Province - RTS

Blog regarding an overly ambitious Real Time Strategy game/learning experience using unreal engine 4.

I've wanted to create an RTS for quite a while, though with work and lack of hard coding knowledge, there was always a mental blocker of time vs learning vs wanting to have fun! That being said, a lot of reasoning as prompted the excelled learning ambitions to take hold, as such, with the help of the internet; I shall attempt to bring a small portion of my ideas to life.

Initial issues!

My main reasoning for not wanting to create small projects on my own was simple: I lacked assets! Sure, I could have made my own, but I'm not a great 3d artist, I can create assets, but it's time consuming to gather the reference, block out the model, unwrap and texture etc etc. This, coupled with my idealogy of wanting my content to look somewhat presentable disheartened me to start/created/finish even a small project. With that being said, and scouring multiple sources - even things like turbosquid or the unreal market - I wasn't overly keen on spending a lot of money on assets I wasn't overly keen on - I decided to throw a bit of money at a store sale and get some low poly standard assets, rocks, trees, nature stuff usual things that make everything more....well....just more.

After finding these assets, bringing them into engine, i got carried away with making small scenes/environments that would never really see the light of day. So, I started working in the blueprint editor to allow myself to help populate the world I want to create...albeit...a simple word.

Onto the ideas!

The premise is simple, create a village/settlement/town/city/empire and gather/trade/conquer/create a bustling economy while doing so. I want to maintain a large environment, which is difficult, because of the time it will take for units to travel the expanse and maintaining the element of awe/purpose/gameplay etc etc.

On to basic implementation; Controls - Camera controls are simple but will likely be retweaked, I just want a quick way to get around the map:

Camera Controls

This blueprint will do the job! For now.... the feature is rudimentary and akin to a plethora of similar variations on line. WASD to move the camera up/down/left/right or diagonally, in addition, holding the middle mouse button will allow you to pan and reset the camera settings, shift will increase the speed the camera moves. These are based on small estimate values for now, but I don't like the idea of pressing too many keys to do something as simple as moving the viewport/camera....this will be changed!

On to the assets! I'm trying to find similar styles, low poly esque, luckily for me, almost every indie game on the planet is either "stylised low poly" or "pixel art" This is good news, so here's a small scene for a collection of assets I've purchased/located online for free usage!

Art Asset Test Scene

I love the style, hopefully I can make a good use of this! They're vibrant and eye catching, which will help.

Design Note: Silhouettes are key to identification! If you can tell what an object is from a distance without colour; it will help prompt decision making at a quick glance, it's a core premise implemented in a lot of games, especially competitive games like Starcraft and Overwatch, more prevalent in real time strategy games due to camera draw distance! 



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