Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

game title and many more to be made during its development life. For popular reference,
Starcraft and the Age of Empires titles are well-known examples of RTS games.
Most RTS games utilize groups of vehicles, humans, and/or creatures available for
player control. The player can control groups or individual units and direct their efforts
in a number of ways. Frequently, these groups of units are run through missions
with objectives that require the player to apply strategy to resolve or conquer a given
objective or scenario, or to topple another player. Let’s focus on some of the topical
challenges for design in creating an RTS-style game:
� Requires heavy art asset design and creation
� Unit definitions
� Unit behaviors
� Interface hazards
� Pathfinding
� CPU opponents
� Simple or complex strategy
RTS games are extremely asset-intensive. They require tons of custom art, code,
and tools support. It takes a sizeable team, working well together, to deliver the
amount of raw assets required to build a competitive RTS title.
These player-controlled groups of humans, creatures, vehicles, and mobile weapons
require precise definition. For every unit, lowly and mighty, what abilities, weapons,
affiliations, motives, strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies will they possess?
Each of these specific unit details tend to come together for designers in data tables.
Here’s an example of an extremely simple, generic, character-unit table with an
arbitrary value system that has a maximum of 30:
Strength 20–30
Speed 5–18
Intelligence 5–15
Luck 10–20
Endurance 20–30
Attitude 20–30
Hit Points 20
Dexterity 5–20
Vision 8
C H A P T E R 5
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Design by Genre