RTS into First Person _______

[Squid Empire]

Obviously the Renegade games are built around playing the RTS command and conquer games as the units in a first person perspective. I've been putting some thought into how an RTS (leaning towards city building) could be built in first person. My concept would play like a mix between Minecraft or Rust and Anno or Age of Empires. I liked Minecraft but was frustrated by the emptiness of it, the hollowness of your creations, and Anno games are great, but it would fantastic to play as the mayor, wander your own streets, and have greater control over the micro architecture of your base - not to mention lead your armies into battle! The goal would be to mix the 'macro' elements of the RTS game (the abundance of 'citizen' AI's, large scale cities that manage themselves) with the 'micro' elements of a sandbox building game (resource gathering, crafting, architecture, exploration, fighting).

Has anyone got any thoughts on this? Is there a market for it? How would you do it? What theme/setting would be best? Maybe there's a different way to convert an RTS game into a first-person game?

[GeneralCamo]

How about Age of Empires in an First Person RPG game?

[DeviousDave]

Keep the graphics simple and easy to read, if your making a city builder fps hybrid then your gonna need to give the player all the information in an easy to understand way and build a solid foundation that doesn't lag out when you hit 40-50 citizens.

 

Your settings (IMO):

 

A) Medieval/Fantasy ( Age of Empires or even better Dwarf Fortress style)

B) Scifi (go look up a game called Maia on Steam)

C) Post Apocalyptic (either realistic or Fallout style)

 

You want one of these settings (bonus points if you manage to combine a Scifi city/colony with a Medieval/Fantasy world) to limit people in a realistic way at first and to provide challenging enemies for the FPS survival aspect of the game to make the early game more fun, give them a wagon with supplies (or lander/rover if Scifi) and some NPC's to manage and then let them loose to decide where their colony is going to be.

 

Make them build the colony up with a selection of pre-designated buildings such as walls, houses, farms etc. that fit into a tech tree with requisites that need researching (masonry + stone working for walls etc.) but also include an editor so that people can make their own building designs for the designated stuff and share it with others.

 

As the Colony grows and acquires more people, add an option to switch to a RTS style mode for easier management and placing of buildings.

 

Make sure it has a bloody good tutorial, I mean SERIOUSLY good.

 

At the end of the day however it's your game (or idea) so make what you want to make.

 

That's my view on it anyway.

[Squid Empire]

Great ideas Dave! Graphics are interesting yes. Personally I love me some good graphics, but I can totally see why you'd want to limit them. Perhaps if you used a fancy rendering system that turned objects you can't directly see into wireframes or something that might same some memory... You probably couldn't go the Minecraft way of only rendering what's in your 'sector' because then any AI's you had that went out to chop wood would simply cease once they left your render range.

 

As for settings - nice. When I originally though of this I pictured a colonial theme (for obvious reasons) but then I went Sci-Fi. Finally I ended up with a dieselpunk/colonial hybrid but as you pointed out, it's good to have some strong enemies that make sense in your world - and my concept did lack that.

 

As for how a town started, that's another good idea. It sounds like the start settings in Banished. I had though of having a start like Minecraft, as a lone newcomer to a New World, with just your backpack and some tools (maybe you could pick from some character classes for some RPG elements). I'd have some roads and towns already existing (for combat or trade) and if you build near a road (or build a road near your place) then NPCs in cars or on foot would occasionally travel past you. You could then hire them or they might trade with you - like in the iPad game Towncraft.

 

Building the buildings is a challenge. I think you're suggesting a system like in Spore - I hadn't thought of that and it solves some problems. The biggest problem I think with building is that there should be a balance between the hight scale town planning and the low scale architecture. If you have to design each home by scratch yourself that'll quickly get tedious and frustrating, but if you don't get any control over your town's architecture it won't feel custom enough. I had thought about a complex SimCity style system where citizens build their own homes on plots of land you designate, using whatever materials you supply. That would require powerful generation tools.
Another idea I had would be to have a bunch of components related to the building type and level. A citizen's house would be their own property and they'd decorate them themselves, but factories and shops are built by the player by using pre-built room templates and then placing specific components into them. You could build a lumber mill by first building a brick building, and then placing a 'saw' and a 'engine' into it. Maybe later on you'll upgrade it by placing another saw, a generator, a burner and a storage room.

This one of the coolest parts of the game but also one that would need the most work

 

For the RTS style building, I would have a component be a 'mayor's desk' or something like that that you can place in your home or town hall. Using that puts you into RTS view.

 

I can see why a tutorial would be important haha

Would a story based tutorial or an abstract narrated one be better?

