53
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How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
I would like to challenge the framing of the primary thrust of this question: the notion that "flat" design is a good idea.
Game design is really not that different from plot structure in narrative ...
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17
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
Very good advice in comments (which got moved into chat). I'll just add, since I'm in the middle of implementing such "flattening" into my RTS (Knights Province) right now.
Classic strategies are ...
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11
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How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
Ideas for removing micro from the game :
No units at all (at least physically present in the game) : you win by spreading your control over areas like in the Go game.
You have units but you can't ...
- 1,270
10
votes
Accepted
Performance of manipulating a mesh in realtime
Yes, you can change a mesh at runtime.
get the current mesh from your object using Mesh mesh = GetComponent<MeshFilter>().mesh. Alternatively, if you want to ...
- 122k
8
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
Fair warning: if you don't find this sort of game play in the RTS world, that means there's a good chance that your market of gamers don't find value in this sort of game. Always be careful with the "...
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7
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
Most RTS games provide you with automation tools to automate some menial tasks, but in many cases these are implemented poorly, as to give you a disadvantage. If you made sure that these systems don't ...
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6
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
Micromanagement
There are a few approaches to minimizing the impact of actions-per-minute on the outcome of the battle. Other answers have touched on these:
Removing micromanagement by only allowing ...
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6
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
Tactics win battles. Strategy wins wars.
Either remove, or disincentivise the ability or need to micromanage tactics, whilst allowing and incentivising the player to focus on strategy.
The fact that ...
- 421
6
votes
Grid-based pathfinding for a lot of agents: how to implement "Tight-Following"?
If a entity has a successful reservation then you can mark its current square as available for reservation. Then check any entities that had a failed reservation.
If no entity can confirm their ...
- 7,609
5
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
Making an answer of my comment.
You could remove the parts where the user has to create their base and their army. So when the player starts the game, the base and the army they have is all that they'...
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4
votes
Performance of manipulating a mesh in realtime
As Philipp said, you can change the mesh at runtime. You might have performance issues though (it's not "streaming" at all); in particular RecalculateNormals will ...
- 226
4
votes
Accepted
HTML5 realtime MMO games, should I do server side physics update or client side?
Unless you want players to be able to teleport through walls using their browsers build-in JavaScript debugger, you will have to implement any game mechanics worth manipulating on the server.
This ...
- 122k
4
votes
Grid-based pathfinding for a lot of agents: how to implement "Tight-Following"?
Your current approach amounts to each square having one of two states, locked or unlocked, and agents must lock squares they occupy and are moving to. This in turn means that any given square could ...
3
votes
Accepted
How to save and load scene in realtime?
I believe you are talking about serializing MonoBehaviours. This is something we have struggled with since the dawn of humankind.
There are third party tools available on the asset store, but they ...
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3
votes
Accepted
What is a reasonable bandwidth usage for a RT multiplayer game?
From this article, I would say 100MByte/hour is a reasonable estimate for the popular multiplayer games out there:
https://www.rhoonet.com/how-much-data-does-online-gaming-use
100MByte/hour converts ...
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3
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
Regarding an RTS that comes remotely close to this, I recommend experimenting with StarCraft II, archon mode: 2 players control a single side.
If you got a couple friends to experiment with, you can ...
- 9,955
3
votes
What is the unit of time in Unity?
You can answer this question yourself with a quick trip to the documentation:
Time.time
The time at the beginning of this frame (Read Only). This is the time in seconds since the start of the game.
...
- 136k
2
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
I'm going to attempt to address the lack of information due to the fog of war, and ways to mitigate that.
Perhaps taking a look at the assumptions around the fog of war. In my experiences with RTS ...
- 1,330
2
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
In any RTS, reaction time and APM will always yield an advantage.
Games like Starcraft 2 are notoriously biased toward the "RT" part, and less toward the "S" part of their genre. I believe it's not ...
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2
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
You might wish to look at games like Galcon and Auralux, in which players direct units from one node to another.
They largely remove the reaction time requirement by removing fog of war and slowing ...
- 21
2
votes
Accepted
IntersectMovingAABBAABB weird behavior
Realtime collision detection is a great book, but that code is clearly wrong. If the relative velocity was zero, it would always return true, which is clearly incorrect. I believe the first test in ...
- 171
2
votes
Accepted
How can I accurately lerp Colors over seconds?
Keep in mind that Time.deltaTime is the time between the current frame and the last frame. When calling ...
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2
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
While many answers focused on unit tactics, and others focused on army size one of the primary reasons that the mid-late game in SC II is so intense is because you have to use army tactics and macro. ...
2
votes
How to create an RTS gameplay experience where all phases of a match are equally engaging without spikes in required concentration?
There might be some value (whether for you, or others...) in taking your root question (How can I go about designing this kind of game?) in more of a process-oriented direction. I'll reluctantly lean ...
- 283
2
votes
How do Idle games progress while not active?
They do mess with some time and calculate everything from it. The question is which time do they use?
Some games do use system time, and on their case, if you change your time locally, you can fool ...
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2
votes
Accepted
How do Idle games progress while not active?
They do actually use the clock the way you think they do, but they'll sometimes make network requests to get the time from a more reliable source. Try disabling the internet, closing the game and then ...
- 15k
2
votes
keeping clients up to date with server state in an mmo-like game
A common solution is to divide the game world into square chunks which are as large as the visibility zone of a player.
Give each chunk a list of entities which are currently in that chunk.
When ...
- 122k
2
votes
Architecting server for real-time multiplayer game with Unity client
If you're building your front end in Unity anyway, I'd strongly consider using Unity on the back end too, if feasible, for a few reasons:
Both the client and server will care about many of the same ...
- 136k
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