Stormgate Dev Tracker

It’s a tough balancing act. In my role, I am super happy to see so many people excited for the game, but it’s also important to remember that this game is still relatively early in development. We have a lot of work ahead of us.

Basically, yes.

Following this thread to take notes

Hi, everyone! It’s been a little while since we last had a discussion, so let’s get right into it. We’re going to discuss systems that have a huge impact on both the fun of an individual match or story mission, as well as the long-term fun of the game.

That’s right -- we’re talking about Progression.

What Is Progression?

There’s Player Progression, which we’ll call the player’s journey of personal growth as they become more skilled; and then there’s Game Progression, where rewards are unlocked, characters or units become stronger, and quests are completed—often ending with “beating the game” and watching the credits.

For the purpose of helping us make Stormgate the best game it can be, we’d like to focus this conversation on two sub-categories of Game Progression in this discussion: Match Progression and Meta Progression.

Match Progre...

Unfortunately, this is an engine-level issue that would be extremely difficult and take substantial engineering resources to tweak, especially without widespread consequences across the whole game. =(

As a slight correction, I believe the original quote/thought was "25% StarCraft, 25% Warcraft III, 25% other RTSs, and 25% new ideas."

One of us! One of us!

Thanks for reaching out! We are absolutely looking at ways to support our awesome content creator community, including things like Twitch Drops for their viewers.

It’s that time again!

We’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts in response to our last discussion topic on War Chests, better known in the games industry as Battle Passes. This is a super-important topic for the long-term health of the game and your feedback was constructive, thoughtful, and incredibly valuable to us.

Time waits for no man

It’s not money, gas, or minerals – time is the most valuable resource as it’s the only commodity that can’t be replaced. Many of us who once enjoyed long nights and weekends playing our favorite games now have other responsibilities that demand our attention. Many of you, including ...

Here's the scoop from our game director, Tim Campbell, and the design team:

We are still in the earliest stages of playtesting our internal build, but for 1v1 we're aiming for an average game length of around 15-20 minutes. We believe our 3v3 mode will be a little longer.

One of our goals is to make it so that the game lengths across all of our competitive modes are fairly consistent. It's too early to definitively lock in where we'll land -- we'll be looking closely at player feedback during next year's closed beta tests (sign up at playstormgate.com if you haven't already) and ultimately we'll follow the fun.

We all still love StarCraft II here on the Frost Giant dev team, but we are super grateful to see so many of the commentators and pros express their excitement for Stormgate. It's a big responsibility, as we came together to build this game for the RTS community.

We're doing our best to build a game that you'll all enjoy. Hope to see you there!

I hope he does Top 5 Age of Mythology units next!

metacomment: i think its easier getting feedback upvoted (and thus rated) if you encourage people to focus on less questions in one post. just an option for the future in case 120 comments are too much to tackle.

Appreciate the feedback!

Hello to all friends and future defenders (or invaders) of Earth!

It’s time for another discussion topic where you can help us shape the future of Stormgate.

In our last discussion, we covered a wide variety of topics related to our overall launch plans. Our vision is to support ongoing development of Stormgate for years to come, and to regularly release new stories, maps, units, and more. To help make that plan a success, we’re asking you to share your thoughts on the in-game rewards systems known as battle passes – you may know them as the War Chest...

This is an incredibly exciting time for the team at Frost Giant. Now that we’ve announced Stormgate, we can talk about our upcoming universe and our plans for the game in much greater detail. Please note that we are still early into development and things can change, but these discussions reflect our current plans and thinking. Let’s get into it!

We announced Stormgate just a few days after our last discussion topic, which explored some of the different aspects of modern video game publishing. We asked for your input on a variety of topics, including Early Access, box-model vs. game-as-a-service (GaaS) releases, physical collectibles, and so on. We greatly appreciated the fantastic response–we received more comments tha...

Funny you should mention this. In one of our prototypes, we ran into a lot of problems where air units would stick together too closely by default when a-moving (no special microing required). This caused a lot of issues where the DPS density was too high against ground units, focused on a single point, and it was very difficult to target and pick off weak air units. So how air units stack and naturally spread while a-moving is something we’re looking at. That said, we think stacking air units has its place as long as the air units aren’t overpowering. For example, there’s very interesting play and counterplay against deliberately stacking Mutalisks that can hit-and-run in the StarCraft franchise.

In terms of terrain, we’re actively looking at air pathing blockers that “work”. Though air pathing blockers technically existed in SC2, units did not understand how to path around them, which led to odd behavior on maps such as New Gettysburg.

Your cloud idea is interesti...

In terms of base building, two key sources of inspiration include Warcraft III and They Are Billions.

In Warcraft III, the placement of all your buildings matters a lot, and different buildings have different levels of vulnerability, leading to varied harassment and interaction among the factions.

They Are Billions takes this concept to another level where every building has unique abilities/adjacency bonuses, and base-building is almost half the game. That being said, we recognize that They Are Billions is a single-player RTS and thus the player can be expected to pay a greater % of his attention to this particular aspect of the game. But it is interesting to think about how much of this we can translate into a multiplayer RTS.

Yes! Our current focus is designing fair, balanced, and interesting units for the versus modes. But along the way, we’ll certainly have wacky ideas that end up on the cutting room floor, which will end up in our PvE modes. This doesn’t apply to just units, but also for potential abilities as well, for example, how the Adept has slightly different abilities across all the various modes of SC2. For a new RTS that has multiple modes, I think the process you’re describing often comes organically.

I'm a sucker for any new Pokemon release, so while I've had my fair share with Arceus this year, I still can't wait for Pokemon Violet/Scarlett.