
Mining a 1993 game design for innovative game mechanics - DanBC
http://lunar.lostgarden.com/game_HardVacuum.htm
======
RTigger
(commenting here since the author's forum is down)

There's a few points on here I'd like to debate:

\- I haven't played an RTS recently, but the last time I dived into the genre
there was lots of innovation: World in Conflict had an entirely new resource-
based deployment system, Warhammer 40k Dawn of War and Company of Heroes both
employed brand-new "capture and hold" territory-based gameplay. You could
argue that League of Legends and DOTA both contribute to this genre as well.

\- The author mentions several times that they didn't have the time or
resources to spend on map creation. Level design is a pretty important aspect
of any game development - maybe the Hard Vacuum game would've taken off if
they had content?

\- "A team like this today can not even hope to create a major blockbuster
game". See: decent indie studios all over the world. Maybe it's just that the
definition of "major game" has changed since the 90's.

While I agree with the main premise of the article, that game designers need
to take a critical, uninfluenced look at the genres they design games for, it
feels like the author hasn't attempted to play a game in the last 10 years.

~~~
Jtsummers
> While I agree with the main premise of the article, that game designers need
> to take a critical, uninfluenced look at the genres they design games for,
> it feels like the author hasn't attempted to play a game in the last 10
> years.

The article was written in 2005 so that seems like a correct assessment.

~~~
RTigger
Oh, hey, look at that. Thanks for uncovering that. And the games I talked
about came out after 2006, so maybe they were inspired by the article :)

~~~
Jtsummers
Another game, though I haven't looked at it in a while, with a very innovative
idea is Achron. Time travelling with all the potential hazards and benefits it
implies. Lost a battle? Go back and reposition your units. Cost increased to
go back further in time so you couldn't infinitely regress. I fell out of
playing video games a couple years ago though so I'm not sure how it turned
out. I should download it again and check it out.

------
b0rsuk
If you like to dabble in modding or are a game developer, here are some fairly
obscure but quite innovative games:

Heroes of Might and Magic 4. What REALLY is unforgivable in the game is the
AI, which - mostly due to time pressure - even its own developers described as
"lobotomized". But it has many things new to the serries, including obstacles
affecting line of sight in combat, towers that need to be manned (no more
turrets that are either too weak or too strong), separate initiative and speed
stats (greater flexibility in units). Gone is the notoriously hard to balance
Attack Skill, Defense Skill, Spell Power and Knowledge (attack/def got
stronger and stronger as turns passed). Heroes4 riped off Master of Magic
spell system, which in turn ripped off M:tG spell magic colors. This means
that magic schools are actually unique and work in different ways. Heroes 4 is
a broken game in a couple of ways, but a library of intriguing mechanics as
well.

Nox. Easy to mistake for a Diablo clone, Nox by Westwood Studios (neglected by
EA) has no random loot, no chance-based dodge or shield block or hit chance,
practically no resists. All spells remain useful thorough the game. Nox has
many interesting spells and mechanics. It is skill-based instead and combat is
very satisfying. The most noticeable thing in the game is its fun line of
sight algorithm. In Diablo, you can anticipate big fights because you can see
past walls. Here, you can't. Teleglitch is a new game that also has this
mechanic.

Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. Like Heroes 4, it was sunk by bad AI I believe,
but is a great game especially in multiplayer. I would describe it like
"Heroes 4 done right". Flying units, spells on adventure map, Master of Magic-
like research and magic system, the ability to build towns and roads as well
as raze&rebuild neutral structures. If an ice witch passes over land, it's
permanently covered in snow. Try that over water or enemy city's crops !

And play board games. Board games have many mechanics unseen in computer
games. Try ones like Dominion, Neuroshima Hex, Seasons, or Dungeoneer. The
last one may appear like just an improved version of Talisman, but it has one
wonderful mechanic. Buffs and positive powers are used from a SEPARATE pool.
Normally multiplayer games have a problem where by spending your resources on
hostile actions you don't help your cause but make the target of your malice
easier to beat for others.

~~~
b0rsuk
I forgot Laser Squad Nemesis and Frozen Synapse. They have simultaneous turns,
and in some ways it's the best of both worlds. You get the ability to plan
moves carefully, like in TBS games, but don't get the time artifacts
associated with them. Like in RTS games, time flows naturally. Try to
distinguish between a shotgun and an automatic rifle in a TBS game. Good luck
with that. The same thing is very easy in a game like LSN. I like to compare
simultaneous turns to crossbows. Both inventions were very good and have their
merits, but (in western world) they came too late to matter.

