RTSs can get away with not having a campaign (see Sins of a Solar Empire) but missing Skirmish vs the AI is kind of a deal breaker.
If it remains multiplayer only I think it will never reach anyone outside of the hardcore.
hence the entire point of kickstarter.
have faith that the kickstarter will succeed, we do.
If you’re suggesting that we should have built singleplayer campaign only and not built multiplayer at all with our tiny budget : that’s simply impossible. and for a myriad of reasons.
Self-respecting RTS campaign will be decently long and fun to play and a good experience, that is incredibly hard to do, requires a lot of going back and fine tuning, having a grand scope and building things up with artists writers and designers first, to near perfection before actually implementing it. it requires hiring voice actors, implementing special engine features that are only built once in the game for that specific mission, and an ungodly amount of playtesting to find how it can be broken, the off-mapping and all the bugs, not to mention paying for cutscenes to be made.
The time and cost of each of these individual components is beyond the money we have, add them all up and you are far far faaar beyond the money we have.
ironically in RTS the singleplayer costs much more to make than the multiplayer. this isn’t the case for platformers, party games, RPGs, so I can understand this being missunderstood.
There’s another aspect to consider : people, once given the singleplayer experience and once having completed it will then want to experience the multiplayer for said game. (at the very least Co-Op)
this particular type of RTS, simulated projectile, is probably the harderst to just “add netcode to”. You just can’t do that in this case. either you’ve built it from the ground up or the multiplayer support will either be woeful or will never exist.
but yeah first and foremost this is a budget call and there is no way to have it otherwise.
And since our budget was so limiting it was hard to, for example, not have AI being on the list of MVP features turn into feature creep : “oh, you have AI, well you must support more lobby options”, “why isn’t there simple missions I can play vs the AI” ect ect.
So I decided to call it and make it a bit more of a black and white thing then it might necessarily seem like is needed.
However : we are already laying the groundwork for implementing AI, we know that such a thing is also core to the design of the code.
Our game is also already fully moddable (and in LuaJit!) and partially mappable, so we expect that things like AI modders will be as common as they are, for say, supreme commander.
We’re very aware that singleplayers constitute the crushing majority of players so it’s not as if being able to cater to them isn’t a constant thought for us.
Again, though, all things staying on the rails they’re currently on, the kickstarter should be a success, therefore there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to Singleplayer.
Then you would know that a sunset would never happen in a Dyson sphere, no matter if you’re inside or outside the sphere. Additionally, the shadows in that image seem to indicate a single light source that is most certainly not the sun setting in the background, which doesn’t make any sense (if there were multiple “sun mirrors”, you’d have multiple shadows).
Anyway, it was a criticism of the concept image, not of the game concept or idea. If anything, I wish you success!
haha thanks! ok
yeah honestly it’s really just a concept image but my idea is that mirrors would rotate where they point so you’d have a local day and night cycle, however I can see how light having to go sideways through a hundred thousand kilometres of atmosphere to get to the surface if it-were low-angle would red-shift the light so badly that yeah it would look a hell of a lot different than the sunset above, fair point. 😛
someone on our discord made a 3D print of our Bison tank! how cool is that?
(we share our 3D models for free)
Rotated mirrors (if they’re circular) would appear as ellipses in the distance, if they’re rotated to a 45 degree angle to project light sideways. As I said, the concept image just fails to represent any workable interpretation of those concepts, unless you create unreasonable/unworkable sci-fi mumbo-jumbo to make up for it. ;)
That kind of mistake is understandable, but it does your original concept no favors. That’s all.
yeah but that is a good point. we’ll endeavor for more attention to detail in our concept art in the future.
this art was made by Kubo Wu, our 3rd 3D model artist, responsible for the “Guard” faction. He isn’t as much of a sci-fi nut so that’s understandable.
I think I personally would have even made the sun shaped like a triangle.
Circular mirrors would be your best option. Triangles would look cool but they would be both less efficient and harder to build and maintain. But that would provide a “solutions” to a single issue in the concept; there are a lot of other issues to solve with a “externally-habitated Dyson sphere” - more than with a “live in the inside” one, in fact - but that is a whole different problem, really. ;)
makes sense!
Special Bread is the one you’ll want to chat on this with, on our team. He’s kindof a sci-fi expert and came up with the idea of putting our RTS on a Dyson Sphere.
