Sulphur on 15/8/2010 at 23:39
Yup, Commandos. That's the first thing that hit me when I read that description. Be interesting to have it in first- or third-person. Though that's pretty much Hidden & Dangerous 2, again.
Chade on 16/8/2010 at 00:55
Quote Posted by catbarf
I just think RTSes aren't quite as well suited to the ideas of exploration and survival.
My crazy zany idea: an RTS exploring the ideas of exploration and survival! Horror, even (sort-of).
Seriously, why not?
First, all resources are finite. Now we have survival, and a need to continuously explore.
Try to evoke some sort of emotional connection to some sort of "mother shelter" that must survive. Perhaps it contains the women and children?
Second, get rid of idea that there are a finite number of well understood units. There are all sorts of different abilities that units can acquire by picking up appropriate technology from the map. Now we have more interesting exploration.
Have aggressive fog of war, which changes radius depending on the lighting level, with lots of meaningful growls and so forth warning of monsters out in the darkness. Make sure that monsters have devastating initial attacks.
Make sure that, when units uncover a piece of technology, it becomes a magnet for monsters. Make sure that exploration is expensive enough that you can't afford to explore in large groups.
Encourage the player to "watch over" units in danger. Have lots of different enemies with different strengths / weaknesses. If the player isn't around to see a monster decimate a scout, they won't know how to effectively counter the monster when it attacks next.
Let units be "cowardly" or "brave". If the player makes them run away when they uncover a piece of technology, then they may avoid being eaten by monsters, but the monsters could come and take the item back to their lair (a darker, more dangerous, place). Units can attach some sort of "scented" device to an item before running away, so it leaves a trail behind if a monster takes it.
We might not be talking STALKER here, but I don't think an RTS aimed at survival / exploration / horror is necessarily a lost cause.
Taffer36 on 16/8/2010 at 02:06
Quote Posted by catbarf
The biggest problem I see is the amount of micromanaging you're proposing. It's hard enough when it's just you in a first-person perspective- trying to manage six units in this manner would be taxing, to say the least.
I suppose basic AI for the units would be necessary, then. I outlined it for if you send them to "infiltrate" on a path, but it would probably be necessary to give them similar abilities on "engage."
So units would move to destinations that you select them to, but once at said destination they would take proper cover opposite known enemy positions. They would also fire and engage enemies along the way and at the destination, or would attempt to avoid patrols if set to infiltrate.
I guess if they get engaged by enemies and there is no good cover around them, they should either seek to run to closest cover or retreat, in which case something would pop up on the HUD to notify you that one of your units is in a bad situation.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Yup, Commandos.
The gameplay videos up on youtube are pretty shitty, but it looks interesting from what I could see. As catbarf pointed out, units would probably need less micromanagement than that, as I saw the player having to constantly click ten yards ahead of the unit to get them moving where they wanted. I really think a DRAW A PATH system with basic unit AI that can take cover or take out small patrols stealthily would help a lot.
Neb on 12/2/2011 at 16:23
Thread's getting old, I know, but...
A first-person perspective time travel stealth game. After every timed cycle you are transported back in time a little bit. You work with your past selves to solve puzzles, but if any of them see you then reality collapses.
Ripped off from a Net Yaroze game called Time Slip, but it was a platformer, and reality only collapsed if you touched yourself (but you were a snail so it wasn't that kinky!)
demagogue on 12/2/2011 at 17:16
Yeah, that'd be cool.
Combat could be cool too.
You use your past self as a decoy to flank the bad guys, as long as your reaction time was fast enough to kill them before your past self gets killed. Or you line up a couple of selves to take out an entire large group. Lots of tactical potential there (I think).
I'm thinking about an economic-social sandbox game, just a massive city with a working economy (prices set by supply-demand), with as many bots as can realistically run, and you participate in it and manipulate it ... as a producer, a seller (wholesaler or consumer), or a bandit or crime-lord (or some mix; bots also have these roles). And a few twists like you can hire or "persuade" bots to do work for you, pay or kill off your competition, a basic politics (bots "vote" based on their social-economic condition for politicians who change the policies which affects the economy which feeds back to the bots opinions, and you can run for office of course, or a dictator takes over and sets policy and only a coup can take them out), maybe some simulated crises (like a famine, where the prices spike and the politics radicalizes, then you can try to spearhead a revolution and make yourself a dictator, etc). But anyway, really sandbox. None of these things are scripted. There are just bots, buying & selling, & "official actions", and you let the system run and play it to your advantage.
