Guardians of Atlas

It's being designed for PC gamers. Certainly you can open it on a phone, and mobile's definitely on the road map, but we want to make the true PC game experience with mouse + keyboard input!

Thanks so much for the kind responses <3.
1) We're wanting to make the most fun ass, easy to pick up multiplayer experience ever (inspired much by Magic the Gathering and TF2). If it becomes an eSport, great! If not, we won't force it. We trust the communities desires in these regards . If there IS interest for it to be an eSport, bet your butt I'm ready to go allin.

2) It would be less "games within a game" and more of a "platform that anyone can make a game with & Atlas is one of those games." Project Atlas will be the first of many titles Artillery will make .

3) IM SO FUCKING EXCITED OMFFG!!!! So thrilled that you feel dat excitement too! :D

The goal of Project Atlas is to be fun as hell. If the game winds up being a major eSport, great! But, we're not going to try to force it. The community knows what it wants, and Atlas will naturally evolve into an eSport if the community wants it.

As for SC2, we're simply making a different game. If you compare something like TF2 vs Portal, they're simply wildly different experiences that happen to both be first person shooters. We're approaching it in the same vein! Perhaps the only notable aspect would be that we're not making something hyper similar to SC2. If we wanted to play that sort of game, we'd just go play SC2 (which we do a pretty frequent amount anyways lol)

This!

We're in a super iterative state. We certainly have a variety of concrete ideas that we're building the game around, but no reason to mention them here if they can still change. I can say for certain that I would be blown away if it behaved anything similar to SC2.

I'm the head of design for it! I do tons and tons of testing, iterating, and experimenting

Artillery is making a platform that a wide variety of games can be developed on. On this platform, Artillery/Day[9]TV are developing an RTS game. This specific video is focused on the platform . Screenshots/footage of Atlas to be showed in da future!

The choice of in-browser is about accessibility. Suppose you buy a new PC, turn it on, and want to play your favorite game. No doubt you'll have to download a bunch of stuff or, even if it is installed, you might have to patch for 20 minutes.

WIth Project Atlas running in browser, you can simply load up, go to the website, and 30s later you're ready to play. Pretty slick eh?

I have some "dodgy" answers for you!

Most specifics will not be shared, as they are ever changing.

1) I completely agree with your implication: resourcing and tech are two fundamental systems to RTS games, and two that are severely underexplored. These two (along with unit movement/pathing) are the almost exclusive focus of the design process right now. We want to nail these perfectly before trying to add on bells and whistles.

Resourcing - We're testing so much crazy shit lol. But, our fundamental goals are the most important: the players should be actively encouraged to expand and try to gather more resources. Not "implicitly" encouraged by an abstract concept like "I strategically think I can best my opponent by acquiring more resources at this particular time." We also want resourcing to be about making a decision (ie i'm going to take a new base now) instead of management (I have to remember to build another worker). Though I personally like heading home to build probes frequently in SC2, we're exploring the "decision" route .

Tech - we have a pretty clear idea of what we want to do here. But, I shall so totally not tell you right now <3.

Q: RTS games have quite a ways to go before they are as accessible as an FPS or a MOBA game.

If you could find some way to make losing at an RTS less painful, I think that would go a long way to taking the entire genre forward.

A: I cannot emphasize enough how much that statement resonates with me: how do you make losing in an RTS less painful? I think about this all the time and how to make Project Atlas pretty fun to lose in :D

I will be neither of those. For Project Atlas, I'll be the lead designer on it! Certainly balance will be a part of that, but I doubt my full role will ever be a multiplayer balance designer.

Traditional RTS. Not something like a relaxing, low engagement, log-on-once-a-day RTS game that's popular on facebook.

I absolutely want more action throughout the game. I'm hoping to have plenty of skirmishes and occasional massive battles throughout the game. We're changing the resourcing / win conditions rapidly atm, but in every iteration there's a push to fight your enemy for clear gains.

I want to have as absolutely few game modes as humanly possible. I'm a huge believer in having a simple, clean design. Though we may do hundreds of different experiments, the public will only see our selected favorite and best gametype.

Sure! Sign up for early beta access at www.artillery.com

Business model is free to play, although I hate that term

The RTS game is a fundamentally fun gametype, but one that's severely underexplored. There's wildly successful games like StarCraft 2 and the C&C series, but not much else. Contrast this to FPS, where 30+ games in the genre release each year. You get a huge range of different experiences in the genre: Portal, TF2, Quake, Call of Duty etc. We want new experiences in RTS games.

We want our game to align with how the modern nerd plays games: an ever evolving experience over time focused on community. What does that mean? We don't want to hide away and slam out a release after 2 years and then walk away. We want the game to constantly grow and evolve in a way similar to LoL / MineCraft etc!

[edit]

Upon rereading this, I realize it's not particularly specific lol. Forgive me I haven't been awake long <3. Felt like I nailed it! Allow me to go into some specifics (although we're still in ultra early development on the game. The vid demo is primarily to showcase the tech)

The typical approach to an RTS game is "how do we make sweet units. What are some neato abilities. What are the cool races going to be?" However, I'm of the opinion that those things are secondary to the core, fun parts of playing RTS games: unit control and collecting money. So, in our early development, we're spending a ton of timing just focusing on those two.

For unit control: What makes moving around and attacking a unit feel amazing? What makes it feel like you can micro it super well? Does it feel like you can control it "well" and "badly"? Does it feel fun to control well? Or, do you simply feel relieved to have not fucked up? There's a ton of core questions that have no clear answer. Surprisingly, to get a "good feel," we've been doing some really "unusual" decisions regarding pathfinding, movement, and collision. We tweak small factors like rotation speed of units, speed of curve as it's turning, the angle a unit has to facing before firing etc. An example of something really unusual is the intelligence of units in pathfinding. Imagine we have two groups of units that are passing through eachother. When they behave "very smartly," there is no movement penalty. They simply slip in and around eachother to pass at an expected speed. But, we've implemented some "stupidity" to the AI to make it slightly worse, but predictable as it moves through a crowd. Rationally, you'd say that "pathfinding and collision should be optimized for best movement," but it "feels better" to have units be a little dumb. These are examples of our approach.

Resource management: How do you encourage the player to go out and gather more resources? How does the pace of income change the players behavior? How can we use this research to get the player to behave the way they want? Do we want lots of small workers or a few big workers? Do we want workers at all? How does teching work? We run about 10+ experiments a week with wildly different resourcing methods to study exactly how players behave. We want the resourcing to be easy, for sure, but we also want people to go to battle aggressively!

These are the RTS fundamentals. We're focusing heavily on getting these solid. Otherwise, why the hell would anyone wanna play our game for 500 hours? :D

OH also there are a ton of sweet things about the races/units that I won't share yet MWAHAHAHAHAHAH

There's literally no way I won't make videos for this. I poop out like 15 hours of video content a week as is lol :D.

It's being designed for PC gamers. Certainly you can open it on a phone, and mobile's definitely on the road map, but we want to make the true PC game experience with mouse + keyboard input!

The biggest things I'm shooting for are
1) Extremely easy and fun to pick up
2) You feel like you can do magic with units (ie huge possibility to micro for immense gain)