David's Blog

MMO RTS - A Competitor

I have just had someone point out another game (in alpha) of a very similar vain, http://www.picaroonthegame.com/  and it looks cool too. My inspiration is more from the VGA Planets side of things though and I am trying to tackle some of the issues from a slightly different perspective from these guys.

Reading their blog, it’s a company not just a single guy like me and they are going without AI for the units keeping everything simple and directly human controlled.

This half worries me and half makes me exited, they are obviously more experienced at this than me so I hope they are not passing up on AI due to architectural complexity and it really is just a game-play decision, as I plan on heavily relying on AI to aid the player and reduce micro-management. It also gives me a chance to be distinctly different (and hopefully better).

I very much want to build in user customization into both ship construction ala Master of Orion 2 and via an AI rules engine ala Dragon Age (but more advanced)

Also my biggest challenge maybe to see if I can record an instance of gameplay for later playback to create reports ala VGA Planets in order to alleviate the annoyance of logging back on to find your new fleet destroyed, at-least you could watch a playback of the action and see what happened.

We both look to be thinking of using iPhones / Android for a cut down form of playing on the move. (One of the main reasons I like using unity is number of platforms I can deploy on including mobile)

So despite it looking quite similar (though not based in space) I think we are taking the idea in different directions, and for somewhat different audiences.

17 July 2010 ·