Iterating an RTS

Rob's lesson notes

Creating a paper RTS

Our set reading for this lesson was all about a games MDA and I have notes on it in an earlier blog. The main point we focused on from the reading for the class task was to design a game but focusing on the aesthetics first instead of the mechanics. So we decided what we want a player to feel when playing our game then design a game round those aspects.

So we were handed a game to play test. In this game we had a hexagonal grid 

We played with four player with one player playing from each corner. 

We would also place various obstacles on the grid for players to manoeuvre around.

Now the main part of this game was the RTS(Real Time) aspect how this was accomplished was to have four types of cards

move

turn/move

turn

shoot

Now each player would have a set of these cards in their hand and would pick one and place their card face down. Now everyone would turn over their cards at the same time and reveal their move. So for example a player can move two places with a move card but only in the direction of their counter is facing hence the turn cards also a player can only shoot in the facing direction. We played this game for about 20 mins and realised that it was broken with its current set of mechanics. 

We found that players were camping and continuously shooting to not move now there was no way another player could get near them with the moves at their disposal and kill them so it left players in stalemates. Also the game went on way to long and conflict was very slow if it happened at all.

So after this we decided to iterate and make changes on an aesthetic start point. So we picked challenge.

To add challenge to the game we decided to give each of the players four troops to command each with their own different abilities

1. - Soldier - 6hp, 3 range
2. - Sniper - 4hp, 7 range
3. - Medic - 5hp, 2 range, half damage, AOE heal
4.  - Air - 7hp, 3 range, jumps over cover.

We played this iteration for a little while but quickly figured that with keeping the old move amounts the game dragged out again and we needed to speed up a player getting into conflict situations. We could of done this in two ways. One by reducing the size of the play board and two by increasing the amount of moves. We decided to increase the amount of moves you could make by adding counters. So players could pick up to three cards or play a single card three times or two cards and use one twice and one once etc. We made players show this by placing counters on top of the cards to how many times they want to use that card before turning it over to stop people just saying what they wanted to move depending on what their opponents picked.

We also added more strategically placed obstacles and a capture the flag system to create a point on the battlefield that all players would head for and make a nice conflict zone in the centre. 

We play tested this several times and it was definitely successful in adding the challenge aspect to the game however the game still lacked anything concrete to keep you interested. It is hard to play a good real time game in a non digital format but other things we could of added in any future iterations was the way the units moved or to go back to a single unit for a player and implement random weapon drop location that maybe gave players different types of shots. I believe also that this game would of played allot better in a turn based way with slightly different mechanics.