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[Deckhead]

Im starting work on one now, and thought id take a look at what others have done, but there's just a few 4x games....

[rj]

isometric art is hard
most indie dev kids grew up with segas and nintendos instead of command and conquer (?)
isometric art is hard
3D art is less satisfying for rtses and harder to make look good
isometric art is hard
it's harder to make a gimmicky rts

tbh i'm actually planning working on an rts myself at some point; in super early stages though. most of that is because i have a deep love and nostalgia for command and conquer tiberian sun. otherwise i wouldn't.

also i'ts more complicated to make competitive games feel good for both single and multiplayer and rtses really feel lacking if they miss one or the other


shrug


24

[Slader16]

isometric art is hard
most indie dev kids grew up with segas and nintendos instead of command and conquer (?)
isometric art is hard
3D art is less satisfying for rtses and harder to make look good
isometric art is hard
it's harder to make a gimmicky rts

tbh i'm actually planning working on an rts myself at some point; in super early stages though. most of that is because i have a deep love and nostalgia for command and conquer tiberian sun. otherwise i wouldn't.

also i'ts more complicated to make competitive games feel good for both single and multiplayer and rtses really feel lacking if they miss one or the other


shrug


24

I think you forgot to mention something, isometric art is hard.

 

[rj]

oh right, no, good point. isometric art is hard.

23

[jiitype]

3D art is less satisfying for rtses

Why do you think that? Just curious.

[rj]

partially (probably more than a significant part) this is just pure biased personal aesthetic preference, but there is some measure of reason behind it

3D art in an rts is imprecise. which is ironic, because it's actually more precise in the literal sense; each unit has more definition and actual mass and placement in a world that's more literally exact. but once you have a Z axis that's defined beyond voxel work and a free rotation then you add too much to a genre that necessitates hyperfocus.

personally i don't like having to think about camera placement besides perhaps a 4-position isometry setup when i'm playing an rts. i feel like i am actually seeing less when there's 3D onscreen; pixels/voxels just read better and faster visually when everything is as tiny as it is in a traditional rts.

you wanna be speedy and 3D is just...not as speedy.

19

[Boreal]

I disagree - I think Supreme Commander worked really well.

[rj]

note: i've never played supreme commander

that said, everything i know about it doesn't make it strike me as a traditional rts, though

could be wrong!

18

[starsrift]

Balance is also hard.

There's been a few. I believe there's a couple slogging along in the Devlog section.
Deep Quest was a game released a while ago.

[Leon Fook]

RTS is not cool now. they rather make moba than rts.

well real reason though RTS is one hard game to make, not because of art, but

Balance is also hard.

[...]

C&C General is 3D and it's good.

also http://oilrush-game.com/
is that rts enough for you?

[Sik]

To be fair while an isometric viewpoint is common now, early RTS games had a top-down view instead (and of course were 2D), so I suppose that you could completely sidestep that problem by just not having to go isometric in the first place.

[rj]

C&C General is 3D and it's good.

also http://oilrush-game.com/
is that rts enough for you?

aw man, i hated generals! like, with a burning passion. i detest that game.

and oilrush really doesn't look  visually appealing at all, honestly

note i don't think it can't be done, because i think that C&C 3 (though, unfortunately, not red alert 3) manages to make it almost work, and i think that if someone continued along that visual vein they could pull something together.

and probably some outside the box thinking would help.

but no, i really think in general rtses benefit from pixels

14

[Leon Fook]

but no, i really think in general rtses benefit from pixels

I really need to see it to believe. Any idea? (starcraft maybe?)

[Johnman]

For some reason making units feel robust in 3D is difficult, or perhaps that's the way we learned to feel about them. In a game like Starcraft or C&C Red Alert (original) units feel like they are there, stompin the ground. In games like Supreme Commander or Tiberium Wars units feel somewhat floaty to me.

Starcraft 2 is the only 3D game that I feel has been capable of tackling that problem, whatever it is. Perhaps it's because in a Starcraft game units have to move in a very precise and predictable way, almost as if it was a tiled turn game. I'm sure there's someone at Blizzard who knows exactly what I'm talking about. A pro who has grinded his moves to death and can reproduce them to the millisecond needs a game that will behave predictably. Deterministically.

[shinygerbil]

I guess it's in the same way that something grid-based is more "precise" than any kind of continuous measurement, as you can always judge distances at a glance much more easily. You can also be more precise and consistent in your movement/placement.

For example you could place a unit exactly (max range +1) distance from an enemy unit, and know that they are safe from attack, every single time. Much harder with 3d models, especially if they have 3d hit/detection boxes and are not just represented mechanically with a circle around the central point, for example.

