Game Design: Ex illis






Ex illis was the first project on which I worked having a multidisciplinary team very close to video game studios' structure (project manager, marketing director, programmers, 2D and 3D artists, animator, game designer and writer).

Sadly, this game is not alive anymore today, but it was a very ambitious project having the intent to take a place among the Miniature Wargames leaders, Games Workshop and Privateer Press, nothing less (huge investments, big team of people, etc.)


Ex illis was meant to be played between actual physical opponents, the software only being used as a neutral tool which handles the rules for the players and not a video game as such.

The way we designed the game to fit this criteria was simple: we didn't put all the information into the software. A lot of info came from the physical components of the game which made the game much more dynamic.

This allowed us to come up with a sleek, easy to use interface, and yet a very deep game system.

(Click on the pictures to enlarge them)



Here's a narrated introductory video of Ex illis' gameplay, including army construction and a full battle. It's 10 minutes long, but really tells a lot about the game without having to watch all of it:




One of the most interesting thing about Ex illis was the fact it was so intuitive that anyone could start playing it in 5 minutes by simply exploring with the mouse or touch screen without even knowing the rules. On the other hand, those who wanted to dive more deeply into the game could play for years and still discover new strategies. Our rulebook was a huge Wikipedia in which you could easily browse for rules, unit descriptions, the art and the story of the game.

Here's a visual example of one of our Wiki pages:



The Ex Illis Wikipedia is still up, but has not been updated to most recent versions of Web Browsers over the years (so it suffers from a few glitches now):
www.ex-illis.com/wiki


Website (bilingual):

Wikipedia (English & french respectively):

Gameplay Section (I designed 80% of its content):

Available units in the game

Units details

Main competition in the miniature wargame industry:
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/home.jsp (Owns around 80% of the miniatures wargame market)
http://privateerpress.com/ (Owns between 7 to 8% of the market )

Testimonials:
http://forum.ex-illis.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2101
http://forum.ex-illis.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2755
http://forum.ex-illis.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2655
http://forum.ex-illis.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2576
(I'm BonifaciusVIII on the forums)



The Ex illis Kickstarter

Years later, we attempted to launch a rulebook supporting the game without the need of a software by the means of a Kickstarter campaign! The campaign was not funded so we never produced the book, although we did have an early prototype of the rules.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/672225583/ex-illis

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