1 post tagged “make every move count”

Fascinating article on cumbersome UIs posted on Gama Sutra.

Occasionally, Gamasutra can be good food for thought. I was never fond of the "clickfests" such as Diablo, Starcraft, and the author of this article hit a number of great nails squarely on the heads.  I suppose if people feel the need to micromanage, pick a tier within the chain of command to quickly navigate through individual units.  It's an idea, but is it really necessary? Especially to facilitate game play?

There are games out there that do make each unit count and make it fairly easy to command them. They do take the additional step of removing the real time factor.  With only 1 map and 16 pieces(which fall into 6 "classes") the turn based game of chess is considered one of the deepest strategy games.  Still deeper with a larger map(still just 1!) loads more pieces(only 1 class this time around) is the game of Go.

I'm trying to think of a game that's essentially a remake of RobotWar for the PS1. The programming was all done using iconic tiles, the robots could be upgraded with special hardware, hold more complex programs and new routines were obtained.

The point of this little diversion about simple, highly strategic games is for good strategic gameplay, one need not bury the strategy in layers and layers of complexity and require that micro management happen at hyper speed.  Making a tremendous number of split second decisiosn and having them all work towards a long term strategy is certainly a cognitive exercise of sorts.

I suppose a good exercise would be coming up with an RTS that follows goal I previously set of making every move count. I'll certainly think about it.