My RTS concept

Off-Topic Forum
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It’s not the bang engine, it’s the phoenix engine (partly based on the bang engine)… Circa 2005, around the same time Ensemble Studios was shipping Age of Empires 3, Ensemble employee Angelo Laudon was experimenting with a prototype of Ensemble’s previous game, Age of Mythology, that allowed the previously PC-only game to be played with a controller “without too much friction”. This prototype would come to form the basis of Ensemble’s next project after the release of Age of Empires III, known as Phoenix, which would be a real-time strategy game released on the Xbox 360.[2]

Before the Phoenix engine ever entered development, Ensemble initially attempted to port the Age of Empires 3’s iteration of the Bang! engine, an older, PC-exclusive engine originally created for Age of Mythology.[3] Engineers Rich Geldreich and Billy Khan spent around 3 months in 2005 porting the engine from PC to Xbox 360, in what Geldreich described as “the most painful and mind numbing task [he] ever did [at Ensemble]”. Ultimately, it was a waste of time, as while the game was made to run and the Win32 networking backend was rewritten for the Xbox 360 to allow for multiplayer on the console, the game’s performance was incredibly poor, averaging between only 3-8 frames per second, and load times were as long as 5 minutes due to a slow, custom interpreter used by the script processor component of the map generator.[2]

Geldreich attributed the poor performance to the significant difference in target hardware between the original target platforms of the Bang! engine and the Xbox 360. While he praised the engine itself, particularly its resilience with respect to corrupted, modified or deleted data, which helped significantly with the 360 port, and its random map generation, it was fundamentally designed for single-threaded x86 systems with a large amount of RAM and a virtual memory system. These specifications differed significantly from those offered by the Xbox 360, which had an in-order PowerPC CPU, limited RAM, no virtual memory and no built-in hard drive.[2]

Ultimately, this port of the Bang! engine was only used for some internal playtesting and prototyping, running multiplayer matches with new maps and custom game scripts created by Graeme Devine and Angelo Laudon. Attempting to play the ported version of the engine, though, highlighted indisputably to the team that a direct PC to Xbox 360 port would never properly work for the engine, due to not being fun to work on for the Ensemble staff, very few of whom truly understood the Bang! engine, and due to the fact that such a port would not be competitive with other Xbox 360 first-party releases. In addition, the Bang! engine was heavily single-threaded, and thus even with extensive optimisation of the engine, performance still wouldn’t have been acceptable. Consequently, the port of Bang! engine was abandoned in favour of starting a new engine from scratch. The “Phoenix engine”[Note 1][1] is a game engine designed for the real-time strategy (RTS) genre, which was developed between 2005 and 2009. The engine takes its name from the eponymous cancelled video game project by Ensemble Studios, for which it was originally created. Circa 2006, when Microsoft directed Ensemble to retool the pitched project as a Halo game, the Phoenix engine was retained and would go on to power the final product, Halo Wars, and its eventual sequel Halo Wars 2.

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hm, didn’t know creative assembly reused phoenix

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Normal, it’s a sequel, but yes, it’s a little weird…

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God… This is horrible. You’re basically just trying to combine your favorite parts of all the Age of Empires games. Then having a crack at the modern era to the point it starts to sound more and more like an already existing game, Rise of Nations.

It’s not a good idea to base your game so heavily off a game that already exists and then just “make changes.” Not only because you’ll have to deal with copyright issues, but it also makes for a lack of theme and conflicting goals.

The problem is you have so many categories of features you’ve outlined, but it’s not a comprehensive design document. It just jumps from idea to idea, concept to concept without much rhyme or reason. It sticks of someone just dumping ideas onto a page as they come to your head. You’ve got a whole section dedicated to smoke, explaining it takes 1-2 minutes to disappear. 1-2 minutes is a LONG time in a competitive RTS which means you’ve come up with the idea of smoke, not keeping any degree of continuity for how the flow of the game time would actually progress. The fact you created an entire Supply mechanic which ties to unit and siege reloading is sad because you have a major error in here. There’s no way to siege enemy territory because you never explained how an army can move out of your territory, into enemy territory, maintain supply, hence maintain an effective fighting force. In other words, this entire game becomes a HUGE camping party with no players ever wanting to leave their territory because their armies become instantly nerfed.

