I am working on a new game for about a month now. I am developing the game on my own in Unity, fulltime.



The gameplay is similar to node based strategy games like Auralux, Mushroom Wars and obviously NeoWars, which I developed last year. I have written a devblog for NeoWars here



Here is a scribble of what I have in mind for the gameplay.

While those node based strategy games have generally no resources, I have decided to add 2 resource types, gold and mana.



As I want to develop a slightly more complex and strategic game than NeoWars I decided to use resources as they make the decision which node to attack/conquer much more intresting.



As resources are automatically harvested by a nearby tower, it’s only a slight complexity increase. But there is more. Harvesting is semi automatic. The player has to put the tower into “harvest” mode. The different tower modes are explained later in this post.



Gold is vital, as it is used for building, upgrading and recruiting troops, but Mana will be one of the deciding factors for winning a battle.







Terrain

Inbetween tower nodes could be trees, water, lava, traps and also blocking obstacles which are currently not shown in the scribble. The obstacles can slow down, harm or block troops when trying to reach another node/tower.

In NeoWars I had only blocking and later in the game timed barriers. The new system adds a lot of interesting depth to the game without making it too complex. This time the player is able to build, destroy or influence obstacles using the wizard.

As I am using voxel art, I am not yet sure how I am modelling the terrain at all. I have thought about using a similar tile system as Warcraft 2 did, I would model every single tile in voxel just add a little more depth and variation and create a level editor which can handle the voxel tiles.



This is something I will care about more, when the core gameplay works well enough.







The Wizard

The mana is needed by a powerful wizard! Each player has only one wizard to control.



The wizard can be called on top of each tower. Once called he can heal troops, cast fireballs, burn down nearby forests, repair the tower etc.

If used right he can destroy hundreds of enemy units and can turn the tide even in a desperate situation.

The problem with this approach is: The player has now an additional complex unit to care about which can be easily forgotten in the heat of the combat.

To solve that the game will be a slower paced than e.g. Neowars or other games in that genre.

The wizard is going to be very powerful. In the first few levels the player just needs to teleport him to the right tower to make a difference.



As soon as he arrives, the troops of the tower will have improved stats. Also the tower will harvest, produce or have a better defense value depending on its mode.

Spells:

Currently only 3 spells are in the prototype. A fireball, a tower repair and a troop heal, but I have planned to add much more spells in the final game.



The player will not be able to use them all in one battle, but has to decide which he want’s to learn (skilltree). I am currently planning white and black magic, but might add more magic schools later on.



The spell system has yet to be fleshed out, As I started out, I was not sure if the wizard is a good idea at all, but I am now more confident, that he will play a big role in the whole game.



The wizard is also the main hook for the story telling.







The Tower

Towers can be build on each node of the battle field, if the player has enough resources. They can only built when a node is conquered.

The following gif is an example how to conquer a node. (The first two weeks, I have worked only with cylinders, spheres and cubes to speed up the development process)





The following gif is a very simplyfied level with nodes and two towers. You can also see the resources gold and mana. The battlefields later on will be bigger, but for testing purposes this was good enough.









Tower Modes



Each tower can switch to 3 different modes. Switching mode has a cool down, to make the decision a little bit more interesting.

The towers might change shape or spawn some addons to make sure the player realizes immediately in which mode the tower currently is. I will go into detail in another blog post about this.

Produce:



This is the standard mode, the tower will transport units to the battle field. As I don’t want to make it look like the tower is “producing units” it’s actually opening a portal and teleports soldiers from an unknown location to the battlefield. This costs some gold and mana for each soldier teleported.

Harvest:



Towers can only switch to that mode if resources are nearby. Depending on its level, it harvests gold and/or mana from nearby resource pools. There is no need for workers. The harvesting is done with wizard powers obviously!.



Defend:

As soon as the tower is switched to defend mode, it gets additional armor and archer/cannons spawn on the top. The tower can now withstand a much bigger force.



Tower Upgrades



Towers will be upgradeable during a battle. I haven’t yet decided how this is going to work exactly. Probably only defense, production and harvesting can be upgraded while battling. There will definitely be a skill tree where the player can decide which part of the tower should get stronger.

Battles:

Controlling big armies is always very satisfying for RTS players. I haven’t heard anybody complaining about that ever :).



It was actually not planned in my first concept, to have hundres of units on the battle field. After adding more and more units to the game, it felt so good, that I decided to give it a try.

I am not yet sure how big the battles are going to be, but I think several hundred units on the whole battle field will probably be quite normal.

This was a first small test which felt quite promising, but I was facing lots of garbage collector spikes even though everthing was pooled. I solved those and other problems already but that’s another story.

It will be quite some challenge to make this a good experience for every player, especially on older computers, so I have to plan carefully as I am the only one working on this game.





Squads:



After playing a lot of other RTS games, I have decided to try a squad approach to get rid of micromanaging single units. Single units will still have a “brain” but act more in the interest of the squad. My hope is also to be able to display more units using squads as some of the decision processes can be done inside the squad.



Another good thing is, that I can get rid of a lot of healthbars and introduce a leveling system, which adds more depth again but does not necessarly make the game more complex.



That’s it for today. Thanks so much reading!



In my next post I am probably going to talk about pathfinding, pooling and other technical challenges I faced during the development of the prototype.

