of want a blend of this and that. Instead of going isometric pixel art like with Into The Breach, I am going for a stylized 3D isometric perspective. *cough* not even sure whether that’s a thing or not.

The first thing that came to my mind is to make my own custom grid editor to place the tiles in the 3D world. And so, I did… 😈

After that, I made some pretty basic tiles in Blender. Basically, I bevelled the corners and it looks pretty decent.

After that, I tried to implement a few shiny things like fog tile, water shader and wind particles.

I searched on youtube and got to this video from which I end up making this fog tile. It looks cool but I am not sure how to use it as of now so, I am just gonna keep it for use later on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qE3tAfijuk

And for water shader, I found yet another video on youtube. Got the unity package, modified the shader graph a bit and voila… a stylized water plane is ready! I can’t believe how easy it is to develop games. Huh, pish of cake!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_HUntydy8I

For wind particles, I used a trail renderer and played around with velocity curves.

And here’s the end result!

I hope that you liked it. Let me know in the comments what you think about it and what else should I implement. Will come up with another devlog next month. Goodbye!