So many resources, so little fun

Well its Monday again and for some reason I've decided to write one of these every Monday just to make sure I keep working on my game. This Monday I don't have much to say about my game. I made one level. That was it.

The problem was I bought Rise of Nations for five bucks on Wednesday and spent the rest of my free time playing it. And to be honest it wasn't really that great. All the levels played out mostly the same. Its like Age of Empires with less features. However, the next game, Rise of Legends, look pretty good. They cut the races down to three and the resources down to two. It seems like a lot of RTS games are going that direction. I think they're trying to copy Star Craft, which in my humble opinion is still THE best RTS ever made. The very fact that you can still find it on store shelves speaks volumes about how good it is.

Some time after Star Craft, game developers decided that more resources meant more fun, but I think they're starting to reel it back in now. I myself am all for conservative use of resources in game design. I think that resources should be used and collected in dramatically different ways. Otherwise, its really just the same resource in a different color. And besides, its really pretty hard to be strategic when you have to keep track of six resources.

Since I'm talking about RTS design (how did I get started on this) I'll go ahead and mention some other things. When playing strategy games I find that I make a decision about ever 5-10 seconds. I think game developers should really push to make those decisions matter. For instance, in Star Craft near the beginning of levels, I had to decide if I wanted to upgrade my current marines or build a new robot or more troops, and since the Zerg would be attacking in about 30 seconds the decision really mattered. I just don't find that happening in most of the RTS's these days. Typically they force you to build infrastructure for half an hour and then the fighting starts, so you don't really know if your loosing until then and you certainly can't narrow it down to one decision. "If only I had built a soldier instead of that villager!" You just don't hear that.

The other beautiful thing about Star Craft is that the races all had dramatically different units. Now I know, there are some new strategy games that are starting to do these things again, but for a long time it seemed like the differences between armies was that this one had slightly faster units and that one had slightly longer range, but it really wasn't anything you would take into account when you planned your attack. So the rule of thumb here is that if there is a difference in races, it should be a HUGE difference. In fact, it can't be too huge. The bigger the differences the better. In Star Craft if you played with the Protos the same way you played with the Zerg you would loose, quickly. And that's the way it should be.

Well, enough on that. I should probably start working on my game again, which is not a RTS. But my next game might be...

-Peter