It's 12:00am and I've had a game idea. What are your thoughts?

The title was sort of clickbait, sort of not. I do have a game idea: I just didn’t come up with it at 12:00am.

For the past year or so, I was messing around with an idea for a real-time strategy game. Recently, however, I had major worries about handling performance with a couple hundred units on the battlefield, and essentially gave myself the ultimate burnout.

I decided I would instead work on a new game, and, to not feel like I wasted all those hours of my life, searched for a concept where I could transfer as much RTS-related code as possible.

I found an older game concept of mine that I have ultimately decided to work on. I present what I have at the moment:

Inspiration

The original idea sparked from watching some gameplay of Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle about a year ago. After rediscovering the idea, I decided to watch some more videos of the game; this time, however, I would be carefully analyzing what I did and didn't like about the game, as well as whether or not concepts would fit into the style of my game.

Story

Keeping it brief, you are a faction leader on a forgotten war planet at the edge of the solar system. There have been no major alien conflicts for several decades, so the humans have begun forming factions to try and gain dominance over one another. Your objective is to gain followers, claim faction turf, and become the most powerful faction on the planet.

Core Gameplay

As I mentioned, earlier, I watched a good deal of gameplay from the Mario + Rabbids game. I also watched some gameplay of other turn-based strategy games, such as Gears Tactics, since they were more related to my game's style. I present a list of all that I think my game would utilize:
  • A comprehensive fog of war.
    Players can only see what their troops on the battlefield see. In other words: if your troops do not have direct line of sight of the enemy, they are hidden from your view;

  • Player stats.
    For the sake of keeping this post from going too long, I won’t go into the details of how this will work. Suffice it to say that each character has a set number of skill points that can be invested into different traits that affect their efficiency in certain combat situations; and

  • Destructible terrain.
    Some (though not all) parts of a battlefield can be destroyed with enough ballistic force;

There’s also a few other details I should mention:

  • Players recruit troops from a shop of some sort. All troops are NPCs;

  • For sake of keeping rounds from stretching out too long, a player’s squad may consist of no more than four troops;

  • (Driveable) vehicles probably won’t be a thing;

  • Troops can become wounded or downed during a battle. As a troop becomes more impaired, that troop’s maximum number of action points per turn is lowered; and

  • Troops can lift each other to reach higher-elevation areas (if there isn’t a ladder);

Uncertain Gameplay

Finally, there comes the concepts that I've thought about, yet haven't made a final decision on:
  • The original idea is that this is strictly PvP. This pretty much goes against all turn-based strategy games I’ve seen, which are mostly against a computer. However, that would require AI, and just thinking about creating a believable AI opponent fills me with dread;

  • I have contemplated what the consequences should be for losing a battle against someone. I imagine that downed soldiers die permanently, but then that would bring in the question of what happens to their items. I think there should be consequences, but I don’t want it to go so far as some Roblox survival games, where failure is essentially a data wipe;

  • Depending on the consequences of losing / winning a battle, as well as the value of troops, I have considered the idea of capturing downed enemies during a battle;

  • I am pretty confident that this will not be a pay-to-win game. There will still be game passes for things such as skins n’ stuff. There may even be exclusive weapons / gear, but they would be just as balanced as normal weapons.

That’s about as far as I’ll write. I guess the main reason I wrote this was to see what your thoughts are on this concept. I’ve realized that there isn’t many games like what I’m describing in Roblox, but then again, there aren’t many games like this in general, so it’s hard to tell if a game like this would really go anywhere.

Leave a like &/ comment to show your support. :slightly_smiling_face:

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My thoughts… huh…

the RTS game genre is the most difficult genre to design out there, so much issues and difficulties that I can’t adequately express and or write in a single post.

Man you plan having an AI, this tests your coding skills or require an experienced scripter. I’d probably go and use Reinforcement Learning for this kind of AI. Difficult to make but you can create AI personalities.

I can’t grasp how your game works, you haven’t outlined a game loop, game mechanics are fine, but don’t forget how these influence and affect each other. Therefore I can’t make a full comment

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Taking inspiration from other games is a great idea but to further answer your worries about the popularity of strategy games on roblox you would have to case study analyze other strategy games like The Conquerors 3 and Rise of Nations where I can safely say strategy games can be “successful” as there is a stable player base. Consequently, Yes your game can gain traction

From there you can add on features to your game in order to make it successful.

From my perspective, I quit playing The Conquerors 3 because of the politics involved where you have to go on 1 v 3 situations or that people tend to make server-wide alliances against your team because you decided to attack one oil rig. Moreover, people mostly abandon games as there is almost no way to turn around a game which people acknowledge and so they just leave making it boring.

If you are able to solve these issues seen on the most popular RTS games on Roblox then I would be more than willing to play your game.

I. LOVE. This. It’s great sounding, no complaints.

Really like this! I would 100% play. How much variety would there be in unit types?

The variety in unit types is based on their statistics. In this game, there wouldn’t be defined character classes, such as heavy or assassin. Instead, you choose the best soldiers and decide what weapons will work best for them given their strengths and weaknesses.

Two rough examples: a soldier with a high stamina rating would be better suited to act as a scouting troop, as he / she would be able to move further around the map and be more likely to flank an opponent during a turn. A soldier with high skill would be efficient with a sniper, as his / her accuracy at long range would be better than others.

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That’s really intuitive! The entire thing sounds unique and original. Are you gonna attempt it solo, get a dev team, or some other plan?

I feel like that’s a bit out of topic for this thread, but I’ve always worked solo on my game projects, partly because I don’t have the resources to recruit a dev team.

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