Hello RTS fans! Today SunSpear games has announced it's first public Competition for Vanguard Prototype, the R&D Starcraft Mod that we use to test RTS design concepts for IMMORTAL, which will be a stand alone RTS with it's own art, lore, and engine.
Format:Group Stage followed by Single Elimination Bracket Casters: Members of the SunSpear Games Development Team, including Geoff "iNcontroL" Robinson Prize Pool: $5000+ Date: July 8th-9th Time: 8am PDT / 5pm CEST Stream:www.sunspeargames.com/live Players:
As far as players go, we'll be announcing them as we get closer to the event. We already have several teams signed up, but slots are currently still available if you want to take a crack at a new RTS and your share of the $5000+ Prize Pool.
You can learn more about Vanguard Prototype at http://vanguardprototype.com/ and by hopping into the Vanguard Prototype Discord Server: https://discord.gg/Bd8bWjv asking questions, and playtesting with fellow RTS enthusiasts.
Official Playtests are currently on Wednesdays and Saturdays 1pm - 9pm EDT, but more and more playtesting is happening just from people meeting up and playing games, so feel free to do so
The dev team will be checking on this thread and the video so please comment with all of your questions and ideas. Our goal is to help grow the RTS genre by offering an accessible, social, competitive RTS. If you want the same thing, let's talk about it!
Thanks for the feedback everyone. Been a rush trying to get all these moving parts working in concert, thanks for your patience
We'll be spending the rest of the day improving production quality, especially fixing the sound issues that have been challenging us. Sunday will be significantly better.
I'm so happy to see Classic Inno doing so well, especially since they were a last minute sign up with little practice time, I was worried that they wouldn't be able to display their potential. Fortunately, our design goal of having an intuitive RTS that requires less specific knowledge and more mechanics/general strategy and tactics got a nice point of positive data today.
Production aside, how was the viewing experience? What was easy to understand/follow? What was difficult? Did you feel you could see the players' skill? these are the kind of things that we're prioritizing, so any feedback/help you can share with us is greatly appreciated.
I could only follow 3 matches today (2 maps of Inno/Classic vs Zanster/Sortof and 1 map of Team Ryung against whoever on Cranks channel (before I found your english stream)), so I cant tell you alot, so far:
Generel 2v2 is hard to follow, as there is so much going on. It was clear that the casters had the very same problem. (thats not bad for the game) and often not too bad for the viewer, as it is able to display amazing skills, especially by Inno/Classic, but too often the casting was either too jumpy or it was "ooh and look here, all worker gone". Is 2v2 planned to be the core gamemode or will 1v1 action like in SC II be the main thing? (And how is 4v4 RT playing out? thats what I play as a filthy casual who is fed up with 1v1 RTS)
About the game, from 3 single maps I was not entirly sure how the game concept is: Each race is seperated into differend "sorts" or "commanders" (like Halo Wars II?) as I understood with different abilities and units? But the races themself were not too different, as building style was the same (protoss style without pylons)? Its hard too follow the game initially, as you are so used to how the units work in SC II and here alot of them worked slightly to massivly different. And also the overlay is obviously not made for your mod, which doesnt help. I have no idea what the commander ablities are (or which commanders have been chosen by the players) till you or Incontrol tell me them. I cant see their cooldowns, I only see the energy of the one player the caster clicked on his unit.
At the moment these things made it hard to follow, but I am very interested in tomorrow, the core of the game did look like a fun RTS experience. But till the full experience can be analysed, I guess I need to see your Art and Lore of the "real" game sooner or later, as up to now its more like SC II from a parallel dimension. Would be cool (at least for me) when a "Zergling" or a "Ultralisk" would not be named ingame and by the caster by that, but they already had their "Immortal"-name.
On July 10 2017 05:27 GGzerG wrote: This looks interesting for sure, I'd like to try playing it myself, is it available to play?
You can find the game by searching Vanguard in the arcade. Players congregate in the Vanguardsc2 chat channel. There are scheduled playtest days on Wednesday and Saturdays from ~1pm-9pm EST. Usually playtests start on EU and move over to NA later in the evening. Outside those days it can be a bit tricky to find players, because the community is small.
On July 09 2017 06:59 Clonester wrote: I could only follow 3 matches today (2 maps of Inno/Classic vs Zanster/Sortof and 1 map of Team Ryung against whoever on Cranks channel (before I found your english stream)), so I cant tell you alot, so far:
Generel 2v2 is hard to follow, as there is so much going on. It was clear that the casters had the very same problem. (thats not bad for the game) and often not too bad for the viewer, as it is able to display amazing skills, especially by Inno/Classic, but too often the casting was either too jumpy or it was "ooh and look here, all worker gone". Is 2v2 planned to be the core gamemode or will 1v1 action like in SC II be the main thing? (And how is 4v4 RT playing out? thats what I play as a filthy casual who is fed up with 1v1 RTS)
About the game, from 3 single maps I was not entirly sure how the game concept is: Each race is seperated into differend "sorts" or "commanders" (like Halo Wars II?) as I understood with different abilities and units? But the races themself were not too different, as building style was the same (protoss style without pylons)? Its hard too follow the game initially, as you are so used to how the units work in SC II and here alot of them worked slightly to massivly different. And also the overlay is obviously not made for your mod, which doesnt help. I have no idea what the commander ablities are (or which commanders have been chosen by the players) till you or Incontrol tell me them. I cant see their cooldowns, I only see the energy of the one player the caster clicked on his unit.
