Battle Realms Designer Diary #5

Entry #5 - 01/22/01

By Ed Del Castillo
Liquid Entertainment

Hard-core gamers are an opinionated bunch, and there's no shortage of the breed here at Liquid. The quality of the Battle Realms design is a common topic at lunchtime. No one's shy about speaking up when he or she has an idea that might make the game better, and no issue has been the subject of more scrutiny and criticism than the game's interface.

Creating a good interface is one of the most important challenges that a design team will face. A great interface won't make a game succeed, but a bad interface can definitely make a game fail. Unlike most game features, the interface is being used by players at all times - it's the "face" that the game presents to players. If unit functionality is difficult to access, if the options menus hide too many game features, or if camera control is not responsive and easy to understand, players will be constantly annoyed. They may eventually get used to the quirks, but part of the designer's job is to remove barriers that keep players from enjoying their experience. Life's too short to play a game that's frustrating.

Chaotic Cameras

The first generation of 3D real-time strategy games had to answer a question that their 2D forerunners seldom had to deal with: What the heck do you do with the camera? More specifically, do you allow players to control the camera's placement, and, if so, how much control do you give them? Many games take the "more is better" approach and give players full and total control over camera placement. While this helps show off the games' 3D engines, it doesn't always make for good gameplay. Sometimes, it's even necessary to tilt or rotate the camera to select units or attack an enemy!

For Battle Realms, we decided to keep our in-game view in a fairly traditional "overhead but slightly tilted" angle most of the time. 3D makes camera movement possible, but that doesn't always mean it's desirable, especially in a strategy game. If players are moving the camera, they're not playing the game. Further, by limiting where the camera can go in the game, art can be designed to look its best from certain angles, which allows us to create a more visually stunning world. By going with a mostly top-down angle, we also avoided the common 3D RTS problem of "losing" your units behind objects and terrain.

On the other hand, we wanted to be able to show off our units and animations. (It's exciting to zoom in on a unit and watch them spin-kick their opponents into submission.) So our final decision was to allow players one axis of camera movement - zoom in/zoom out, with a slight and automatic tilt up toward the horizon as players move closer to the ground. Our mantra was a simple one - Battle Realms would never require players to move the camera to play the game. This core principle has helped keep the game exciting, fast paced, and easy to learn.

If It's Broke, Fix It

The original Battle Realms design document included an unusual interface proposal - a console-oriented approach that used circular pop-up menus to access special unit functions. Our goal was to keep the playing field as clean as possible. By having the game be full-screen at all times, with no extra buttons, we were attempting to increase players' level of immersion in the world. We also wanted to keep players' eyes focused on one spot by having the interface appear where players were already looking.

Though the high concept of creating a visually clean interface was a good one, we hit several snags when we attempted to implement our plan. Real-time strategy games are complicated. Many standard interface pieces, such as the minimap, were simply impossible to remove from the field. Further, pop-up menus would hide the combat field at exactly the point where players most likely wanted to see it. Eventually, we abandoned our original concept in favor of a more traditional interface panel along the bottom of the screen.

Innovation vs. Tradition

The challenge in creating a great interface is to resolve the conflict between the desire to create the most intuitive possible system and the necessity to shorten the game's learning curve. Interface standards in a genre are typically defined by what's done in one or two popular titles. To depart from established norms is risky, since players will have to spend a few extra minutes getting used to the differences. For example, it's rare to find a modern RTS that doesn't use the "left-click to select, right-click to move" interface as its standard, simply because several best-selling games have followed that model.

We wanted Battle Realms to provide players with a unique gaming experience and draw newcomers to RTS games, but we didn't want to alienate a core audience familiar with the genre's established conventions. The game already had many new dynamics that players would have to get used to - an innovative production model, a deep combat layer, and an unusual unit training system. To pile on a new interface would further increase the learning curve. If our original interface design had proved to be a big improvement upon traditional RTS interfaces, the risk would have been worthwhile, but when we compared the approaches side by side, neither had a clear-cut advantage.

In the end, we focused our design efforts on perfecting new gameplay elements while sticking with a more traditional interface. The result is gameplay that feels familiar enough to be quickly grasped by traditional RTS fans - but also gameplay that will still surprise, delight, and entertain even the most jaded players.

Unless you're designing a sequel to a game that sells millions or churns out a fast-and-dirty clone on a tiny budget, you have to innovate to make your product stand out in a crowded marketplace. But it's just as important to channel your creativity into a few select areas. If you build on what's been done before, gamers will be able to accept the new concepts that are most important.