Spring RTS Engine

Zero-K is an ongoing project to create a free, fully open-source RTS game. The project has been going on low profile for some time as a fork of CA.

The focus is mainly on gameplay and accessibility. The ultimate goal is to have fun playing it and creating it, with plenty of replayability so that players (and developers) stay interested.


We want to create unique (within Spring sphere) online experience with online campaign/persistency. Some of the features include:

• Online Persistency - Tightly integrated planetwars campaign which makes spring battles part of a larger campaign, upgrades/unlocks in game as rewards. (For example unique unit upgrades, different commanders).
• Stats and fair battles - You can review past battles (not just yours), view their replays etc. Team balancing is based on skill level to achieve fair games.
• Well thought balancing done by best players and assisted by simplified game rules obeying physical models and real unit statistics gathered from actual games.
• What You See Is What You Get aproach - No hidden armor classes, effects matching damage sizes etc, to make it more approachable to new players.
• Recruitment outside of the Spring community - To increase the total playerbase rather than competing for finite Spring players.
• Development-friendly environment - A large development team collaborating together which encourages contribution, even from players.
• If game is successful, there is some potential for generating revenue (from selling points for faster upgrading or unique visuals). Such revenue would go towards self-promotion of game.

Why join us?

• The project is in a very advanced stage - core game is ready.
• Done by highly skilled and stable people - veteran Spring players and developers who are around for years and have worked on the project for years.
• A playerbase - we have enough developers and players to have games every day.
• Simple democratic internal structure - important decisions are agreed upon or voted by core developers.
• The team members contain engine developers, lobby developers, maintainers of Spring server and moderators.
• Our team created all parts of infrastructure needed to make the game as accessible as possible with truly exciting features. These include: Lobby, AI - CAI and the original chickens, autohost (Springies), mission editor, content providing infrastructure (downloader/updater), LUPS effect system, Chili GUI framework, support sites (stats, repositories), and tons of generally used widgets.

What skills are in high demand?

• 2d artist/design lead (icons, gui style, website design etc)
• texturer
• web developer
• coders (C#, Lua)

But there is also plenty of room for people without specific skills to contribute.

How to join?
Contact me or Quantum!

Unfortunately I am lacking in the skills you require, but could you elucidate this point please?

Licho wrote:If game is successful, there is some potential for generating revenue (from selling points for faster upgrading or unique visuals). Such revenue would go towards self-promotion of game.

Good luck.

You know League of Legends? Look how its done there.

Basically we are going to have upgrade unlocks and different commanders.
People with more experience will be able to unlock them.

People who are developers or contributed to spring or ZK will be able to use cool looking stuff (different skins on commander etc - visual only) and to achieve gameplay based upgrades (unlocks) faster.

Technically we plan to establish non profit foundation if it becomes significant.

funny u say, i downloaded it 1 h ago :D ( i mean LoL) im not rly skilled, but if u need something done in 3d, ill try to be usefull

Well I see no real information on the actual game design which in my opinion is the most important thing. So is there an actual design which is set describing all gameplay relevant aspects in detail? All of this open and democratic stuff sounds nice but especially when looking at CA this was its greatest downside...

To my mind you really need consistency when trying to pull something off as you described it. It sucks if the game always keeps changing with a heavy impact like every 6 months. With that you also keep away all those who just play for just some hours a week - they have no interest in relearning the game and as such won't stay for long...

So is there someone "in command" or is there a set game design? I mean ok - you don't need to have everything down to the most tiny detail yet and it's no problem to like add an additional unit here and there in the process if the team sees fit. There really should be a definition of like what resources there are, how the econnomy works and things like that though. You really mustn't allow to change such basic gameplay terms which especially CA suffered from (and I don't want to do a full list of all the things which kept changing over time there totally redefining the gameplay like at least once a year)...

There is lots of game-design text, check CA wiki for documents. There also have been many discussions.

CA has changed a lot because it started off from AA/BA and it took some time and experiments to discover what plays good.
ZK has game mechanics and units set the way we wanted after years of experimentation.

But while basic rules are pretty much set in stone and won't change, I don't expect game to be completely static. Like it's always possible we add/remove unit, if it turns out its duplicated role or we have oportunity to add new specialized role with unique ability.

League of Legends style purchasing could not work if you want a balanced competitive rts. Its bad enough in League of Legends and could potentially break an RTS or atleast make it unfair. If you want it to be a lulsy korean MMO style addictive game fair do's.

Good Luck but I don't see the revenue thing working (at least not in that sense)

I hope the game goes well. I am slightly disappointed in how CA turned out and I admit I did little to help except baaaaw. But I do hope all goes well in the future. And I will give Zero-K a try when a polished version is released.

http://www.zero-k.info/
http://trac.caspring.org/wiki/ProjectGoals

Found this, but still feel a little curious jet very under-informed.
It feels like a CA-internal matter. It feels like CA period.

