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[Tunabrain]

Gates of Ruin is an RTS set in a timeline where humans discover space age technology a little too early. The result is weird WW2 vehicle concepts barely held together with the help of magic space rocks.

The game is heavily inspired by Supreme Commander (strategic zoom, large-scale battles, physical bullets, giant units) and Red Alert 2 (a light hearted RTS that doesn't take itself too seriously). I'm working on this by myself, mostly for fun rather than profit. The game supports multiplayer, with a single-player campaign planned for later. The game is written from scratch in C++ and OpenGL.

This project is in its early stages and is not the prettiest, but a first devlog has to happen at some point!

Below are the most interesting bits about the game:

Resources

In Gates of Ruin, there is only one resource: Magical Space Rocks ("Pyonium"). Space rocks need to be mined and transported back to a refinery to become useful. The only way to move space rocks is with pylons, which will slowly float rocks to the nearest refinery.

The refinery will turn space rocks into energy. Energy can be used to warp in buildings and units - but getting the energy out of the refinery is tricky! It can only be beamed out of the refinery via space lasers, and only within a short range. To extend the range, you need pylons (how convenient).

Engineers can carry a little bit of energy with them, which allows them to build outside of your pylon network. But only for a little bit - then they run out, and need to drive back and refuel.

The resource system is a bit unusual, but it adds an interesting spin on what's already out there. The main idea is to make your economy very visual: You can judge your income from the stream of incoming space rocks, and you can immediately see your expenses by following the energy beams.

Pathing

Pathing is based on flow fields and is optimized for large maps and a massive number of simultaneous units. Look at them go!

For the curious, here are a few older videos showing some more pathing action:

• Tight squeeze
• Wide turning circles
• Get out the way!
• Colliding armies (warning: old)
• Traversing a forest (warning: old)

Strategic Zoom

In classic Supreme Commander style, the map can be zoomed all the way out to move around quickly and see what's happening elsewhere in the world.

Deep Command Queues

This game is less about hectic microing and more about the long con - and a big part of that is queueing up lots of things to happen.

See it in action!

A couple of weeks ago this game saw its first playtest, which was a lot of fun! Players immediately figured out that the artillery unit was overpowered, but at least there were no crashes or desyncs, which is all you could hope for in a first playtest.

A condensed version is below (warning: naughty language).

[AlexVsCoding]

Just wanted to pop in to say this project looks absolutely glorious, LOOOOOVE the floating rock supply routes. More than happy to give this a playtest. Look forward to more updates in here!

[Devilkay]

another game about tanks XD

[Tunabrain]

Big updates! I spent quite a while redesigning the look of the game.

I wasn't completely happy with the top-down view of Supreme Commander, so I redesigned the game to be in isometric 3D perspective.

I modelled a few decorative buildings and put together a city test map. What do you think?


Zoomed out:

Zoomed in:

To get back into the gameplay side of things, I also added wall structures and a gatling defense turret.

Behold the glorious zoom:

BRRRRRRRRRRRRT:

Thanks for checking it out!

[Geoff Moore]

Wow, that is a major change! I love the isometric look, it's very nice indeed. I think those blues would work really well with a red earth base for some maps instead of the grass. Looking forward to seeing more!

[ARF Initiative]

I like it, yeah. Will you make an update with all the features and mechanics? Gameplay looks interesting right now.

[gruffler]

If you don't mind me asking how do you implement your fog of war? I know of using a texture to mask out the fog but yours is very clean and precise, i can see no evidence of an overlayed texture, so I dont think you do that.
Also I like the isometric style change! This looks really promising!

[Tunabrain]

Wow, that is a major change! I love the isometric look, it's very nice indeed. I think those blues would work really well with a red earth base for some maps instead of the grass. Looking forward to seeing more!

Thanks! Yeah, I'm still trying to find the right environment and setting for this game - this is my first time making a real game, so it's all a bit overwhelming. A red earth base could work! I'll play with that idea.

If you don't mind me asking how do you implement your fog of war? I know of using a texture to mask out the fog but yours is very clean and precise, i can see no evidence of an overlayed texture, so I dont think you do that.

I'm still using an overlayed texture, I'm just using it differently. With a standard fog of war texture, you would set the texels to binary values (0 or 1), so that doesn't give you much information. Instead, I'm storing the signed distance to the vision boundary. When you interpolate in the texture, you get a smooth distance value out, and then you check the sign to figure out if its visible or not. You can also use pixel derivatives to anti-alias your fog of war boundary at pretty much no cost (just a smoothstep).

Computing the signed distance texture is an interesting subproblem. I ended up using a trick similar to the old voronoi diagram trick: My fog-of-war texture is actually a depth texture, and for each unit, I render a cone centered on the unit, with the same radius as the unit's vision radius and with the rim of the cone sitting at z=0.

This allows you to abuse the rasterization hardware to compute the distance field super fast. You end up with something like this, that you can then feed to your shader:

Of course, the GPU stuff is just for visualization - internally the game uses a binary visibility texture computed on the CPU to determine visibility for gameplay. After all, all results have to be exactly the same across machines for lockstep multiplayer.

[fearless_donut]

Very nice visuals. And looks like the gameplay is pretty original. It definitely looks like a mix of SupCom and RedAlert.
Will there be any kind of extended tactics for winning or the victory is decided mostly by units numerical superiority?

[Guntha]

Hello Tunabrain,

Just so you know, I bookmarked this topic as soon as saw the first seconds of that gameplay video; it reminds me a lot of the time I was playing TA Spring in highschool.

To be honest, I'm not yet convinced by the new isometric style; I can't wait to see new gameplay in this style!

Keep going,

[Tunabrain]

As you would expect, the graphics overhaul caused a whole cascade of gameplay issues I had to resolve. There were also a lot of balancing issues that came up in the previous playtest, but I managed to get a new version of the game in front of a couple of friends and we had quite a bit of fun playtesting.

Here are a few gifs of our session:

The game is starting to feel fun, which is encouraging. However, there is a lot of work to be done - there are only a handful of (ground)units so far, and I'll have to think carefully which direction I want to go. Adding an air layer might be crucial to figure out how to make this game more fun, but there are a lot of options when it comes to air.

Also, an interesting issue that I've only had to deal with after switching to isometric: Units can occlude other units. In particular, the decorative high rises and houses pose a few issues. With a few stencil buffer tricks, hidden units are now visible:

I'm not fully satisfied with this, and I'll have to work on improving it. Starcraft 2 solves it nicely, and I will likely try to implement that once I have time.

Will there be any kind of extended tactics for winning or the victory is decided mostly by units numerical superiority?

I'm trying to avoid winning-by-unit-spam. Right now, victory mostly depends on being able to break through defensive positions and avoiding artillery barrages (or, conversely, funneling your enemy and taking him out with well positioned artilleries). I'm hoping to expand on this, so that winning depends on clever positioning and a small amount of micro-ing your army.