Also, Laser Squad Nemesis is a game designed by original X-COM's designer.
It's from 2003, so and has nice high-res 2D graphics.

~~~
scotty79
Anyone fond of Lasersquad (XCOM and such) type games please take a look at the
flash game "Mission in Space: the lost colony"
[http://www.kongregate.com/games/StormAlligator/mission-in-
sp...](http://www.kongregate.com/games/StormAlligator/mission-in-space-the-
lost-colony)

It has very nice mechanics. I especially like the unlimited shots of
opportunity fire (well, limited by the ammo left in the clip) that allow for
fun play while being hugely outnumbered.

~~~
b0rsuk
It looks promising so far. The game actually explains mechanics to me is a
good sign, it reminds me of Debian. Another interesting thing is separate
action and movement points. I've been thinking about something like that.
Basically the idea is you can move your legs separately from your hands.

------
VSerge
The point on environment made me think of Civ, though turn based, in which
affecting the terrain and fighting are somewhat linked : clearing terrain for
faster transport, nuking an enemy city.. But it's nowhere near what's
described in the article. Then you've got the total war franchise in which
terrain is essential to tactical fighting, but still, terrain can't be
modified to affect the fighting itself (and there are bomb units and cliffs,
so the opportunity would be here). Maps are still very shallow in the strategy
genre, it seems that they have resources and movement properties and that's
often pretty much it.

While we're talking oldies, this made think of Master of Magic (turn based),
which had parallel universes, another concept that is very much under-
utilized. And 'parallel universe" is a theme up for the round 2 of voting for
the upcoming ludum dare.

~~~
tfinniga
What about Bullfrog's Magic Carpet? It had resource gathering and terrain
modification as core mechanics. I think it also had base building. It was
first-person though.

~~~
b0rsuk
By the way, Magic Carpet is returning as Arcane Worlds. It's looking very
good, and has some new effects like good looking water spells. I described it
in more detail here:

[http://forum.maiagame.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=159](http://forum.maiagame.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=159)

------
b0rsuk
When it comes to innovation in RTS games, it's really hard to beat Kung Fu
Chess ! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azzsuss-swo> (Princes of Babylon -
Meaningless Conversation)

It's chess without turns. Yes, you can actually dodge other pieces if you
click in time and your piece is not currently on a cooldown.

The idea is both innovative and very simple. How come no one thought of this
earlier ? The idea is also very elegant, if you can look past chess rules
quirks like en passant and castling.

~~~
Tipzntrix
Why is this game so godlike? I think people might have missed it because they
are too used to thinking about what could happen on a real board, where arms
would get tangled and whatnot. The strategies in place, like leaving your king
wide open to get taken, but dodging at the last second to bait a power piece
in are awesome!

------
kriro
While I like the idea of changing the shape of the map during the game I think
the point about player created content falls flat.

There's significant modding, mapmaking, AI etc. communities for many games. In
fact in this day and age I'd say it's smart to outsource that to the users to
a good degree and provide excellent tools+some support.

Then again this seems to be a 2005 article about a 1993 game and I don't even
recall what the situation was like in 2005. Probably a lot less modding etc.

~~~
ANTSANTS
I don't know how it compares to the modern scene, but there was definitely a
large amount of RTS modding and mapmaking going on long before 2005.
Particularly for the old Command and Conquer games, which were much more
accessible to modders than modern, full 3D titles. It's much easier to plonk
down some 2D or isometric tiles, carve a vehicle model out of voxels, or edit
the "ini files" of those games than it is to create a similar experience with
a full fledged 3D modeler and modern toolset.

It may not have really been programming, but modding Tiberian Sun and making
simple websites from plain HTML were my childhood "I can make the computer do
what I want?!" moments. They were such limited environments, but the ease with
which a kid could do interesting things with them really opened up new worlds
to me.

People talk about the "little coder" problem a lot. I wonder if it's better to
start a child with "making your own pong," so that they are confronted with
actual programming from the beginning, or to give them a powerful but
inflexible tool so that they can do impressive things right off the bat,
before starting to think "why can't I do this? If I had made it, it would be
like this..."

~~~
b0rsuk
There's an insightful comment over here:
[http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2012/02/whether-
they-l...](http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2012/02/whether-they-love-or-
hate-story-in.html)

"""I think one of the very interesting things about modern single-player game
development is that it creates exceptionally expensive content designed to
appeal to everyone and be played exactly once for 8-10 hours. As anybody who
plays European board games will tell you, making a game (read: the body of
rules, the mechanics and dynamics) is cheap - all you need is creativity and a
lot of playtesting. AAA videogames are entirely different, though - millions
are spent on voice acting, scripting, graphics, etc. This is why I'm excited
for moderate-budget games like Bastion that can publish interesting and
challenging gameplay with a budget lean enough that it doesn't have to sell to
absolutely everybody."""

~~~
chii
basically, to sell to more people, you need to appeal to a lower common
denominator, and rely on high production value.

