Shattered Lands: A Design

choffstein · 2005-01-17T11:47:52

First step to a successful game? Fleshing out the design, and then having it hammered by other developers. So here is the design to a game I called: Shattered Lands. Shattered Lands would be a real time strategy game based on strategy instead of micro-management. The game would begin by generating a overview map (think LOTR style...large map), and would randomly decorate it with several "cities." Each of these cities would be neutral, and two cities would be labeled as player capitals (the cities would be the two cities which were the furthest away). The goal of the game is to kill the other persons "commander." The commander is a special unit (the only experience based unit in the game) who embodies the player themself. So the game works like this: To conquer a city, you must breach its walls and slay all enemy forces (this might need work). If cities are not owned by an enemy player, they are neutral, but still hostile (and therefore, will be AI controlled and will fight back.) To march upon a city, you must have one city "connected" to it. Cities are connected if they are within 20 miles of one another (Think ut2k4 onslaught). Upon conquering a city, you gain access to all its buildings and its people, who generate stone, wood, and gold daily based on their location. Mountain cities will generate more stone, etcetera. There is no micromanaging here: income is calculated daily based on assets minus peasant expendentures (each peasant requires 1 wood, 1 stone, etc). Each city also would have anywhere between 1 and 10 plots of land, upon which you can build several types of buildings. These are: Farm -- Generate food for your people House -- Create more peasants Barracks -- Train peasants into soliders. Archers Range -- Train peasants into archers. Smithery -- Research war technology Lumber Mill -- Create lumber Quarry -- Mine rocks Mine -- Mine gold Wall -- These are special, and can be built anywhere Arhcer's Tower -- A defensive structure Capital cities are a bit different: These are the cities that the player starts with, and they each have a castle, and many more plots of land than a regular city. Unlike many RTS games, you would not need to send peasants to do tasks. Peasants would simply exist as a number, and peasants would be assigned to buildings. For example, you could assign 50 of the 150 peasants in a town to mine in a gold mine if you are running low on gold. You must fire them, however, before you train them into soldiers, or something like that. Soldiers would be trained at either the barracks or the archery range, and would be created individually. Each building has a maximum number of peasants available to work there. Peasants also, before coming soldiers, are assigned a house, so once all the property in the town has been filled, new peasants will not become available, unless you make old ones into soldiers. Soldiers and archers are the only units you can actually interact with. To fight a battle, you must march your solders across terrain into another city. This is where you can start thinking star craft, or something like that. The overview map is where you would see your soldiers marching -- and their speed is based on their terrain. Once you arrive at a town, however, it loads like a starcraft map. At any time, you can return to the overview map and click on another city, to "warp" there. This allows several battles to be occuring all over the map at once. City maps basically have the city situated in the center of the map, with random terrain elements all around (trees, cliffs, etc). When an army arrives, they are placed randomly along the perimeter of the map, so as to disallow the player who owns that city to place mass units at an "entry" point. So what happens, Mr. Visage, if two armies cross paths while marching to war? Well, neither player would know about the opposing army until it was too late, and a map would be immediately generated in real time, and the two armies would square off. That point would immediately exist on the overhead map so to allow each commander to send reinforcements if they would like. For now, there are only two types of units: Footsoldiers and archers. This is to help with the simplicity of the game (though, perhaps later down the line other types will be added.) Each has its obvious pros and cons: archers are weaker, but can fire from a distance. One of the features I am pondering adding is allowing certain cities to be controlled by "lords", which would be AI entities which would control the city. So you could set the lord to make the city defensive based, or have him pump offensive units, or have him make it entirely economically based. The goal is to make this game 1v1 network based, so thats how you can imagine it. Probably no versus AI play. So that is the design so far. Comments? Please, be harsh. If it doesn't sound fun...tell me. I am designing this to be a simple 2d tile based game with very primitive graphics (no fancy schmancy animated buildings or anything -- the only animated thing would be the soliders). Thanks for reading!

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by choffstein January 16, 2005 09:04 PM

9 comments, last by N8dunn 20 years ago

N8dunn

236

January 17, 2005 11:47 AM

i have nothing useful to say, just wanted to note that

Quote:
In response to TaoLung's post, I'd like to offer some vague and useless advice regarding a possible implementation of your battle system.

was ridiculously funny.
ok, carry on.

Shattered Lands: A Design

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Shattered Lands: A Design

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