Stormgate Dev Tracker

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.

As many of us hail from SC2, deathballs are a constant topic in our minds. First, to preface this topic, we aim to at least rival the crisp pathfinding found in SC2 that allows players to engage in the game with minimal frustration. That being said, we recognize that this style of pathfinding does encourage deathballs, so from this starting point, it’s all about finding strategies to mitigate these deathballs. Without going too much in-depth into each of the options, here are just some things we’re looking at:

• Designing units with “does this deathball” as one of the items on our mental checklist
• Relatively higher unit radii to reduce DPS density
• Reining in unit range to reduce DPS density
• Lowering the power level/providing strong counters to air units to reduce DPS density
• Territory-control focused units and structures
• Territory-control abilities
• Units that can be very effective when pulled apart from the deathball...

Coming from the starting point of StarCraft II, we’re going to be tackling replayability from multiple angles:

The first is customization. StarCraft II had both the Mastery and Prestige systems of customization, which allowed you to customize commanders via four vectors with two to three choices per vector. In Stormgate, we aim to greatly expand the number of customization options you’ll be able to play around with. Combine this with a shift to three players and a greater focus on cooperation opportunities in Stormgate unlocks even more ways to play the game!

Second, we’re going to look at lethality in order to enable endlessly scalable difficulties. SC2 Co-op was built on the foundation of highly lethal SC2 units. And because of this high lethality, it became unintentionally balanced around deleting waves instantly either via your units’ high DPS or very powerful “nuke”-style calldowns. One of the side effects of this was that we could never make debuffs feel good ...