At the moment these things made it hard to follow, but I am very interested in tomorrow, the core of the game did look like a fun RTS experience. But till the full experience can be analysed, I guess I need to see your Art and Lore of the "real" game sooner or later, as up to now its more like SC II from a parallel dimension. Would be cool (at least for me) when a "Zergling" or a "Ultralisk" would not be named ingame and by the caster by that, but they already had their "Immortal"-name.
Thanks for the detailed response!
2v2 is definitely hard to follow, and a lot of our design principles are about promoting aggression and movement out on the map. Those things combined means near endless action at the highest level, really fun for the players, but definitely something we need to focus on improving from an observing/production side of things.
In professional sports broadcasts, you have camera ops and a technical director (simplified verison) the camera ops all have their cams pointed at different spots and the TD decides which feed to take at what time. This is the method Overwatch is adopting at the highest production levels. I think long term, Immortal will have a similar method of observing because there is so much going on. That said, on day 2 we actually had 2 observers in the games on voice coms, one would call out when things were happening and the other would be focused on following the action. This is probably the best solution for low budget productions like ours. Picture in Picture is also going to be important in the future for high level production.
There are currently 6 factions. This means 6 unique sets of units (though buildings and drops are the same/similar). It's hard to tell in the tournament because Eternal Swarm was heavily favored over Monarch Brood and Dominion was heavily favored over Raiders. Khalai and Nerazim seemed to get pretty balanced reception. Currently each of these 6 factions have only 1 commander available to them each. One of our next goal is to get up to 2 commanders per faction up and running, otherwise it's hard to see the system we've created for Immortal.
Commanders don't change entire unit sets like Factions do, instead they have 3 unique modifications of the base faction, that could be units, spells, buildings, or a combination of these or other things. We're keeping it pretty flexible at the moment so we have room to test what's fun and what isn't. The idea is to create slightly different flavors of playing each faction.
Concerning overlay and observer limitations, we're aware of them as well. Having a custom made interface for Vanguard would be phenomenal, but a ton of work. I think your feedback is from day 1, if you watch day 2 we made sure to use WCS 3.0 which was definitely an improvement, but there's still a lot left to be desired. If someone outside the team is interested in taking on that project, we would be so appreciative to have your help.
Finally, it's important to note that Vanguard and Immortal are not 1:1 ratio products. Vanguard exists to help us test core RTS principles so that we can apply the lessons learned to Immortal. It also serves to prove that we can create a compelling, spectate-able RTS product to people interested in making Immortal a reality. So there will be no "Reaver" in Immortal, but there may be a siege unit that has an explosive payload that tracks targets in some way, maybe it will be faster or slower, maybe it will be smaller or larger, maybe it will be part of a larger unit, the possibilities are open wide to us. The point is that Immortal will be a wholly different game, but it'll have the same kind of defender's advantage, comeback potential, retreat-ability, anti-mono-unit, anti-a-move, kind of feeling to it.
Remember that Blizzard owns everything in the arcade, so we can't use the names of the units etc in Vanguard because we'd essentially be handing over our IP to Blizzard. This is why we're focused on broad strokes and mechanics. Fortunately these things take a lot of R&D to produce the desired result, allowing us to sink pure time into acquiring the solutions instead of burning a ton of time in a new engine at a much higher cost.
edit: Forgot to answer the 4v4 question! There are a lot of new tech developments that allow RTS on a modern engine to have a much better 4v4, 5v5, etc. experience! We are going to create lots of different game modes so that everyone has a chance to enjoy different ways to play RTS
I think constant action works best when it's 1vs1, because there you still only need to be able to observe to players and their abilities to create this action. As soon as your game is a teamgame and it is designed to have action all the time it gets messy. Also in general "constant action" is probably not even interesting. It's a fine line to walk, but if there are no downtimes then it easily gets overwhelming to play and watch. A certain pacing with lows and highs seems to be the best scenario tbh, successful games like counterstrike, dota and lol follow this. Ofc there is no objective right or wrong on this though.
About your 6 factions, i actually think that it's too much. On the one hand it certainly allowed for a lot of diversity, but it also increases the burden of knowledge a lot. You might say that mobas have this and do fine. But you have to consider that every specific game only presents 10 heroes. That's manageable. In any specific rts game the opponent can throw anything at you. Nothing is more frustrating than losing and simply having no idea what you did wrong.