Game Design

In this publication I'm going to do a brief explanation of the design for my RTS game.

We have four key elements in our game design: Resources, Units, Buildings and Upgrades. It's obvious that I'm not going to create a complete and balanced RTS game, with all the option that this kind of game usually have (that could take me months), but at the same time I need enough variety to explore and play with the AI to see interesting results.

For example, it would be boring and "easy" to create an AI for a RTS game with only one kind of resource (gold), only two units (villager and soldier) and one building (barracks). Why? because the game would be so linear;

Produce villagers -> get gold -> build barracks -> produce soldiers -> "win".

Instead, we want the AI to have different paths to achieve its goals, different possible strategies. In the game I have designed we have four different resources, four kinds of units, nine buildings and six different upgrades.

I have also defined the amount of resources needed for everything, the times of construction for buildings and training for units, and the time it takes to gather each resource.

Here is a outline of the game design (some  of the tables are minimized so they could fit in a single image). Upgrades also consume resources and take time to research, although it is not shown in the image.

(click on the image to enlarge)

I think that with this design there is enough variety to plan different strategys.

For example, we have a University that you need if you want to do research, like double bit axe (gather wood 20% faster), or improved pickaxe (gather ores 20% faster). We also have a weak soldier (pikeman) and a strong soldier (Knight) which is more expensive but is stronger.

If it's planning a fast rush of basic units (pikemen), is it worth to build a university as soon as possible and invest on some research to gather wood and food faster? or just focus on getting pikemen and forgetting about everything else?

How many workers is it going to allocate to each resource?

In the early game is it going to focus only in improving its economy (tons of villagers for tons of resources), or is it sacrificing some resources for training soldier and have some defenses?

I want to have different options in every phase of the game. That will allow me to create different AI "profiles", and try to make the AI as unpredictable as possible.