 

Another important area of the game would obviously be the AI citizens. Should they behave autonomously, carrying out their own lives and businesses, or should they work under your dictatorial thumb? I supposed you could have 'private' citizens that runs banks and insurance companies and provide your settlement with money that they generate as long as they're happy and working. Then you'd also have 'workers' who respond to your commands in a indirect way, you could say 'cut these trees' and the nearest free workers would get on it. I'd say the most important 'victory condition' would be your people's happiness. Providing your citizens with a nice city with plentiful bear and food would cause them to be happier thus increasing your score.

 

 

 

I did some sketches of some 'level 0' houses for the earliest town. Here's one I quickly modelled.

 

 

It's a cozy 4x4m

 

 

 

How about Age of Empires in an First Person RPG game?

 

That would be interesting! You could start out as a villager and level up to eventually become a paladin. Image if you came across a enemy monk who tried to convert you haha

[GeneralCamo]

Just to add to the fun, let's add anachronisms all over the place! Byzantines vs. the Incas! It will be just like the original game in that sense. I mean, there was an Aztec campaign which had the Aztecs developing Gunpowder and Calvalry late in the game...

[DeviousDave]

For the tutorial I'd go with both, a skipable, hand holding, tutorial level/start that gives you directions to a decent place to start your town (although you would find better areas on your own) and walks you through the early steps and a grimmer or mayor handbook that players can refer back to with useful information and references to what they learned in the tutorial.

 

As for citizens I'd go Dwarf Fortress style as in they take care of themselves and attempt to complete any jobs you assign them that they can do, but you can't actually control them (although you could make them follow you with a follow me command)

For example I set an area to be mined to create a cave, then anyone who has been assigned to be a miner will go and mine that area out, however I can't chose who (out of the people with mining) will do it or when they will do it as they could have other jobs to do first or be sleeping etc.

 

I could however find a miner and cancel whatever other jobs he has so that the cave digging is now his priority, or possibly make it so that you can set certain tasks to proceed other tasks for certain citizens, such as mining being greater than fishing for miners who are also gatherers.

 

I'm also curious how mining/resource gathering etc. would work in this game, would it be like Minecraft where people actually go down mines to find stuff, or would it be like Anno 2070 where you build a structure over the resource location that constantly mines out resources until the area is depleted?

Would resources be teleported to the stockpile or would someone have to transfer it manually (or by truck)?

 

I'll write more when I'm not so tired

[Squid Empire]

Sounds great for the tutorial. Personally I love the manly european narrators from the Anno games (not 2070 lol) and would have one of them narrating the tutorial haha

 

That's what I was thinking of for the citizens too. It's the same style used in a lot city-builders (like the Settlers, Tropico, Banished etc.). How in depth would you have to go though? Would it be like Tropico, where some citizens are better at some jobs, and you have to micromanage them to shift them around, or simpler where the citizens are all equal (like in Age of Empires) and they can all work well anywhere?

Say you're playing in first person, I'd think the most you could do would be to select one tree or rock for 'harvesting', whereas if you're in 'mayor' mode you can click and drag for an area of 'work here' - like in Banished. But when you're in first person, you can get some citizens to follow you (like you said) and go on adventures, they could have weapons and act as your army, and help you construct camps along the way.

 

One problem I just thought of fits into this. How much can the player 'see' in RTS mode? In most RTS/city-building games the player can see the whole map at a time. But in this game if you could do that it might take away the fun of exploring in first person mode. On the other hand, if you limit their mayor-mode view to just their town, how can they tell their people to mine the forests just outside of it?

 

Resources are cool. I would be tempted to go the Anno route and have heaps of resources, that can be combined and worked in chains. As for how they're collected... Ideally you would have a Minecraft system I think. But pragmatically, it might be hard to implement an underground with resources strew about in a modern 3D engine without 'blocks'. My suggestion would be to have areas of fertility, like in Tropico.

 

 

 

 

 

Certain areas are richer in some resources. Maybe you'd need to conduct a survey to find out an areas fertility, or maybe it's automatically discovered for you. You could then build an iron mine in an iron rich area, and as long as people work there it provides iron. Or you could build a sugarcane farm in an area suited to that crop. This would mean you'd try to build your town in an area with the resources you want or need. Trees I think would be handled differently, with lumberjacks actually cutting them down, and replanting them.

 

As for resource transportation, this game is begging to have lots of AI's moving around so I would say go for the people carrying stuff all the way. I suppose having a stockpile where people take everything would be great, but they have to actually take it there! It would be awesome to build a road from your distant silver mine to your base and then see trucks loaded with silver lumbering along to deliver it to you. You could have 'shop' buildings in your town that distribute your food etc from your stockpiles to your people.

 

Just to add to the fun, let's add anachronisms all over the place! Byzantines vs. the Incas! It will be just like the original game in that sense. I mean, there was an Aztec campaign which had the Aztecs developing Gunpowder and Calvalry late in the game...