I've seen games with similar elements, but I think it'd be fun to have a little self-contained simulated society down to the individual bots, and you're just one faceless person in the mass, but you can go as far as you can play the system. (It could have a multiplayer version too, though I can't see it being that popular.) Then I think about adding some plot elements, some hardwired, some randomly generated, in the manner of Transcendence where different buildings have different things going on. So that adds an exploration and mini-missions part on the side and follow a "story" if you wanted.
I'm seriously thinking about making a game like this, because I think even going through the process of designing and making I'd learn a lot, and just seeing the city in action would be cool. I'm also thinking top-down is the proper perspective for this.
catbarf on 12/2/2011 at 17:32
I've been thinking, we see plenty of aliens-in-space survival horror shooters, but I've never seen that sort of premise used as an RTS (well, besides hybrids like Natural Selection). Humans on one side, aliens on the other, and a map to fight over that serves as more than just window dressing, with objectives that have in-game consequences. Aliens destroy the generator, lights out, reduced accuracy and range. Something like that.
Perhaps have the aliens/infection/zombies start with just one, and the human player starts with just his leader. The aliens need to infect people/reanimate corpses/lay eggs, the human needs to recruit people who then come under his control.
Nameless Voice on 12/2/2011 at 17:36
There was this cool Starcraft 2 custom map called "The Thing" which was a little like that. Everyone plays as marines in an abandoned facility full of infesteds, but one player is secretly a monster that wants to kill them all, and anyone it kills turns into another like it.
Not quite what you're talking about, but it has some vague similarities.
Unfortunately, the idiot author pulled it. Yay for idiotic battle.net 2.0 actually allowing people to do that.
Bakerman on 13/2/2011 at 05:59
I like dethtoll's idea as well - it sounds like what I was hoping Metro 2033 would be. It'd be really nice to bring in STALKER-style A-life for both your enemies and your allies. Having your buddies make supply runs to far outposts, allowing them to explore regions and discover things themselves, etc.
If I were making an FPS/RTS, I think my process would first be to make a good squad-based shooter, then to add top-down control. So instead of the Dawn of War 'stand and shoot until someone falls over' RTS syndrome, you're actually literally making a shooter, but with a bit of a grander scale, and then giving the player much broader control.
(This, of course, relies on the characters actually having AI. So, you'd be looking at STALKER as opposed to CoD :p.)
I'd probably give the player some sort of actual physical presence - plus an elite bodyguard squad of AIs and a helicopter to reach anywhere on the battlefield quickly. Of course, this means that if an enemy squad found you, they could kill you... leaving your side commander-less.
The actual commands you'd be giving to your squads would probably be pretty standard RTS fare, but they'd accomplish them in very different ways, simply by virtue of them being AIs in a shooter.
An interesting idea would be the concept of a multi-unit plan, where you can stack up orders in a grid, where one axis is time and the other axis is each unit that is part of the plan. That'd allow you to do things like have a unit on standby in a dropship, then send in a squad of commandos to take out an AA battery. Only once that stage of the plan is completed will the airborne unit receive its order to attack. The idea behind this automation is both to reduce the amount of micromanagement you have to be constantly doing (just stack up a few orders and you're ree to pay attention to something else for a little while), but also to mitigate against the effects of a commander being killed. If you'd left plans stacked up when you were killed, your units would continue on their way, and could possibly still win the day for you :p.
Neb on 17/2/2011 at 03:05
Psychological thriller exorcism game:
Demons periodically flash into existence. Only half aware of the reality in which they have found themselves - and also their immense power - they 'haunt' areas with their impulsive needs. You are an exorcist who must infiltrate each zone and use your wits to either satisfy their demands or banish them completely. The closer you get to their motivations, the more volatile the resistance.
demagogue on 17/2/2011 at 04:34
I like it.
Another angle is a strategy game about a shadow war between angels & demons in and for the normal world, with only a select subset of humans (priests & pagans) able to see what's going on and participate.
Edit: Lol, make it an MMO and you're almost guaranteed commercial success as religious and pagan gamers will join to keep the world from falling to the other side.
