Beginning RTS game student project

Question

I have experience with XNA and Unity3D. I have also built my own engine with Tao and C#. I am in last year of college and I want to make a small RTS game demo, nothing fancy I won't bother much with the art part. I will leave objects untextured, just drop some light.

It is a big decision, which one to choose XNA or Unity3D or maybe else? I definitely won't build my own engine since I will waste lot of time that way. I am looking for an engine/framework that will allow me to concentrate on higher level stuff like AI algorithms rather than do my own texture loading and stuff.

More details: I will try to copy stuff from Starcraft2. My models and environment won't be textured though. I won't bother with sounds either, just some simple explosion and shooting sounds. The player will play against AI. I will go for the Starcraft2 mechanics/logic, not the skin. By skin I mean art stuff. At the end I would make small videos of gameplay showing the AI decision making process by printing text, so that a potential employee can see what is actually going on.

Answer 1

How to Choose Between Two Things

Seriously though, it sounds like a personal choice to me. Which one do you have more experience in or are more comfortable with? How might you start making an RTS with XNA vs. making it in Unity3D? Unity3D is higher-level, more engine-like; do you want to deal with matrices and stuff, essentially writing things from scratch, or do you want to work within Unity's environment?

Also from a goal-oriented perspective, it sounds like you're doing this for the end goal of showing an employer your game AI. It seems like you would want to do the least amount of work to get to the point of implementing AI, therefore you would want to choose Unity. But if you want to impress your employer with what you've written from scratch, XNA is definitely closer to starting from scratch than Unity3D.

Answer 2

XNA is fine. Unity too. Really just choose one.

As a student I coded a turnbased strategy game in C#/XNA to implement an AI.

So here's some free advice:

You need to get the game in a playable state before even thinking about writing the AI. Yes I know this is obvious ;) So you might wanna consider making a mod for an existing RTS instead of writing an RTS from scratch.

Create a dumb AI as soon as possible. Just to test/tweak your RTS (if you build from scratch). This will give you some insights how to design your AI and which problems the AI needs to solve. It can also be used as opponent against the real AI later.

Your RTS rules must be complex enough to even require an AI e.g. a player should not be able to win by simply mass producing one unit type. One way to do this is by having a counter unit for each other unit type. Starcraft achieves this with different weapon/armor types.

The AI Game Programming Wisdom books by Steve Rabin are a good resource on game AI.

Answer 3

There is a FOSS engine specifically for RTS's http://springrts.com/

It uses Lua and C++.

Though it looks like your using the StarCraft2 engine. Which is a really good idea.