Spring RTS Engine

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-4 ... &uid=24965
I was looking at small Indie games online, and found this. I thought it was quite interesting, (though I didn't have opportunity to test it yet.)

And I thought I'd mention it was made in unity, since it is somewhat being compared to Spring here

I especially like the concept drawing. Simple idea lots of directions to go with it... also in general pictures make "imanaouncinmagame" a very different experience for the reader, I think.

its a well presented concept.. though i think the problem here is well hidden.. you can not make procedural active gamecontent (means programable items or units) that are not somewhat generic and therefore uninteresting, else you need a automated gamedesigner..

Random Generators work best on passive levelstuff - plants (treegenerators), levels (minecraft) themselves, neutral units (spore)

In those games that had random generators for weapons the basic rulesets made those weapons unrememberable (diablo, borderlands)..

I agree that it works best on passive stuff, but I don't think that because of that it couldn't be used successfully for other things. And I don't think the level of use of procedural unit creation isn't that high in this example. And the number of different units created per game would probably be low and the units will probably look a lot alike (still haven't played it actually), but maybe that wouldn't be such a big deal in the right setting or maybe it goes along very well with the specific game-play. And iirc I know you care about gameplay

(maybe key is to mix it up with a few uniqe things, like most rpg-s do; I don't know.)

Oh, yeah, I came up with a similar design once but couldn't figure out enough details to make it a good idea.

what's really needed for "procedural units" to work is for the various parts to supplement/interact with each other in interesting and non-intuitive ways. Making this work is.... hard.

It's not procedural strictly speaking, but I've also ran into this mayascript and thought it was pretty cool. Minor points being, the advanced version is $10 and I haven't really worked in maya for years.

@KDR
With your track-record I find that hard to believe

@yanom
What do you mean by interacting in a non-intuitive way?

I can imagine a tank game, with a few different chassis (amphib, all-terrain, maybe), a few different turrets, a few different types of shielding (and a cloak possibly), few different types of projectiles.
Or it could be a game with agents outfitted a wide range of different prosthetics... ( i'd like that better I think )
But you think that would be to strait forward to make it work well?

FireStorm_ wrote:@KDR
With your track-record I find that hard to believe

Most of the ideas I turned into games went through significant rethinking before being worth doing. It's easy to think up a creative new scheme for producing things and such, it's hard to make the scheme more than just busywork where you spend like 10x as much time but in the end just make the same decisions you'd make with a conventional system. A bad example would be Perimeter's unit morphing, you need to produce exact ratios of small units to morph into the final units so you had to do the math and then click a lot to do what a normal factory would do in three clicks and no thinking. Yes, you could just produce rough numbers or deliberately add more to allow morphing on the field but since there was a hard cap on the number of small units you could have you would just waste capacity by being inexact.

Hi guys, just stumbled across this while trying to find my game jam entry page :) I had no idea the Spring Engine existed! Looks really cool..

The idea I had in mind for this 'pluggable structures' concept was to allow a small number of structures to create a large number of possible unit variations. I think that there are definitely substantial challenges to making this a workable and fun design, but maybe it's possible.. :)

The game jam was only 7 days, so I didn't manage to deliver anything like the concept sketch in the end. In particular, I didn't manage to get the main part done which is mix n' match unit designs. The plan was to have a slot-based modular unit system, so you could combine different base chassis designs with a variety of weapon, armor, and upgrade items. Ideally you'd be able to create anything from tanks, hover units, fliers, mechs using the same system. The real challenge would be getting cool and unique looking unit builds that also had quite divergent gameplay impacts. Tricky! Player mastery would be to learn good builds / building layouts, recognize what the opponent is up to with their builds, and so on.

Anyways, thanks for noticing my humble jam game, and nice to meet you! :)

@KDR

I recognise that: When trying to be innovate, pragmatic decisions steer you back to a more generic end result, and you might end up basicly mimicking existing rts gameplay.

@Substruct

Nice to meet you too!
Sometimes some people using and making Spring would wish that is was a little more mainstream and better known. So thanks for noticing Spring
Note the Spring engine is not for everyone or every project, but you sound like someone who might have a use for it.
In any case: Welcome

What really would be interesting, if you could glue your own creatures together (basically mecha lego) to spore like giants, and let them fight each other- so basically t3 is all you can build

I believe that could be done using knorke-magnetism-magic:

If you had torso's and limbs, and made sure torso's would not affect/stick to other torso's, I think you would already have cool and funny system. I image all kinds of incredipede-like creatures roaming the battlefield.