Its the same situation with other media, like movies, and i doubt its going to
really change.

------
willvarfar
Excellent timing, because:

This coming weekend is Ludum Dare 25! <http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/>

Get game coding!

------
jrogers65
I just got hit hard by nostalgia. I love that graphical style. It's very
similar to the one used in Tyrian, if anyone remembers that little gem.

<http://www.abandonia.com/games/296/Tyrian2000.htm>

~~~
thristian
The author says that after doing graphics for this game Hard Vacuum, he went
to Epic to draw sprites for Tyrian, so it's no surprise they have a similar
look. :)

~~~
jrogers65
My mistake! And there I was wondering how they were so similar.

~~~
neumann_alfred
As a matter of fact, freely usable Tyrian gfx are also available at that blog
:)

[http://www.lostgarden.com/2007/04/free-game-graphics-
tyrian-...](http://www.lostgarden.com/2007/04/free-game-graphics-tyrian-ships-
and.html)

------
danso
These are the innovations from the OP:

\- Supply Lines

\- Variable Height Terrain

\- Walls

\- Player created landscapes: (Walls, base building, supply lines, and
advanced terrain modification)

Disclosure: The last RTS's I got into were Age of Empires II, Total
Annihilation, and a little of Warcraft 3...

The innovations above don't seem like innovations to me...they seem like
features that got ditched because of limitations (still present today) in AI
and game-testing:

* Walls made it too easy to turtle against AIs and more importantly, play havoc on pathfinding AI. They also make no sense whatsoever in games that take place after the age of (gunpowder) cannons.

* Deformable terrain has the same issues as above...it's a good feature because it adds realism, but ultimately, it seems to require a much higher level of programming sophistication and game mechanics to implement in such a way that it didn't make the game too cumbersome to enjoy. I personally don't think it would add much to a RTS _unless_ terrain deformation was the _focus_ of the strategy... _that_ would be an interesting game. Adding full-featured terrain deformation to a standard RTS? I think it would just make things unnecessarily complicated.

* Supply lines: I think this was essentially handled through the use of "peasants" traveling from the townhall to the town center (in Warcraft and AOE). In Total Annihilation and other such games where mines/power generators wireless send you resources...you still had to allocate resources to protect the lines. In any case, it was a welcome form of streamlining.

* Variable Height Terrain: It seems a lot of games do have this, even Age of Empires (hills and such).

For me, if we're mining old games for innovation, I wish designers would be
more open to incorporating more turn-based mechanics instead of making
everything real-time twitch based. I still go back to X-Com and Jagged
Alliance time and time again.

~~~
mrcharles
I call bullshit on your pathfinding AI excuses. A* is A*, it doesn't matter if
you dynamically modify the terrain, and it's easy enough to check if a path
would end at walls or impassable terrain, and have the AI deal with that
accordingly.

~~~
danso
> _and have the AI deal with that accordingly._

Yeah, that's kind of the problem I alluded to, isn't it?

But you're right, I don't know the state-of-the-art in pathfinding...as I
admitted, the most recent RTS I played was Warcraft 3. It just seems to me to
be a very common complaint in most modern games. I still play Team Fortress 2,
and even though they've implemented AI, the AI only works on certain pre-
designed levels. Yes, I know that a FPS is generally more path-computational
than a RTS, but if you're proposing that an RTS have 3D terrain then, well,
that makes it a 3D game, no?

And it's been awhile since I've designed a game but I think you're
underestimating the computational power it would take for an AI to dynamically
generate efficient paths with every change to the terrain. IIRC, a lot of
early AI compensated by having pre-calculated paths for each level (and I
think virtually all of them only pretended to be encumbered by a fog of war).

My point still stands though...these aren't really innovations...again, I'm
not in game development, but I'm guessing that some of these are ideas that
teams consider and then drop in lieu of their difficulty of implementation. In
other words, the innovation would be the actual implementation of the idea,
not the idea itself.

~~~
mrcharles
Using a tile or node based A* map, there's no additional cost for altering
heuristics on the fly. All paths are always dynamically generated on the fly.

The only reason early AI had 'pre-calculated paths' (an assertion I am dubious
about, to be honest) would be that it was running on processors that could
barely push the graphics of the time to begin with.

Those days are loooooong behind us.

------
natural219
I just watched Penny Arcade's excellent summary [1] of how game genres should
be broken down. If you find this article interesting, I highly recommend you
check it out -- it pretty much carries off where this article left.