 

Yeah I'd imagine that a Age of Empire RPG would quickly become a comedy game, what with 10 war elephants on a small boat, or villagers being paid a lump sum of 100 food for indefinite indebted servitude to the mysterious overload that controls everyone's actions

[NaokiP]

Taking this off-topic for a moment, but have you ever played Valkyria Chronicles, Squid?

It's a game that effectively combines turn-based tactics (top-down, simplified view) and third person real-time shooter elements, along with some basic resource management between missions and RPG elements.
It's a far cry from what you have in mind, obviously, but I think it's a start of what a combined top-down and first/third person hybrid could become.

 

There's also Source Mods like Empires or Nuclear Dawn that have been around for years now, which have successfully integrated a top-down "Commander" role ingame, one that oversees building placement, vehicle production and resource management and issues orders while all the other players play the game in a first-person perspective. It's an amazing mix, and it's so saddening to see both games dying off because they're such a niche and have reached a stopgap in development, it reminds me of why W3D projects also can't get the break in popularity they deserve.

 

The original Dune RPG DOS game touches on a lot of things you mentioned in your previous post, as go between first person text-based RPG and a top down strategy sort of display when traveling across the planet. And you've got resource management, troop management... it's a really overwhelming game unless you look some instructions up, hahah

[DeviousDave]

There's also Natural Selection which is a bit more main stream that does RTS/FPS in that one player builds structures and issues orders while others play as the 'grunts' and actually do the fighting.

 

Another one would be Project Nomads which involved flying Islands and constructing a base on your Island before exploring in TPS in search of blueprints and resources for other buildings.

 

Or Maelstrom... assuming you can get it to run which is a shame because it's a really good game.

 

There is a list of games here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:First-person_strategy_video_games

 

And that's not all of them, there are tons of them in development at the moment, Flagship, Mist of Stagnation, Universal War (can't seem to find it anymore ), Dysis (if the dev ever comes back from Hiatus), Battle Swarm, Universum: War Front.

 

As you can tell I love RTS/FPS hybrids

[Squid Empire]

Oh yeah! I've heard about a lot of these and try my hand at many of them, and you were right to say it's a huge mix and requires a lot of learning. Even more programming to make it I'd imagine. I haven't played Valkyria Chronicles but I did see it when it came out. It seems that on the scale of FPS ---- RTS most hybrids are in the FPS zone. One I played was Iron Grip: Lords of War (which had a cool steampunk aesthetic), that game was a FPS tower defence. I think that sort of mix would be fairly common, as evidenced by the games you listed Dave. I remember Natural selection too, which again I was thinking of buying...

 

It's a bit dubious to say that the games didn't get the reignition they deserve, while they may have had bad luck conspire against them; if there was a true niche they needed to fill they would still be going I think. It might be that there's just no market for this sort of game, and that we three here are the only ones who would play it!

 

The city-building FP game I was thinking of above would be my ideal game and I would absolutely love it even if it was full of bugs and had placeholder graphics, but I can't speak for the population of video gamers as a total. This is sorta the reason for this thread. With enough willpower and willing people, we could make this game. The question is; is it worth looking into? Is there any need for it, or would it just be a waste of everyone's time.

[DeviousDave]

Oh yeah! I've heard about a lot of these and try my hand at many of them, and you were right to say it's a huge mix and requires a lot of learning. Even more programming to make it I'd imagine. I haven't played Valkyria Chronicles but I did see it when it came out. It seems that on the scale of FPS ---- RTS most hybrids are in the FPS zone. One I played was Iron Grip: Lords of War (which had a cool steampunk aesthetic), that game was a FPS tower defence. I think that sort of mix would be fairly common, as evidenced by the games you listed Dave. I remember Natural selection too, which again I was thinking of buying...

 

It's a bit dubious to say that the games didn't get the reignition they deserve, while they may have had bad luck conspire against them; if there was a true niche they needed to fill they would still be going I think. It might be that there's just no market for this sort of game, and that we three here are the only ones who would play it!

 

The city-building FP game I was thinking of above would be my ideal game and I would absolutely love it even if it was full of bugs and had placeholder graphics, but I can't speak for the population of video gamers as a total. This is sorta the reason for this thread. With enough willpower and willing people, we could make this game. The question is; is it worth looking into? Is there any need for it, or would it just be a waste of everyone's time.

 

I'd play it and I took the liberty of asking a few friends who are into RTS games and they all said they would play it.

 

i think you would be catering to a very niche market though, although don't let that put you off. If you want to make it, make it and if it's good then people will buy it/play it.

Edited June 1, 2015 by DeviousDave

[Squid Empire]

Thanks Dave. I guess I'll do a Bfranx and post random concept images until I learn some 3D. Hopefully that'll at least annoy Synaesthesia