Previously: The User Interface of StarCraft
Then a group of ex-StarCraft developers left Blizzard and formed Frost Giant Studios. They made an RTS game called Stormgate. They said RTS gameplay had been stagnant for more than a decade. And it was about time that changed. Everyone was excited. I was excited. They raised $40 million in funding.
The developers thought the UI of StarCraft was too scary for beginners. They wanted to lower the barrier to entry. They thought a good UI should show less by default. Don’t overwhelm the user. Our system can figure out what the user wants, and helpfully do things on their behalf.
In older RTS games, if you want to construct a building, you need to select a worker, ask it to build, select a location, and then when the building is finished, you have to remember to ask the worker to go back to work. This is very beginner-unfriendly. So Stormgate added Quick Build. No matter where you are, just press the Quick Build key, select the building and a location, and a worker will automatically walk there, construct the building, and go back to work.
This sounds very good. Then one day your base is under attack. And you want to build a tower to defend. You press Quick Build, tower. Now which worker is going to build the tower? The system tries to be smart about this. It first looks for idle workers. If there are none, it will select one that’s gathering resources. Let’s say you have a forgotten worker far away from home. You’ll see it wade all the way back to build the tower while the enemy tears your base to pieces.
Some units have abilities. For example, the Scout has On The Hunt, which makes the Scout see further than it normally does. But how much further? For how long? Does it cost anything? Whoa whoa whoa. Slow down. The users don’t need to know any of this. How about just saying things like “greatly increase vision radius” or “grant small health generation”. This is friendly, natural language. I’m sure the beginners will appreciate it.
One of the factions is the Celestials. Their entire thing is that their buildings can move. But buildings also produce units. Right-clicking on the ground normally means move. But for buildings, right-clicking sets the rally point for produced units. S normally means stop. But for certain buildings, S is a shortcut key to produce a unit. Either way, you get a shitty moving building. Either your building cannot move normally, or they cannot set rally points normally.
Another faction is the Infernals. Their entire army is built around a mechanic called Infest. For example, your infantry unit can throw a bouncing axe that infests enemies it hits. But what is Infest? Is it like a poison? Well, your spell caster can put down a trap that explodes and infests its targets. And your dragon has a breath attack that infests all the enemies in an area. Isn’t that cool? Okay seriously, Infest is… nah, I’m not telling you. Just click on an infested enemy unit and hover over its status icon and read the tooltip before the effect wears off.
The game got a lot of attention, but it didn’t become a hit. Beginners felt the game was too boring to play. The pros spent more time fighting the controls than playing the game. Then Frost Giant ran out of money and sunsetted the game.
I heard that they’re making a new game now, so their dream of an accessible RTS is not dead. Maybe next time, they will try a design language that’s more Liquid and more Glassy. With UI elements that get out of the way and put greater focus on the content.