1)
The main point i get from the initial post is: Easy-to-join-in and RPG-elements in a game tend to generate and bind more players.
I wonder if that was indeed thought of as an imported point to convey.

2)
Since some skills are more rare than others, what i think is an interesting question is: Will there be (completely) new art? or will it look basically like CA does now?

3)
And can anyone play/look at this finished core-game?

If the gameplay was not designed in CA's style I might be inclined to join in and help with whatever i can.
Maybe host a few games so people can easily see what this zero k is?
i dont think i ever managed to play a stable version of it.

to me it looks like ca/*a too.
unitlist = ca
On Zero-K website click "Guide" -> "Introduction" "Introduction to CA"
So is it jused renamed ca/1faction?

why do you not take bigger steps away from ota?
It seems like at the end it will still be "make 2 solars, 3 mex, factory, build flashtanks ooh peewees attack, i make a llt to protect my windfarm."

ive seen this vid over there, i thought its CA >>

Zero-K is not finished yet!
Its not something you can play yet, even the website is not yet made!
FireStorm unfortunately caused major confusion by posting link to outdated site.

Clicking on those links is misleading for that reason and I shut it down.

Firestorm:

1) I don't understand

2) ZK is based on CA art, but it contains several new units and misses others because its made to be open-source. Regarding art style, there is only rule that units built by same factory should follow same artistic style. We will keep upgrading visual style as models become available.

3) This thread is not an announcement of the game you can already play! Just call for help :)

Wombat wrote:ive seen this vid over there, i thought its CA >>

This vid was 3.5 years old video of CA, not zero-k...

well i saw it once, few weeks ago, why its there then anyway

Old stuff, the site itself was over year old placeholder. I hid it now.

Licho wrote:Zero-K is not finished yet!
FireStorm unfortunately caused major confusion by posting link to outdated site.

My apologies then...

Licho wrote:Just call for help :)

My main concern was, in order to help one would need a some kind of (mental) picture of the project. To me that isn't a very clear picture.

(I must say this is probably because personally I feel more like an artist, enjoying creating original concepts and artwork.)

Thats why its best to contact me directly. It would be too much work to put everything on paper and it could be confusing if its bound to change.

Depending on what would you like to do I can point you to stuff.

Licho wrote:There is lots of game-design text, check CA wiki for documents. There also have been many discussions.

Well how should anyone new know about those many discussions and design text if you don't give links? I also couldn't find anything Zero-K related besides this which is no game design but a "we want to make a cool game speech":
http://trac.caspring.org/wiki/ProjectGoals

When using the search function I now also think you were very unprecise with your opening post. To me and because of e.g. THIS it looks that this Zero-K project of yours really just is the 1-faction-fork of CA. So why don't you outright tell that to people? I mean you present this as a totally independent project using some of CA's art but now you start to tell people to look up the design stuff in the CA wiki (where at least I found nothing Zero-K specific but just the CA design stuff - tell me if I missed something)...

If you really want people to join your project why don't you present it at all? How many factions, what resources, what eco system, what player count per match should it be optimized towards, what units will it have / is there a plan for units yet? These in my opinion are the questions you should answer at first instead of describing your goal of having a cool game with many players, tournaments and a lobby of its own. To me it now sounds like you didn't have the heart to outright say that you're looking for help for finishing and polishing the 1-faction CA fork you now call Zero-K (while I of course don't know if that applies to you or not - it's just the way it looks to me now)...

So once again: What's the game design and what's the now obvious connection to CA which seems to be more than just sharing some art and ideas but simply being the 1-faction-fork of it?! If you really plan to "just" use the current way CA handles everything then say so. If you plan to totally rethink the way CA handles things then please say so and as described please also tell if those new rules then are mandatory for the rest of the development or if they'll change over the years as it was the case for CA. Again I don't want to say you need to provide a definite design detailed up to every single unit and their stats. I just think that there should be a base to rely on which isn't so much about making it easier for the developers so they don't have to readapt their game to the new rules but which is about the actual players who (usually) don't want to relearn the most basic gameplay mechanics every few months...

RTS game itself is not the innovative part of the project.

Innovative part is the integration/online persistency.

Thats why there is no point presenting RTS game design, which will be based on CA-1faction. That "core" game is CA-1faction, mutator going on for last year as stated in opening post.

Only basic rules for game design are set, you can read them in numerous documents about balancing, visualising stuff etc. But don't expect exact list of units.

Just so we can get clarification, is this statement roughly accurate:

Zero-K is developed from CA-1Fac, and thus has CA-1fac gameplay... BUT... with customizable comms, and certain units, comm-morphs, and comm-customizations being unlockables that must be acquired external to the main game.

Is that it?