Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Most real-time strategy games have multiple resources to harvest, forcing players
to assign different tasks to their workers.
Figure 6.46
expands upon the previous
one to include a second resource: timber. In this diagram, players can move work-
ers between two locations by activating the two pools representing those locations.
Workers in each location contribute to the harvesting of one of the resources. In
this case, timber is also a limited resource (the
Forest
pool). The initial harvesting
rate for timber is slightly higher than the harvesting rate for gold. However, as the
workers clear the forest, the harvesting rate drops because they have to travel lon-
ger distances (you might recognize this situation from
Warcraft
). This mechanism
is modeled by applying a little negative feedback on the harvesting rate of timber
based on the number of resources left in the forest.
FIGURe 6.46
mining gold and har-
vesting timber
RTS building
In real-time strategy games, all those resources are harvested for a reason: You need
them to build your base and military units.
Figure 6.47
illustrates how resources
can be used to construct a number of buildings and units. The diagram uses color-
coding, and each unit type has its own color. Soldiers are blue, and archers are
purple. Building types have their own color too: Barracks are blue, the mill is purple,
and towers are red. Different colored activators are used to create dependencies
between the building options: You need a barracks to be able to build units and a
mill to produce archers and towers.
