Core Stratagem

About Core Stratagem and Urocyon Games

Urocyon Games is a one-man indie game developer. I started out in the games industry as a QA tester and later worked as a programmer, but I pretty quickly realized that the modern games development environment wasn't for me.

I'm too young to remember the days of smash hit games coming out of suburban garages, but after watching a major publisher buy up the local developer I was working for, force out the last game in a few months of painful crunch, and finally just shutter the studio, I was pretty much done with the idea of ever working in the "big leagues."

I got some more experience under my belt working on University projects and at a tiny, almost literally "mom and pop" developer, but ultimately set off on a career outside of gaming. Now I pursue my passion for great games in my free time, both as a player and as an indie dev.

Core Stratagem is an old-school strategy game inspired by games like Strategic Conquest, Advance Wars, and Empire Deluxe. I started working on the project in December of 2011, and it's my first solo game dev project. I wanted to create a simple but compelling game that distilled the strategy genre into its core essence: no tech trees, no diplomacy, but not just a tank-rushing blitz either. A game where the underdog can pull out a surprise win through careful tactics and a little but of luck.

CS was written in Java using Eclipse. CS uses JLayer libraries for audio playback. All included music files are public domain works, primarily from opengameart.org. All sound effects not entirely recorded by myself are edited from public domain files from opengameart.org and freesound.org. All audio recording and editing was done in Audacity. I made all the art for CS using an ancient version of Paint Shop Pro.