Influences: Part 1

So what was I trying to accomplish when I came up with the idea for NXS? What influences led me down the path that would eventually become NXS?

As I’ve already discussed, my inspiration for creating my own game was Terrace. I genuinely liked the idea of a game with much simpler rules than, say, Chess (one of Terrace’s key principles). Don’t get me wrong, I love Chess just as much as the next person, but the rules can be a bit daunting at first.

I was also learning Go at the time (and I had played Reversi/Othello in the past). I really enjoyed the idea of a more fluid goal like territory, as opposed to chasing the king in Chess. But I still liked the idea of two armies facing each other across a game board, as opposed to starting empty like most territory capture games.

It seemed to me that most games I had heard of fell roughly into those two categories; set up armies and try to capture a key piece or space on the board, or start with an empty board and try to fill or capture territory (getting a certain number of pieces in a row being a variant of this, in my opinion). So I set out to create a hybrid of these two concepts.