The units should feel like humans, says Oskar St lberg, co-creator of Bad North, a strategy game about little soldiers defending their islands against bad Vikings. They re quite stylised; they don t have faces and barely have arms, but they should feel human in their behaviour and what they re capable of doing. They should feel fragile and it should look like fighting is a courageous effort.
You might be surprised about how much work Bad North does to make your tiny soldiers human. They lead surprisingly full, if short, little virtual lives, and some of the fullest are led by its doughty pikemen, whose weapon of choice presented their creators all manner of weird problems.