On October 09 2024 23:33 Hider wrote: I don't think making it more like a MOBA can work. The game might play out fun enough, but after a while people will be "why don't I just play LOL or Dota" instead?
Adding a few units extra to control beyond a hero IMO adds nothing to the experience beyond what a MOBA does. For an RTS to distinguish itself relative to a MOBA, unit counts needs to be somewhat higher.
I disagree! Adding a little bit of something to change up the gameplay can change everything. To this day I play the dead game of Heroes of the Storm because it's just that bit different to LoL or Dota. There is a small playerbase, there are no big competitions, nothing. Yet still I can't bothered to play LoL or Dota and instead having still grat fun with HotS
Here is the difference: HOTS was developed with clear ideas years prior to release as to what problems they wanted to solve from existing MOBA's.
If Stormgate was started on the same premise it might have worked. (well probably not but you could argue so). If it was started by developers who knew MOBA's well, but also had clear and concrete ideas for how to innovate the genre. Yes, I would all support it.
However, what happens here instead is that we have some devs that failed in the RTS genre due to lack of innovation and execution and now needs to reinvent the MOBA genre - a genre with much tougher competition than RTS - in a matter of months. Do you see the problem? This has < 1% chance of succeeding.
Oh absolutely. I have zero expecations and almost zero hope (like <1% :D ) that FGS will turn the ship around. I do hope however that someone somewhere will be doing a RTS/ MOBA mix. I don't even need big armies. Maybe just call down squads of 10-20 units with a special purpose evolving throughout the game to add another strategic depth or even control what units/ what unit composition goes down which lane 1 / 2 / 3 to counter the enemys lane mix or or or. So much ideas :D
The SC2 world builder is a great way to experiment with these ideas. Also, Unity is super easy if you have went through a legit 4 year computer science program.
As a company having a choice in the matter you do not want to touch Unity with a 10-foot pole lol
Even with them back-peddeling on their attempt you simply never know when they try to (also retroactively) screw their customers again.
While Unity's business model and trustworthiness are certainly a topic for consideration, I don't think it's necessarily true that their technology is not an issue. I am not aware of any RTS built using Unity, but if Battle Aces is, then it sure seems to work a lot better than UE5 for it.
Looks like I was a bit too fast out there. I had read the 3v3 mode as max 5 units per player. But I guess it's 5 different units to select from and max 100 supply. Yeh that's still an RTS.
Even with them back-peddeling on their attempt you simply never know when they try to (also retroactively) screw their customers again.
While Unity's business model and trustworthiness are certainly a topic for consideration, I don't think it's necessarily true that their technology is not an issue. I am not aware of any RTS built using Unity, but if Battle Aces is, then it sure seems to work a lot better than UE5 for it.
Unity is very hardware friendly IMO. I mean you can play browser games in Unity
I've helped a couple of coders who were inexperienced with C# who are picking up Unity for the first time. A few weeks later, I get surprised by what they accomplish. Unity is good.
Stuff like this is why there are 45873978598 games being released on Steam every week. Making games is "super easy... barely an inconvenience".
Do not buy into the marketing hype by these video game companies that making a PC-only game is like landing a man on the moon. If Stormgate fails there will be 348578479 other RTS games to play.
Even with them back-peddeling on their attempt you simply never know when they try to (also retroactively) screw their customers again.
While Unity's business model and trustworthiness are certainly a topic for consideration, I don't think it's necessarily true that their technology is not an issue. I am not aware of any RTS built using Unity, but if Battle Aces is, then it sure seems to work a lot better than UE5 for it.
Oh, sorry, I could have worded that better - my point was not that the technology is flawless or best suited for the type of game, but as I lack profound technical knowledge about Unity I simply could not make a statement judging it's technical capabilities.
I've helped a couple of coders who were inexperienced with C# who are picking up Unity for the first time. A few weeks later, I get surprised by what they accomplish. Unity is good.
Stuff like this is why there are 45873978598 games being released on Steam every week. Making games is "super easy... barely an inconvenience".
Do not buy into the marketing hype by these video game companies that making a PC-only game is like landing a man on the moon. If Stormgate fails there will be 348578479 other RTS games to play.
While making games using a sophisticated IDE might be easier, making GOOD games never really is, especially when it comes to RTS, that's why you can more or less count the amount of good RTS titles with both your hands and some of those games date back to the 90s.
Ultimately while it certainly depends on the field of appliance, in regards to creative output, and I would definitely put games into this category, I think that quantity does not necessarily lead to quality.
I've helped a couple of coders who were inexperienced with C# who are picking up Unity for the first time. A few weeks later, I get surprised by what they accomplish. Unity is good.
Stuff like this is why there are 45873978598 games being released on Steam every week. Making games is "super easy... barely an inconvenience".
Do not buy into the marketing hype by these video game companies that making a PC-only game is like landing a man on the moon. If Stormgate fails there will be 348578479 other RTS games to play.
While making games using a sophisticated IDE might be easier, making GOOD games never really is, especially when it comes to RTS, that's why you can more or less count the amount of good RTS titles with both your hands and some of those games date back to the 90s.
There’s a whole bunch of good RTS games made by like one dude/dudette and their dog on a shoestring, a whistle and a prayer, but they almost invariably fall into the ‘this is a fun campaign, I’ll get my 10/20 dollar’s worth and maybe not touch it again after’
Which is absolutely fine, I’ll play em!
