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I’m wondering if anyone has experience in developing RTS games – or more properly, RTT (Real Time Tactics) because the game I have in mind is closer to Myth than Warcraft – more about the story and the fights and less about the spending half the game doing resource management and chopping down trees.
In theory – this should make it marginally easier?
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Sorry have no professional experience on RTS’s. Having said that perhaps this can open up the debate a little:
It would depend on deeper design decisions right? But from a high level I think what you are trading is complexity for content and these days people tend to err on the side of avoiding content. In what way do you see the game being less complex/easier for the story game?
I played myth, it’s a great game, lots of great ideas. I think ultimately they traded programmer time spent on opponent A.I. and balancing for lots of simple but interesting story based units when compared to a game like Command and Conquer (Warcraft3 has a great story mode too, so doesn’t make for a great comparison imo). They would also have been required to get their level designers focusing on pretty story levels more than highly balanced skirmish maps.
What is nice is that in Myth they don’t have to worry about unbalancing the design with one or two bad decisions. In a story game, a poor unit choice is something that affects a small part of the game (any time the show up in the story). In an RTS game it’s always there (past the tutorial levels).
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There’s a book on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Game-Direct3D-Carl-Granberg/dp/1584504986It’s not a *great* book, the code is buggy, the A* implementation (which should be the corner-stone of a book on RTS games, is/was inclusive of a recursive depth-check Hack). I think the author got a fair amount of critique on that one, and is working (last I heard) on a second edition, and/or updates to the code.
That aside, if your looking to quickly get up to speed with the more technical implementations surrounding RTS games, this is a pretty cheap and cheerful implementations.
Oh, and there’s UML class diagrams in there too (a very good thing).
B.
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Hi guys,
I will have a look at that book.
I see a RTT game being marginally easier than a RTS game because there’s no involvement of the building. Additionally, the content side of things interests me a lot more than anything else. Myth II, for example, gets a lot of replay in this fact alone.
Actually I’m more interested in figuring out the man-months involved and then starting up something which may turn into a game studio. I say this because a meeting this morning brought together four local games companies to network and collaborate. This is just after one of my client companies presented at the ITLG event in Stanford this week – there’s hunger out there for new and shiny!
In our startup incubator, we’re taking on placement students and hoping we can give them challenging work – maybe in this incarnation, or the next – there will be a games element.
Building games fascinates me – so it’s worth chasing.
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In our startup incubator, we’re taking on placement students and hoping we can give them challenging work – maybe in this incarnation, or the next – there will be a games element.
[/quote:12ca73c6b8]If you need any help during the summer, I’d be glad to help!
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hi Marco – any assistance greatly appreciated. I blogged about part of the aims here
http://cimota.com/blog/2010/03/16/so-i-want-to-start-a-games-company/
and I spent the evening reading about Unity, Torque and other game engines which might be able to provide part of the equation.
And then I couldn’t sleep as I was thinking about the game/story/assets part too much :)
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Hi Matt sounds like fun, keep us informed. Just started prelim work on an RTT myself, it’s a 2d one (making it as a web app with primary focus on iPhone and ipad). I plan on having bullet time as the resourse that gets used up during play. It’s a space theme so not much like myth but if there is any cross over happy to give advice if you need a pointer along he way. I will post the concept in a week or so, busy moving house.
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Hi David,
We’re planning to do some Dublin/Belfast collaborations in the digital media and mobile space in the near future. I’ll make sure to announce them. Very keen to tell a good story (IRL) about telling a good story (in game).(BTW I’m using Myth as a mark of quality and type of game. Not emulating it directly. I have a developer working in Unity at the moment to see if we can get a couple of episodes done.)
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It just came up to my mind that a similar gameplay is involved in the Total War series. In that one, you still have to build and unpdate building and move troops around, but it’s when you play on the field that the game becomes interesting. I really liked the the combat system, a lot of strategy involved and it was damn difficult!
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TotalWar is mentioned as being inspired by Myth.
Looks like I have two developers who have expressed interest in working with Unity3D. I’m working on story and doing UI mockups for a good touch interface.
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