1: <http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/aesthetics-of-play>

~~~
DLWormwood
Actually, it’s “Extra Credits” summary. PATV just hosts them now after they
had a falling out with The Escapist involving a fundraiser for covering
medical bills.

</pendant>

~~~
saraid216
> </pendant>

</pedant>

------
fallous
A game from that era that I wish would inspire some clones is Robosport. I
believe it was a Maxis title and was turn-based, but was really clever in that
it didn't just feel like a board game that got ported to a computer with some
animation tacked on. The version I played was on the Amiga and supported
TCP/IP networking (kinda, I actually wrote my first public tutorial to help
people get the networking running).

------
masklinn
> Supply Lines: When you built a mining tower on a resource deposit, there was
> no need to manually build and manage drones to carry the minerals back and
> forth. Instead, a road was built from your base to the mine. Drones were
> automatically created when the mine had a full load and sent along the road
> to your base. Enemies could blast your supply line and interrupt your flow
> of resources. So protecting fixed supply lines became a bit part of the
> strategy.

I always hated this mechanic, and loved Total Annihilation's (and Supreme
Commander — not 2)'s resource _flows_ , and necessity of regulating resource
flows in order not to gridlock an economy.

~~~
Scramblejams
Could you please expand on this? Why did you hate this mechanic, and how was
TA's mechanic better?

~~~
amishforkfight
In most RTS games, an arbitrary Resource Mine generates resource X at a fixed
rate, but the resource is delivered into your resource pool in fixed-rate
chunks. 100 units of X per minute, delivered at the top of the minute (for
example). You can't purchase Unit Y until you have all 300 units of Resource
X, so you wait 3 minutes.

TA employed a continuous economy system where you were more concerned with
your resource Bandwidth rather than total quantity available. Energy or Metal
mines added +X of their respective resource to your pool, but it was
continuous and if your pool was full, excess resources just vanished.

The unique aspect to this system was that the player could begin constructing
_any_ building whether or not he had the resources available to finish it. The
player didn't need 300 units of Resources X to start constructing Unit Y -- he
just started building it. The construction units would open up and start
taking in Resources at their fixed rate. If the resource pool ran out of
resources, aka your construction needs outstripped your gathering
capabilities, all construction slowed to the maximum rate at which you were
able to gather resources.

A liquid economy, still one of the most fun I've ever played.

------
neumann_alfred
I absolutely _love_ these graphics. I am currently derping around with WebGL
etc., making a super simple "space shooter" ala Galaga, and so far the enemies
are colored circles haha. There are a lot of objects in that archive that will
make rather neat spaceships and collectibles, in a graphical style I adore --
thank you so much!

------
bcoates
Is the file of resources available anywhere? The link in the article is
broken.

edit: fixed now

~~~
flog
<http://lunar.lostgarden.com/files/HardVacuum.zip>

------
happimess
"What many PC gamers today consider to be one of the most burnt out genres was
at that time new, fresh and completely unknown to most gamers."

Is this true? Are RTS games considered played out by the general gaming
public?

~~~
saraid216
In 2005? Yeah. At that time, I remember that my obsession with RTSes was to go
back to older games, on the recommendation of gamer friends. I ended up
jumping ship completely into MORPGs for a while. I guess this is why I like
doing World v World in GW2 nowadays.

------
hcarvalhoalves
Some retro games that I think had great mechanics:

Deadlock: turn-based strategy game, like Civilization, but in a sci-fi
setting. You had to manage resources and colonizer during each turn, but there
were cut-scenes for battle events.

Dark Colony: very fast paced RTS game. Different than most, you couldn't place
buildings anywhere in the map, only control access to resources and deny area
to rivals using your units. Well balanced units. I think it had amazing
graphics and sound design for the time (1997).

~~~
b0rsuk
I remember that one. Dark Colony was one of games that inspired Starcraft.

------
mratzloff
Dan, out of curiosity, why was it never released?

~~~
DanBC
I'm not the author, I just posted this article to HN.

I have no idea why it wasn't released. Sorry!

~~~
mratzloff
Ah, the author's name is Daniel Cook, so you can see how I would make that
mistake! :-)

------
primitur
Wow, this + MOAI is going to be a fun week .. ;) Seriously, thanks for the
Artwork, its exactly what I need to get things happening in a more creative
way on a couple of my MOAI projects. If we make something nice, we'll
definitely let you know!

------
somlor
_He would call me up on pay phones to talk about game design. Every few
minutes he would have to play a series of tones from his little blue box to
get another few free minutes of talk time._

Correction: That would have been a "red box". ^__^

------
figital
Desert Strike and (it's even better sequel) Jungle Strike were amazingly well
designed. I think they were on the Sega and circa 1992 & 1993\. The Hard
Vacuum game looks like it might have been even better.

------
Zardoz84
Ummm... Why you think that I still play DooM . It's the best FPS game of all
times (if you play a source port, of course). It's very fast, with hordes of
enemies, and very easy to mod and make maps.

