Mining a 1993 game design for innovative game mechanics
lunar.lostgarden.com
lunar.lostgarden.com
There's a few points on here I'd like to debate:
- I haven't played an RTS recently, but the last time I dived into the genre there was lots of innovation: World in Conflict had an entirely new resource-based deployment system, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War and Company of Heroes both employed brand-new "capture and hold" territory-based gameplay. You could argue that League of Legends and DOTA both contribute to this genre as well.
- The author mentions several times that they didn't have the time or resources to spend on map creation. Level design is a pretty important aspect of any game development - maybe the Hard Vacuum game would've taken off if they had content?
- "A team like this today can not even hope to create a major blockbuster game". See: decent indie studios all over the world. Maybe it's just that the definition of "major game" has changed since the 90's.
While I agree with the main premise of the article, that game designers need to take a critical, uninfluenced look at the genres they design games for, it feels like the author hasn't attempted to play a game in the last 10 years.
The article was written in 2005 so that seems like a correct assessment.
Heroes of Might and Magic 4. What REALLY is unforgivable in the game is the AI, which - mostly due to time pressure - even its own developers described as "lobotomized". But it has many things new to the serries, including obstacles affecting line of sight in combat, towers that need to be manned (no more turrets that are either too weak or too strong), separate initiative and speed stats (greater flexibility in units). Gone is the notoriously hard to balance Attack Skill, Defense Skill, Spell Power and Knowledge (attack/def got stronger and stronger as turns passed). Heroes4 riped off Master of Magic spell system, which in turn ripped off M:tG spell magic colors. This means that magic schools are actually unique and work in different ways. Heroes 4 is a broken game in a couple of ways, but a library of intriguing mechanics as well.
Nox. Easy to mistake for a Diablo clone, Nox by Westwood Studios (neglected by EA) has no random loot, no chance-based dodge or shield block or hit chance, practically no resists. All spells remain useful thorough the game. Nox has many interesting spells and mechanics. It is skill-based instead and combat is very satisfying. The most noticeable thing in the game is its fun line of sight algorithm. In Diablo, you can anticipate big fights because you can see past walls. Here, you can't. Teleglitch is a new game that also has this mechanic.
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. Like Heroes 4, it was sunk by bad AI I believe, but is a great game especially in multiplayer. I would describe it like "Heroes 4 done right". Flying units, spells on adventure map, Master of Magic-like research and magic system, the ability to build towns and roads as well as raze&rebuild neutral structures. If an ice witch passes over land, it's permanently covered in snow. Try that over water or enemy city's crops !
And play board games. Board games have many mechanics unseen in computer games. Try ones like Dominion, Neuroshima Hex, Seasons, or Dungeoneer. The last one may appear like just an improved version of Talisman, but it has one wonderful mechanic. Buffs and positive powers are used from a SEPARATE pool. Normally multiplayer games have a problem where by spending your resources on hostile actions you don't help your cause but make the target of your malice easier to beat for others.
Also, Laser Squad Nemesis is a game designed by original X-COM's designer. It's from 2003, so and has nice high-res 2D graphics.
FS is also a lot of fun, but it just isn't as deep or complex as LSN. Fewer enemy types, less variety in level design. On the flip side, though, this means that most matches are over much quicker than LSN (a one-sided match often took 20-30 minutes, and hotseat games back in the day often took us an hour to finish!)
It has very nice mechanics. I especially like the unlimited shots of opportunity fire (well, limited by the ammo left in the clip) that allow for fun play while being hugely outnumbered.
The mechanic is deep enough that it can still be fun to play a few rounds with a friend, despite the utter simplicity of the game.
Crossbow too late to matter (you said "in the West", and my comments are likewise restricted), though... whatchu talkin' 'bout? Crossbows in Europe are over 2000 years old, so "too late" seems a little improbable. And they were the dominant ranged weapon in most of Europe for hundreds of years (roughly 1100-1500), so they totally mattered.
- Storm - strategy game, core mechanics was developing your aircraft designs, test-flying them, building them, and defending your flying island with them. Big part of the game was trading in airships parts between factions. It also has arcade 3d-mode fighting system, where you controlled one of your ships, but it was unplayable).
- Net Storm - another game on flying islands - also strategy, but gamplay was very different - it was all about building towers, defensive structures and bridges to contain and defeat enemy flying island. It felt like real-time chess, positioning was the most important. It also had nice multiplayer mode.
- MAX - another strategy game - this time turn-based. It had nice system of resource extraction - you had to scan ground for resources, also your factories, defence systems, mines, etc had to be connected by pipelines for resources and power to be provided everywhere. So defending pipelines was important.
It's a shame it didn't take off more than it did. A re-release with better graphics would likely do very well in current competitive RTS game circles, though. Well as long as it had sufficient marketing and very good tutorials. Free to play with in-game purchases for different tower skins would probably be the way to go...