I’ve played SC2 on/off for 14 years, various modes, run tournaments, watched tournaments etc. The vast majority of games like that have some kind of budget
With some regularity you’ll have a film be a hit that was made by somebody with Parkinson’s and a camcorder, or an album becomes a hit that was recorded in a bathroom and mixed on a 1998 iMac, but they’re usually outdone by content with some of budget.
The whole indie space varies a lot depending on genre. I think 3 out of my top 5 platformers ever are all indie games. Even the best indie RTS games are, for me nowhere near what past titans of the genre have done
I've helped a couple of coders who were inexperienced with C# who are picking up Unity for the first time. A few weeks later, I get surprised by what they accomplish. Unity is good.
Stuff like this is why there are 45873978598 games being released on Steam every week. Making games is "super easy... barely an inconvenience".
Do not buy into the marketing hype by these video game companies that making a PC-only game is like landing a man on the moon. If Stormgate fails there will be 348578479 other RTS games to play.
While making games using a sophisticated IDE might be easier, making GOOD games never really is, especially when it comes to RTS, that's why you can more or less count the amount of good RTS titles with both your hands and some of those games date back to the 90s.
Ultimately while it certainly depends on the field of appliance, in regards to creative output, and I would definitely put games into this category, I think that quantity does not necessarily lead to quality.
There are a bunch of well reviewed RTS games on Steam. More than ever. Sift through the reviews and pick one.
As far as IDE sophistication goes.... That does not matter much. Relative to how games were made from 1980 to 2015 using everything from 6502 Assembly Language to Watcom C to MS C++ making a game in C# with Unity is much easier.
As an example, Pathfinding is treated by Frost Giant like they are proving the 4 colour problem... There are reasonable solutions available in Unity. This is why you will find a certain basic minimum standard of quality in the path finding of Unity games.
Software development tools only get better... They do not get worse. The computing power of the average PC only gets better.
A very small team can make better games than ever. Right now, this is Frost Giant's biggest competition. FG is not competing with SC2.
Dependa what you like from rts. Stormgate has mashed good chunk of wc3 (speed, goldmines, creeps and looks of infernals), and sc2 (gameplay and looks).
I just have a problem with the most basic functions not working.
1. Customizable hotkeys, 2. Worker/army supply info, 3. A+attack stuck or units floating around can be frustrating, 4. Chat, 5. Ffs make pause function.
Basically they should withhold balance for this and let meta develops.
I don't know how hard it is but shouldn't be.
Also community mapmaker would be a must.
Latest patch player count rase is promising having in mind other games have 90% casual playerbase and these numbers are solely for 1v1.
On October 15 2024 00:21 followZeRoX wrote: I just have a problem with the most basic functions not working.
Their first move was incorrect. They chose the wrong engine. There are 0 RTS games using UE5.
Using UE5 will allow FG staff to build marketable skills though. So that is a plus for the employees.
Yeah idk, UE5 gets people excited for graphic fidelty and being the newest version gets people feeling like it's a premium product, at least that's how I felt. I don't know if it's any good for RTS but I mean it sounds good 😅
I hope the heroes in the 3v3 are powerful. Really make it stand out and feel different from 1v1. Even in co-op right now I feel heroes are a little weak. Take a league of legends hero and how powerful they feel and throw that in stormgate imo.
On October 15 2024 00:21 followZeRoX wrote: I just have a problem with the most basic functions not working.
Their first move was incorrect. They chose the wrong engine. There are 0 RTS games using UE5.
Using UE5 will allow FG staff to build marketable skills though. So that is a plus for the employees.
I'm not into these things, care to explain like to the 7yo kid?
From my understanding UE5 isn’t well suited for RTS, or well, best suited for a variety of reasons.
It’s bloody sexy looking, but given most RTS games you’re watching from hundreds of feet in the air in an observation balloon, you don’t really harness the best of that.
Or, if you try, performance isn’t quite as good either. Granted, part of that is that say, UE4 is much more mature and its quirks are more known, devs can squeeze more out of it, rather than necessarily innate problems with UE5
Out of the box, UE5’s not really configured well at a networking/net code level for games like RTS, where you have tons of individual assets responding to commands. For example Frost Giant built a layer on top of UE5 to do some of this stuff. For other types of game you can basically mash some assets and some basic logic together and it’ll work
There’s apparently some other quirks in the engine too, or how it’s written. I’m not a game dev so can’t confirm but it’s been said part of the difficulty in Stormgate having fully customisable hotkeys is down to that
On October 15 2024 00:21 followZeRoX wrote: I just have a problem with the most basic functions not working.
Their first move was incorrect. They chose the wrong engine. There are 0 RTS games using UE5.
Using UE5 will allow FG staff to build marketable skills though. So that is a plus for the employees.
I'm not into these things, care to explain like to the 7yo kid?
A video game is built upon a game engine as its framework. Some places custom make their own engine/software framework. Some places use an engine like Unity or Unreal Engine 5 rather than making their own from scratch.
The engine/framework will often handle mundane but complex tasks with a single function the game programmer can make happen with 1 line of code.
Unreal Engine 5 or UE5 is a very popular AAA engine/framework made by Epic Games. Lots of companies use UE5. The staff at FG are gaining a lot of skills working with UE5. The staff members have acquired skills they can use at a different game development shop if they want to leave Frost Giant.
Found this gem. The UE game looks ridiculously good after 1 day
Very cool, thanks for posting this, I've seen another episode where they compared the workflows of creating an FPS game, needless to say this was basically a "free win" for UE.
EPT
