For the past couple of months, I've been working during my spare time on a project for the Stemfuse Got Game Competition. This competition is specifically for middle and high school Game Maker games. The RTS genre has always intrigued me, so I figured a low stakes competition was a good opportunity to try to make my own. With some help from my friends for graphics and music, I finally finished the game, 1800. 1800 is a historically based minimalist RTS that takes place during the Napoleonic Wars and War of 1812.
Anyway, now for some thoughts on the project. First of all, RTSs are hard. Very hard. I was constantly attempting to optimize the game, while throwing on new features to add to the "strategy" aspect. I had a fairly decent vision of the project from the start, but it definitely evolved as I worked on it. The main pitfalls I fell into were not knowing what I was doing, resulting in some highly questionable design choices at the beginning, creating an AI that wasn't terrible, and reducing lag. Unfortunately I waited until the end to add the AI, and that caused some problems. First of all, it was much harder than I had expected. I really had no clue how to do it and began piecing it together as I went along. Additionally, the AI made the game start to lag immensely as large amounts of units were on the map at a time. This is an issue I never really fixed, but instead tried to minimize in the level design. The original plan was to have 5 countries actively moving units as well as multiple others that were neutral. I maintained this original vision for the most part in the free play mode, along with the warning that it will lag on most computers. For the campaign mode, the American campaign being the only one I actually made, I removed all of the unnecessary countries. This reduced the lag significantly at the beginning of the game, but after playing for a couple of minutes the lag still gets pretty overwhelming.
Overall, I think the game ended up being fairly mediocre in terms of actual gameplay. However, I think that this was a great experience for me. I have learned a lot about what to do and what not to do when making an RTS, and would be able to approach things completely differently in the future. That being said, I'm really sick of RTSs right now and can't imagine making another in the near future
. I think had I chosen to to a turn based game instead, it would have saved me a lot of trouble with worrying about the lag, so I'll keep that in mind for the future.
Now for the part where you can help me.
Here's a link to my entry in the competition. If you could spare me about 2 clicks to upvote the entry, that would be greatly appreciated. Even if you don't think the game is very good, I hope you could just take a moment to appreciate the effort that went into making this and support me. Currently the entry leading in the popular vote has over 500 votes, and is a simple and nearly broken maze game with one level. The effort that went into making that is so minimal that its number of votes is mind boggling. My goal is to get at least 100 votes in the competition, and with your help I can do it.
Thanks so much everyone!