Real Time Strategy Innovation
Good Game Design
by Brad Wardell - January, 2001
A couple of years ago after making (and surviving) the Starcraft
add-on for GT Interactive (Starcraft: Retribution), we talked
to them about Total Annihilation. I was a total TA addict
who played on Boneyards regularly. I was the top ranked "Winner
Take All" player (Frogboy) for a very long time, and
when Boneyards went down, I had the highest winning percentage
of any of the top 10 players.
I pitched the idea to GT that companies like Cavedog could
make a lot of money by creating strategy game engines. Id
was making a good living selling the Quake engine, for instance,
so why not Cavedog with its TA engine? After all, most strategy
games have basic requirements that have to be met, such as
pathfinding, way points, hit detection, unit creation, etc.
And best of all, Cavedog was way ahead of the others with
a true 3D engine that others could already create units and
maps for.
Our friend at GT Interactive (Wizard Works) liked the idea
but wasn�t sure how one would even get started on that. I
suggested that they license it first to Stardock, we would
make a lot of noise that we were licensing the TA engine and
pave the way for other companies to be able to license it.
Regardless of whether someone liked Total Annihilation, few
will disagree that it had a great engine.
For the game, we sat back and looked at our checklist of
features we felt were missing and what we wanted in our "ultimate"
RTS game and came up with: Mobilization.
Mobilization was to introduce a few new concepts to the genre.
We wanted to simplify the actual game play while making the
game mechanics more complex. That is, less clicking, more
thinking. So the first thing we did was eliminate the entire
unit creation mechanism. Really, how do you build people?
I bet Napoleon would have loved to be able to conjure up 10,000
more soldiers after Waterloo if he just had enough wood and
gold.
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