Lee Hickey
Photo by Katie McKiernan

While Project Aftermath might appear at a glance to be a typical Real Time Strategy game, it’s not. Get your hands on it and you’ll realize it isn’t just about winning and losing—it’s about points. The idea sounds weird, but it’s really a self-correcting difficulty selector that makes room in the genre for neophytes and experts a like. Starting armaments cost points, and good performance earns them. There’s no cap on the special abilities that units can use, but they cost you a bit of score with each use. Neophytes can play armed to the teeth (and in deep point debt), actually winning games and having fun, while experts who win with little more than sticks and harsh language score big on the leaderboards.

Lee Hickey stopped by from England and told us all about this and other ways that Project Aftermath makes the RTS genre more accessible. Read on for that, Lee’s thoughts on explosions and their importance to design, and what you can do to bring skilled players and new players together without a one-sided bloodbath. Check out the demo too.

Pixelsocks: Looking at the game, it’s pretty obviously an RTS—it shares some similarities with other genre games. Where you came up with the idea in the first place?

Lee: I think from games we’d played in the past. Games like Syndicate, and Cannon Fodder. Ones that are just all-out craziness. Ones without a lot of the resource gathering and all those elements you get in a lot of chess games. And to really get to the heart of the fun, which I think is blowing stuff up. Things that look spectacular, and feel quite cool, seeing people die all over the place. Maybe that’s something strange about me.

Pixelsocks: I’m sure no gamer has ever enjoyed blowing things up. The emphasis on combat means that the action is pretty frenetic.

Lee: And right from the very beginning as well. So you don’t have that slow period of buildup. What you usually do in those sorts of chess games is you gather a lot of things up and build your base and wait, and your men build up, and you wait some more, and your men build up, and then all of a sudden WOAH and you go into battle, and that bit’s cool, but then you do the wait thing again. So we wanted to avoid all that, and get into the nitty gritty.

Pixelsocks: And another thing that I think helps facilitate that is that your punishment for failure, like death, is actually pretty low. Your Heroes can pick up where you left off and keep on going.

Lee: That’s as much for balance, though, because the way that we’ve got the point system set up. We needed to get that number right, so it’s a sufficient punishment to not just do it over and over again, so the player tries to avoid dying. But if they do die, it’s not the end of the world. They can resurrect, go kill a few more enemies, and hopefully they can get their score back up. So, again, to get rid of the whole, “Oh, I failed. I have to start all over again,” and reload the game. So they can just carry on.

Pixelsocks: Even beyond that, if you have someone who’s never played a real time strategy game before, they can walk in there, spend their points into negative infinity, and start getting the hang of the game. Especially with more common RTSs like Warcraft and Starcraft, you log onto Battle.net and you get completely murdered by all the sharks swimming around in there. This is an opportunity to actually pick up a little skill with the game.

Lee: I hope so. Also, because of the way the points work, if you want to start the game and you don’t really want to go for a high score, all you want to do is have a bit of a laugh, you can. If you want to see what happens when you use a special weapon, we’re not stopping you from doing that. There’s no real punishment in the game. You can just carry on with it. But if you want to take it seriously, and get as high a score as possible, well, that’s there as well.

Pixelsocks: About the score, there’s an emphasis on single-player games inherent in that. While there’s still a social element from a leaderboard where people compare scores, is there actually a place for multiplayer in the game?

Lee: Very much so. This particular game is only single player. We’re actually working on the multiplayer version at the moment. So not right now, but it will be. It’s going to be both a collaborative and competitive multiplayer game. There’s going to be 2 teams, but it can be up to four separate players on each team working cooperatively. Or you can just use the competitive setting as well. The way the point system works particularly will be good for most players. We take out all that building up before hand before you go into battle. You get all of your units beforehand and then go in to fight with your opponents.

Pixelsocks: So when you do eventually release a multiplayer version, it’s still going to be emphasizing the score, and that’s going to be the comparative metric for performance?

Lee: Yes. Again, you could have sharks, people who are really, really good at it, playing a new player, who has five times the number of points to start with. I’m sure we could work out some kind of equation based on the amount of time the player’s played—like a handicap in golf. I think that would allow a new player to play an experienced player, and hopefully we can get that balanced, so you could pretty much play anyone on a level playing field.

Pixelsocks: So, it’s actually remarkably accessible for a real-time strategy game.

Lee: I hope so. That was kind of the aim, yeah.

Pixelsocks: Another thing that makes it accessible is the squad-based component. Really, instead of controlling each unit individually, you have four heroes, the squad follows them, and the AI takes care of the rest.

Lee: It takes the micromanagement out, because instead of 20, 30, a thousand guys, or whatever it is, it’s just four guys, but you can still have actually quite a big squad.

Pixelsocks: If you were inclined towards micromanagement, because some players do actually like that, can you take that level of control, or is the streamlining mandatory?

Lee: No, you can’t, no. You can only control the four guys, plus the two auxiliary characters that you can pick up. There are some missions where you encounter an engineer, and you can use the engineer. Also, you’ve got the mechs you can take over as well. Six guys is the max.

Pixelsocks: That is still quite a few, honestly.

Lee: There’s still quite a bit of management. One thing you can do is selection grouping. You can send two guys to go take over this base, and two guys to go and do something else. You can bind those groups to a single key, making you much more inclined to split your troops up and do different things. So with all that taken into account, there’s quite a lot to do.

Pixelsocks: One last question: if you had to pick one design feature or design decision that really makes it fun, what would it be?

Lee: Let me think. I would say the point system.

Pixelsocks: Thank you.

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Tags:   Gamesfaction · Lee Hickey · PAX · PAX 10 · PC · Project Aftermath · RTS2 Comments

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