You could see the ranges of enemy units, and because it was turn based, you'd also spend a lot of time trying to come up with very conservative hit and run manoeuvres.
Still, an old fav.
Also, Dragon Strike was a very enjoyable and different flight-sim style game set in the Dragonlance world.
Licensed didn't mean "bad" when it came to Westwood back in the day.
Death Gate was Legend, not Westwood, right? Kyrandia were definitely above average P+C adventures, but there were so many good adventure games from that time-period that I find they stick out less.
While we're talking oldies, this made think of Master of Magic (turn based), which had parallel universes, another concept that is very much under-utilized. And 'parallel universe" is a theme up for the round 2 of voting for the upcoming ludum dare.
Not only does it alter movement points, it also alters weather patterns, and so resources gained.
A highly successful strategy (especially when playing agains the AI, which doesn't understand this pattern) can be to create straits up against stronger enemies to force them to rely on seafaring troop transports (that area easy to take out). And when your land units are strong enough to create land bridges wherever you want to go and build railroads instead of sending naval units and transports to attack enemy cities.
It's chess without turns. Yes, you can actually dodge other pieces if you click in time and your piece is not currently on a cooldown.
The idea is both innovative and very simple. How come no one thought of this earlier ? The idea is also very elegant, if you can look past chess rules quirks like en passant and castling.
There's significant modding, mapmaking, AI etc. communities for many games. In fact in this day and age I'd say it's smart to outsource that to the users to a good degree and provide excellent tools+some support.
Then again this seems to be a 2005 article about a 1993 game and I don't even recall what the situation was like in 2005. Probably a lot less modding etc.
The AI in these games often relies on certain "trigger points "on the map for example "try and hold this area", "try and attack this way" , "build a base here" etc rather than having a truly generic AI.
When using user created maps these points are often either not put in or are not used in a way that is not as tested and thought out as those that ship with the game.
This results in AI that either sits there and does nothing or will just play very badly on a particular map.
Of course most advanced players are not interested in playing against AI, but it is a good way to learn a new game or to try a particular technique etc.
About the best the developers can do is give players access to the same interface they have. If you look at the StarCraft community you see amazingly complex AI scripting using what's fundamentally a very simplistic trigger interface. But it's only the top epsilon% most polished maps where the creators put in all the effort needed to make that work.
Unity of Command is an old-school looking hex-based WW2 game. Magarena is a free program to play Magic: The Gathering. It has a few downsides and doesn't deal with fuzzy logic, but most of the time it plays like a bastard. If you underestimate it or hope it doesn't notice something, you'll regret it.
I guess because turn based games are more able to say "stop everything until I recalculate all of the path finding" whereas a real time game has to deliver so many game updates per second and will maybe have to run AI in a separate thread which might not yield a good solution until the AI has already had to make a decision based on stale information.
Chess AIs are often scary good for example and FPS AIs are notoriously dumb.
Examples of FPS games with decent AI are Unreal and Unreal Tournament. The latter also has the best bots to date, I think.
Of course AI is getting better now that we can offload stuff onto other cores without tying up the game loop so much.
I don't know what happens if you put bots in a level that doesn't have bot paths, but it wasn't advised.
Just a few anecdotes from the FPS genre: Team Fortress was a Quake mod released in 1996, Counterstrike was a Half Life mod released in 1999, and Natural Selection was a Half Life mod released in 2002. It's pretty amazing all these are still around in incredibly polished sequels.
It may not have really been programming, but modding Tiberian Sun and making simple websites from plain HTML were my childhood "I can make the computer do what I want?!" moments. They were such limited environments, but the ease with which a kid could do interesting things with them really opened up new worlds to me.
People talk about the "little coder" problem a lot. I wonder if it's better to start a child with "making your own pong," so that they are confronted with actual programming from the beginning, or to give them a powerful but inflexible tool so that they can do impressive things right off the bat, before starting to think "why can't I do this? If I had made it, it would be like this..."
Remember Will's voxel editors?
There's a smaller scene today still around, e.g. MegaGlest.
And Ludum Dare 25 is next week.
Ping if you want to join in or playtest something by some really old C&C modder hands ;)
I recall giving Tanya the cruiser gun via those .ini files. Good times.
"""I think one of the very interesting things about modern single-player game development is that it creates exceptionally expensive content designed to appeal to everyone and be played exactly once for 8-10 hours. As anybody who plays European board games will tell you, making a game (read: the body of rules, the mechanics and dynamics) is cheap - all you need is creativity and a lot of playtesting. AAA videogames are entirely different, though - millions are spent on voice acting, scripting, graphics, etc. This is why I'm excited for moderate-budget games like Bastion that can publish interesting and challenging gameplay with a budget lean enough that it doesn't have to sell to absolutely everybody."""
