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[jacek]

Hi all,

I created an old-school RTS inspired by original C&C and Warcraft II. It runs in the browser.
It's a hobby project I was working on in my free time for the last 2 years.
It is currently called PicoRTS, as it's pretty minimalistic but I might rename it in the future.
The game runs on my custom engine and uses BabylonJS for rendering.
It has both multiplayer and AI opponents, two difficulty levels of AI players are currently implemented.
No need to register or anything, just go to the web page and play.

The game is fully playable at the moment but requires some polish.
All feedback is appreciated, regarding controls, gameplay, balancing, graphics, etc.
The game works most smoothly in Chrome. I don't have a Mac and haven't tested on Safari, if someone could tell me at least if the game works there that would be great
All logic is run server-side, even if you play against AI, so you need to be online and have a decent latency to the server which is currently located in Germany. So I think for people from other parts of the world than Europe the game can be a bit laggy.

Here is the link:
http://rts.picowar.com

And some screenshots:





Thanks

Jacek

[jbarrios]

Hi Jacek,

I played your game and recorded my thoughts:

[jacek]

Thanks a lot for the video and your feedback!
It was actually very useful for me to see how someone approaches the game for the first time.

This situation when your money disappeared when you wanted to build a heavy tank was because in that moment constructor started to build a civil factory you wanted to build earlier but didn't have money for. The moment you gathered enough money it began to build it so the cost of the building was deducted. This was initially a bug that an order to construct a building isn't cancelled when you don't have money - instead it's in a pending state and it's executed once it's possible to execute it unless constructor is given another order in the meantime. I actually thought it may be useful as you can effectively issue a build order even without having money and it will be done when you can afford it so I thought I will keep it that way. But from your video I can see that it's confusing so I will actually fix this bug and cancel the order at the point of displaying "not enough money" message.

I can also see that it would be helpful to have tooltips for building names in the menu as it can be confusing that you need to click on them to see the name (clicking on the icon doesn't start the construction of the building but a first time player may not know that).

I actually updated the code so that units shoot at nearby enemies automatically but haven't deployed that change yet. It will be deployed in the next update as I did a few major changes in attack code and I need to test them. I was aware of it and your video confirms that it's the right change as it's just too much micromanagement to manually issue attack orders every time your base is attacked.

Thanks again for taking time to record your thoughts!