It’s also way too overly ambitious. Not even mentioning so far units with shields, without shields. You’ve got two dozen types of boats. Your economy mechanics are WAY too complicated for an RTS game. They belong in a 4X or a Turn Based game. The farming tiers of fertilization, supplies, how you research technology, etc. You’ve got far too many mechanics conflicting with each other which would make balancing a living nightmare, even for a full team of developers.

Development teams with a few hundred people struggle to make a game 1/8th of your proposed size and finish it within 2 years of development, costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Your game would take 8 years to make, be a balance nightmare upon release, and that’s IF you have hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of experienced staff members.

If you pitched this to a video game studio, they’d laugh you out of the building. Just another incredibly overly ambitious and poorly founded idea, based on “These are my favorite games and here’s my personal changes I’d want.” When I was studying game development, there was no shortage of people with these kinds of wild ideas. When they discovered that 9/10ths of their ideas were stupidly over the top and would never get done, they’d have a sulk and then quit half way through the course. If you want to see a real design document, one that earned me a High Distinction, DM me and I’ll send you the link

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Poor thing, you destroyed his illusions with harsh reality…

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I mean… I don’t mean to be deliberately abusive or anything… It’s just I remember vividly the person to my left and my right when I was at Uni…
The teacher came to one of them and said “What kind of game do you wanna make next year?” (It’s a 2 year course, 2nd year we split into teams of 8-ish and make a game.)
One student replied: “It’s gonna be like GTAV but it’s gonna have this, it’s gonna have this, and have that and this and have this…”
The other student replied “It’s gonna be like Dark Souls but it’s gonna have this, it’s gonna have this, and have that and this and have this…”
The teacher stopped them and said “That game takes hundreds of employees with tens of millions of dollars years and years to make. You’ve got 6 months with 7 friends. Why don’t you try to make a Quake style shooter with 6 weapons, 4 maps and 9 enemy types and we’ll go from there…?”
All the light, the hope, the ambition in their eyes… immediately died and turned to dust. They didn’t finish the course, they dropped out after the first year. These people just want to make the game of their dreams so they can then play it. It’s often just a more personalized and WAY overly ambitious version of a game they already love.

I’m actually arguing with this guy on my Topic, so I originally came here to sh*t talk… but I actually started reading his document and started having flashbacks to Uni. I was actually genuine when I said I was willing to show him my design document from first year, so he can get an idea of what is and isn’t manageable if he genuinely wants to get into game development. But if he’s just having a fantasy about his “perfect game for me”, then yeah, sorry but reality check time

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I know all the things you said. I think you underestimate my age.
I know that my ideas are not a design document. They are just ideas thrown out here to see what people think about them.
Before I’ll seriously start working on anything I will make design documents and my own wiki for it.

The good thing is that we have modern engines nowadays. It doesn’t take long to make a prototype in Unity compared to having to code your own engine.

But no, you didn’t do a reality check for me.
I know that I never want to be a professional game developer.
I can get double the money for half of the work when I work somewhere else.

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If you ever want to write up a legitimate design document, let me know and I can give you some tips and an outline. Even if you want to just develop it in your own time for a hobby, if it’s good, you can sell it to a developer and if they end up making it, you might get to play it one day

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Do you know the game Rise of Nations? you might want to check it out

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yes.
I played it before.
I only tried it out long after it’s release so I never really enjoyed it because it felt dated already.

Some of my ideas are influenced by it though but mostly indirectly by it influencing other games that I actually played like AoE4.

I’m generally in the process of making a Wiki for my game concept because it’s hard to get an overview over my ideas in a series of posts that sometimes have changing concepts in it.

Having a Wiki allows to cross reference between different concepts and then updating those places independently.

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