Its the same situation with other media, like movies, and i doubt its going to really change.
This coming weekend is Ludum Dare 25! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/
Get game coding!
It was the most "arcade like" space shooter that I could find for the PC.
Good to know it is still available as abandonware.
Edit: Tyrian came out earlier, but Tyrian 2000 came out in 1999 which seems to be basically the same game with some extra content.
http://www.lostgarden.com/2007/04/free-game-graphics-tyrian-...
- Supply Lines
- Variable Height Terrain
- Walls
- Player created landscapes: (Walls, base building, supply lines, and advanced terrain modification)
Disclosure: The last RTS's I got into were Age of Empires II, Total Annihilation, and a little of Warcraft 3...
The innovations above don't seem like innovations to me...they seem like features that got ditched because of limitations (still present today) in AI and game-testing:
* Walls made it too easy to turtle against AIs and more importantly, play havoc on pathfinding AI. They also make no sense whatsoever in games that take place after the age of (gunpowder) cannons.
* Deformable terrain has the same issues as above...it's a good feature because it adds realism, but ultimately, it seems to require a much higher level of programming sophistication and game mechanics to implement in such a way that it didn't make the game too cumbersome to enjoy. I personally don't think it would add much to a RTS unless terrain deformation was the focus of the strategy...that would be an interesting game. Adding full-featured terrain deformation to a standard RTS? I think it would just make things unnecessarily complicated.
* Supply lines: I think this was essentially handled through the use of "peasants" traveling from the townhall to the town center (in Warcraft and AOE). In Total Annihilation and other such games where mines/power generators wireless send you resources...you still had to allocate resources to protect the lines. In any case, it was a welcome form of streamlining.
* Variable Height Terrain: It seems a lot of games do have this, even Age of Empires (hills and such).
For me, if we're mining old games for innovation, I wish designers would be more open to incorporating more turn-based mechanics instead of making everything real-time twitch based. I still go back to X-Com and Jagged Alliance time and time again.
Yeah, that's kind of the problem I alluded to, isn't it?
But you're right, I don't know the state-of-the-art in pathfinding...as I admitted, the most recent RTS I played was Warcraft 3. It just seems to me to be a very common complaint in most modern games. I still play Team Fortress 2, and even though they've implemented AI, the AI only works on certain pre-designed levels. Yes, I know that a FPS is generally more path-computational than a RTS, but if you're proposing that an RTS have 3D terrain then, well, that makes it a 3D game, no?
And it's been awhile since I've designed a game but I think you're underestimating the computational power it would take for an AI to dynamically generate efficient paths with every change to the terrain. IIRC, a lot of early AI compensated by having pre-calculated paths for each level (and I think virtually all of them only pretended to be encumbered by a fog of war).
My point still stands though...these aren't really innovations...again, I'm not in game development, but I'm guessing that some of these are ideas that teams consider and then drop in lieu of their difficulty of implementation. In other words, the innovation would be the actual implementation of the idea, not the idea itself.
The only reason early AI had 'pre-calculated paths' (an assertion I am dubious about, to be honest) would be that it was running on processors that could barely push the graphics of the time to begin with.
Those days are loooooong behind us.
C&C was particularly terrible with walls; if there was any path at all, it wouldn't destroy walls, which made it easy to ambush.
TL;DR: Path recalculation has been around since Starcraft I. EDIT: And probably before that
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I always hated this mechanic, and loved Total Annihilation's (and Supreme Commander — not 2)'s resource flows, and necessity of regulating resource flows in order not to gridlock an economy.
TA employed a continuous economy system where you were more concerned with your resource Bandwidth rather than total quantity available. Energy or Metal mines added +X of their respective resource to your pool, but it was continuous and if your pool was full, excess resources just vanished.
The unique aspect to this system was that the player could begin constructing any building whether or not he had the resources available to finish it. The player didn't need 300 units of Resources X to start constructing Unit Y -- he just started building it. The construction units would open up and start taking in Resources at their fixed rate. If the resource pool ran out of resources, aka your construction needs outstripped your gathering capabilities, all construction slowed to the maximum rate at which you were able to gather resources.
A liquid economy, still one of the most fun I've ever played.
edit: fixed now
Is this true? Are RTS games considered played out by the general gaming public?
Deadlock: turn-based strategy game, like Civilization, but in a sci-fi setting. You had to manage resources and colonizer during each turn, but there were cut-scenes for battle events.
Dark Colony: very fast paced RTS game. Different than most, you couldn't place buildings anywhere in the map, only control access to resources and deny area to rivals using your units. Well balanced units. I think it had amazing graphics and sound design for the time (1997).
I have no idea why it wasn't released. Sorry!
Correction: That would have been a "red box". ^__^