Why RTS/MOBA?
RTS games were my all-time favorite genre growing up. The sense of player agency was unparalleled; at any point, you could be building your base how you want, outfitting your army how you want, or attacking your opponent how you want. In modern days, many mainstream games have begun to favor smaller-scale moment-to-moment encounters, which might account for the success of the MOBA, after it spun off of the RTS genre. The aim of this project was to capture the essence of both. The result was a prototype in which the player is asked to constantly evaluate each unit's positioning on a macro level, while simultaneously ensuring individual success via moment-to-moment skill-shots and dodges.
What were the key challenges?
Gameplay Design
The mantra of the game is that you should be constantly moving, switching units, and switching attacks. A few features were introduced to reinforce this:
State-changing Weapons
Quick Selector
Squads!!
State-changing Weapons
Similar to a standard RTS, I needed to introduce a few states in which a unit could exist, so they didn't need to be constantly babysat. They could be idle, entrenched, or active. It defined a sliding scale of autonomy that a unit exists on at any given time. Once this was established, I could start designing weapons that either reposition the unit, or alter their state.
Quick Selector
This is the feature I'm most proud of! The game's design meant that there needed to be a quick and easy way to swap units, without encountering a clunky UI, or a break in the combat. The end design was a unit selector that checks for the closest unit but, depending on how far you drag, gradually closes the radian in towards the cursor. This resulted in a selector that lets you effortlessly 'swipe' between units with no break in the gameplay.
Squads
SQUADS! They're the strategic building block of the enemy AI. If I was to ask the player to move and attack as a team, I should expect the opponent to act the same way. It works like this:
Each enemy starts in a squad of one.
As squads discover each other, they negotiate units until each squad's composition is equally balanced.
Once a unit joins a squad, it will dodge & chase the player on its own, but will travel with its squad by default.
Each squad member shares a single cooldown timer for some movements, ensuring the player isn't swarmed all at once.
The concept of the 'squad' provided a lot of opportunity for how to engage the player: for instance, the game finds the closest squad to the player, and slowly instructs them to begin pressing towards the player, which ensures constant, but fair, opposition.
A shockwave immobilizes a unit, while a punch disrupts another.
