Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
During his presentation, Wright argued that this minimal real-time strategy game
still presents the player with some interesting choices and displays dynamic behavior
similar to that found in other games within the same genre. Most notably Wright
argued that a rock-paper-scissors mechanism affects the three units: Building factories
trumps building defenses, building defenses trumps building offensive units, and
building offensive units trumps building factories. Wright also describes a short-
term vs. long-term trade-off and a high-risk/high-reward strategy that recalls the
“rush” and “turtle” strategies found in many real-time strategy games (see the side-
bar “Turtling vs. Rushing”).
turtlinG Vs. rushinG
Turtling and rushing are two common strategies found in many real-time strategy games.
a turtling player builds up his defenses and production capacity while holding off enemy
attacks; he then tries to use his superior production capacity to build a large attack wave
and overwhelm the opponent's defenses. in contrast, a rushing player focuses on attack-
ing early in the hope of overwhelming the opposition before they have a chance to dig in.
rushing is generally considered to be a high-risk/high-reward strategy and frequently
requires more skill of the player. To rush successfully, a player must be able to perform
many actions per minute.
Modeling SimWar
In this section, we build a model of SimWar in stages, using Machinations diagrams.
The mechanics we build in each stage follow the same structure as the ones we
offered as real-time strategy examples in Chapter 6.
Starting with the production mechanism, we use a pool ( Resources ) to represent a
player's collected resources ( Figure 8.19 ). The pool is filled by another automatic
pool that represents the uncollected resources available to the player. The game's
production rate is initially 0 but increases by 0.25 for every factory the player builds.
The player can build factories by clicking the interactive converter labeled BuildF ,
which will pull resources only when at least five are available. The structure is a
typical implementation of the dynamic engine pattern that we discussed in Chapter
7. Like all dynamic engines, it creates a positive feedback loop: The more factories a
player builds, the quicker resources are produced, which in turn can be used to build
even more factories. However, as the resources are ultimately limited, building only
factories might not be the best idea. Notice that, in this case, the structure requires
players to start with at least five resources already collected or one factory already
built. Otherwise, players can never start producing.
 
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