Note that this ease of placement is not actually necessarily desirable in the eyes of the developers; think about MobArtsDotas where there is a lot of skill in judging/guessing ranges in a very imprecise field. Or Street Fighter where most of the game is built around judging the hard-to-measure space between yourself and your opponent. These concepts don't automatically apply to an RTS of course, but I think they are a decent fit if the game is centred around localised/on-the-fly tactics rather than broader strategy.

Visually I think 3D looks fine for an RTS, but it is a lot harder to do well. With pixels, the screen always looks consistently like one solid piece of pixel art; background and foreground look contiguous. With 3D, you always see the units separately from the terrain in the same way that, when playing an old FPS, you'll always notice which objects are interactable and which are not, because it is immediately obvious which are modelled as part of the environment and which have their own separate models/lighting effects/shadows etc.

[rj]

the two people above me got it down right, too

but no, i really think in general rtses benefit from pixels

I really need to see it to believe. Any idea? (starcraft maybe?)

the classic example, for me, (which, mind you, is one of my favorite games of all time, so i'm really biased in favor of it) is command & conquer: tiberian sun



compare this with its direct sequel, which, as mentioned, i said was one of the good examples i think:



now i don't think it's super biased to think the one on top is more visually clear! why is that?

part of this is that the second one has more visual clutter in the HUD (ironic, since it takes up overall less space), which is obviously unrelated completely to the actual camera/rendering going on so i'll try to ignore that. but can you read what things are what, at a glance, nearly as easily in this second shot? i don't just mean knowing what's going on, i mean knowing exactly what belongs to who, etc, etc?

there's confusion in the second due to a lot of details which help make things look visually appealing in 3D that wouldn't be necessary with 2D here. unless you went full lo-poly (which wouldn't happen here) the instantaneous read that tiberian sun gives isn't possible with these detailed models in the state they are now. you have to think for an extra second about what the units are, what the buildings are etc and that extra thinking time ruins a lot of the experience.

this is very feely feely, i know, but i think it illustrates it well, too.

i guess, in short, simplicity is the key here, ultimately

12

[SirNiko]

The art aspect seems like a red herring to me. You can use art styles other than isometric (like top down or 3d modeled) so that isn't problematic. It's not like Indies are above using shitty programmer art while they focus on the mechanics anyway. There are lots of ways to get around the art if the mechanics and concept are sound.

I'd like to point out that Tower Defense is a really common genre in indie games (to the point of being overdone) that falls under the Real Time Strategy umbrella. The MOBA genre evolved out of tower defense, too. I'd argue that Tower Defense has soaked up most of the Indie RTS energy because it's so convenient to design.

Comparisons of Indie RTS / All Indie Games to Non-Indie RTS / All Non-Indie Games (especially with consideration of Tower Defense) could be revealing. It might turn out that indie RTS games exist and are just being overshadowed by high quality non-indie RTS cousins.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

I don't think anyone who's ever tried to make an rts thinks that art is the hard part. Isometric art is by no means a requirement, and not very hard outside of specific art styles/situations.

RTS games do very well with abstract art (simple geometric shapes, symbols, etc) and work great in a variety of art styles. From the gritty 'realism' of c&c to the abstract stylization of darwinia. Many of the best or most famous rts games of all time - homeworld, warcraft 3, age of mythology 2, starcraft 2, company of heroes & dawn of war, etc -- are 3d. Many earlier, 2d rts games, such as parts (maybe all?) of the command and conquer series, total annihilation, etc, used pre-rendered 3d art as sprites. There are many solutions to creating art & content for an rts.

Some reasons an indie dev might not make an rts:

Rts games typically require either very sophisticated AI or netcode, neither of which are commonly within the scope of an indie game. Short of a very novel design, rts games require quite a bit of work on pathfinding, which is typically something indie devs avoid.

To be good/rewarding, rts games require a great deal of testing and balance -- which is typically outside of the scope of an indie game. To *feel* good and be engaging, you can't just depend on snappy fx and screenshake in an rts.


For a slice of why RTS games are hard, check out the ludum dare 7 day rts challenge:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/minild-44/

[s0]

the genre is also kinda out of vogue. starcraft is pretty much the only one that's still really relevant. after the success of starcraft 1, warcraft 3, age of empires 2 etc. in the late 90s and early 00s there was a huge wave of rts bandwagon jumpers leading to a flood of mediocre and uninspired games, which i guess resulted in fatigue.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

it should be noted that moba-style games and tower defense games are both technically subgenres of the RTS genre (or at least they grew out of it and have very similar mechanics), and tower defense and moba games are much more popular than traditional RTS games for indies