Dysis RTS/FPS hybrid, with Voxel terrain!

While I agree with you emphatically that this game is very unlikely to be well balanced and competitive, it is not just "announcin' mah mod" in so far as 99% of those projects never saw the light of day. I fully expect this project to be completed, and for the demographic to primarily be the Minecraft set, not the competative RTS set. Reading the kickstarter, the focus seems primarily on singleplayer, with multiplayer being secondary.

Yeah, I think this will be a built it and see what happens sort of project. Who would have thought minecraft would become what it did?

There is huge potential, but perhaps not in a way that's obvious to the hard-core RTS set. ZK is a variation on a theme, but this could be a new genre altogether, once they figure out what the key gameplay dynamics.

Or you could post about Zero-K, which is free and great and already finished and has a lot less money than this guy.

There is nothing in that video that suggests this will be focused on being competitive in multiplayer, rather than being a sandboxy type world-exploration game.

Saktoth them already know about us "Ideas from Zero-K" (you can even "bump" it if you have something good to add, but PA devs already did say them are going to implement most of it) 95 Replies/Posts and 4533 views!
Dysis on another hand...

But i agree that if low on money for the server rent, PA/TA communitys (excluding our own, of course) are the best/easier place to ask for help/donations. Asking for donations on the "splash screen"/loading before Zero-K game start may be a good idea. A prominent button/link for PayPal Donation on main page is a must too (have it hidden in a sub-menu of "Community" is not good). When will we get back the color lasers/black inverted impulse riot gun/etc ? Cause in game promotion is the better one that exist, no surprise lots of games are going "microtransations" for pure decorative/customizations items, like League of Legends.

GoogleFrog, i agree that to be competitive/balanced need a active developer after release and a active players base, but i was already expecting it by "default", maybe cause i play Zero-K too much. :P

Um, this is the Dysis thread, not the PA thread, though I voiced the same concerns about PA, we should not assume that their intention is to create a competitive multiplayer RTS in either case.

I played the Red Alert 3 Campaign recently and it was reasonably enjoyable, I never tried it multiplayer. If you have a lot of sandboxy and creep/tower defence type mechanics as well as the ability to FPS and drive around your units, I can imagine Dysis being quite fun without ever playing it multiplayer or even requiring a campaign. I know he probably expects to just add multiplayer functionality and get a good game from it, but historically most RTS's have done this and Homeworlds singleplayer is made no worse by the fact that it's multiplayer is nothing but fighter rushes (Or that Age of Empries 2 ended up being nothing but fuedal age hun rushes in 1v1).

I mean this is minecraft-inspired and minecraft PvP is just awful.

As to your criteria Google: A game can only be balanced up to the skill level of it's playertesters. Increasing the skill level or the number of the playtesters will increase your balance. Godde and Daywalker couldn't break Zero-K (Though I think if they played it a lot in 1v1 they eventually would), but I suspect that the top 1% of Starcraft 2 players given time could break the shit out of Zero-K and reduce it to a handful of viable strategies (To be fair though, they've already done this to SC2).

I think a lot of developers are sadly just incapable. I mean you experienced this with Achron. There is a huge amount of 'noise' in balance feedback, units go in and out of vogue, units whose counters are not immediately apparent seem ridiculous OP, etc. Even if developers do know to listen to high skill players and ignore the static, a lot of high skill players get trapped within the paradigm of the game, with a feverish attachment to the games mechanics they have already learnt, to even the beauty of a well executed 2 minute rush, to finding a way within the current gameplay to beat a strategy, rather than examining how it could play better. A good player abuses every bug, only a scrub thinks about how the game could be better, which is fine when you have total faith in the developers to provide a balanced game, but that faith is simply not warranted for most RTS's. I mean, even SW:IW in the end got caught up on the total lack of infantry anti-tank for empire eventually, even once we worked around all the other issues like no static defence (And Zsinj was a competent player).

You have the unique perspective Google of both a talented player and a talented developer. I've seen what you're capable of and know anything you're involved with is going to be amazing. It's easy for most developers to get trapped in a dunning-kruger type situation if they are bad at their own game.

TL;DR; keep messing with balance, this is a good thing.

---

Something else to think about re balance: I like the constant change. Strategies come and go, interesting ideas get tested and work for a while before counters are invented, new units disrupt things, a nerf forces everyone to adapt.

Aiming for 'perfect' balance is a bad thing, IMHO. Every game that I watch [from good players, anyway] is different, unlike, say, StarCraft replays which are endlessly repetitive. ZK isn't about mastery - e.g, hammers and glaives used to be a standard early game strat, and no one touched light vehicles, now hammers are rarely used and I'm seeing merls used all the time. Gnats were non-existant for a while, and last night I watched a Detriment get zapped by them. Never saw skuttles used until about 2 weeks ago, suddenly they're causing a huge amount of trouble for people that haven't noticed. This dynamism is one of the best things about ZK!

> a lot of high skill players get trapped within the paradigm of the game

Yes and no - I'd argue that high skill players that do that won't stay high skill for long. ZK is reasonably unique in requiring a huge amount of on-the-fly adaptation.

My first impression of Dysis was that it looked impressively well-polished for a 1-man project at an early-ish stage.

I guess the simple texturing and modular unit designs help cut down on overhead.

RTS + shooter does not work that well in general. I think you have to design the game around it. Shooter basically implies that taking control of a unit will increase it's efficiency, with this effect you can't really have a large scale RTS.

quote: Shooter basically implies that taking control of a unit will increase it's efficiency, with this effect you can't really have a large scale RTS.

You can just replace the regular detailed micro with fps instead, but yes that demands building the game around this.

Btw, i think Urban Assault got it perfect in that sense, all with hundreds of units.