Stormgate Dev Tracker

In February, we discussed some of our thoughts and plans for our editor and the experience of creating and playing custom maps within our game. We also asked you to share your experiences with player-created content, and what you would like to see from our tools and custom game experience.

As usual, you provided us with a great deal of fantastic feedback, and we have gone through all of it. The discussion even spanned multiple forums–in addition to the Reddit thread, we also heard from RTS fans on the SC2Mapster Discord, and on the ...

User-generated content (UGC) is one of several pillars we view as essential to creating the next great RTS game. We hope the breadth of this topic inspires discussion from a wide range of perspectives. Please feel free to offer your thoughts and opinions on any or all of the discussion areas below. While things like YouTube tutorials and community-organized events could be considered UGC, for the purposes of this discussion we’re focusing on player-created maps, mods, and custom games.

Legacy & Community

Desert Strike, Aeon of Strife, Defense of the Ancients, Cat vs. Mouse, Diplomacy, Micro/Macro, Mini-Game Party, Mafia, Castle Fight, Phantom, Bounds, Risk II, Bunker Wars, Nexus Wars, Golems, 4v4 Micro Jungle, Hamsters vs. Space Vacuums . . . we could go on and on. Players have now been creating and enjoying custom RTS game experiences across four different decades!

The legacy of UGC in RTS games is beyond comparison. Entire game genres, suc...

A little over a month ago, we posted our most recent discussion topic asking for your thoughts on esports, the tools that support them, their structure, and the surrounding communities. We feel the overall feedback we received on that topic is aligned with our plans, and below we’d like to highlight a few thoughts on some specific topics that were discussed.

Replays and Spectating

Spectating is the first step to celebrating highly skilled play, so it’s great to see many of you asking for a robust and accessible replay system to support player development, and we’re excited to work towards improving these systems. /u/demiwraith brought up downloading professional replays to learn from and practice alongside, and...

In November, we asked for your opinions on different aspects of competitive map design. We read every response to these posts and greatly appreciate the time and thoughtfulness of this community. Below we share our thoughts on some of your comments.

/u/_Spartak_ highlighted the dichotomy between faction asymmetry and map variability. If factions are significantly different, such as in the way their units function, it can be challenging to have a variety of maps that remain relatively balanced. For example, in the StarCraft franchise, the Zergling by itself forces a significant amount of map design considerations due to its impact on all matchups, particularly regarding the size and shape of choke points around the natu...

We love esports at Frost Giant and we’re committed to fostering a robust esports ecosystem for our upcoming RTS. We’re keeping esports in mind from the very beginning of development.

To position our game for esports success, we’re drawing on everything we learned from working on previous successful esports franchises, including StarCraft and Warcraft. We’re also looking at the best examples of competitive games outside of RTS—including traditional sports as well as other game genres like MOBA, fighting games, and competitive shooters. 

We believe esports are for everyone, and there should be opportunities for players of all skill levels, not just high-stakes professional tournaments. We want to support the entire range of organized competitive play, from smaller-scale, grassroots tournaments to pro play. Organized competition will make our game more fun for everyone, streamline the path to pro for players who aspire to play professionally, and contribute significant...

Yep

Map design, along with healthy faction and unit balance, is one of the most significant factors in maintaining a robust competitive RTS ecosystem. Maps are one way in which RTS games keep matches exciting and fresh. New maps introduce features that may change the way allies or opponents interact, promote the use of a particular strategy, or diminish the effectiveness of other strategies. Builds become more or less effective depending on factors like overall size, rush distance, and starting locations. At the end of the day, maps greatly influence the competitive meta.

In the StarCraft and Warcraft franchises, maps have evolved to include certain staple features that are necessary for maintaining faction balance, such as standardized resource availability, main/natural sizes and layouts, expansion/creep distances, and so on. Certain design elements are targeted towards specific factions, such as hiding spots for Zerg Overlords, limiting Terran’s ability to build in the cente...

Two months ago, we asked you all for your experiences with social features in games: how you’ve used those features to interact with other players, which features provided you the best experience, and how those features could translate into an RTS game. Now we’d like to share some of the highlights of that thread and our own perspective on many of the topics discussed.

In our original post, we touched on the prevalence of third party platforms, like Discord, Reddit, Twitch, and YouTube, that have enabled communities across gaming titles. As /u/RoxasofXIII pointed out, the developers of these tools are exclusively focused on refining and improving them, so they tend to be streamlined and efficient in their ability to co...

For those of you following our YouTube channel, we’ve been producing a series of videos designed to give you a sneak peek at our development process. For our next video, however, we’d like to turn the conversation over to you, our community. Since Frost Giant’s launch, you’ve had many questions. Now, we’d like to give you an opportunity to ask the Frost Giant team directly, with answers coming in an upcoming video filmed from ...

Happy Halloween from the team at Frost Giant! In the spirit of both the season and competition, we're holding a Frost Giant-themed pumpkin decorating contest. We want to see your creativity flow in the form of carvings, paintings, or other art forms, so long as a pumpkin is your medium and Frost Giant your theme! Submissions are due by November 1st and should tag Frost_Giant on Twitter or FrostGiantStudios on Instagram. The winner will be announced the following week and will receive a box of limited edition Frost Giant swag. We look forward to seeing your Frosty Halloween spirit come alive!

https://preview.redd.it/iukggu45l1v71.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6bd702c297d2720b46e854abf24cfe6b18e92b01

Social features are an important part of any game, and RTS is no exception. Features like chat channels and clans are common requests, especially from a community that experienced the absence of many of these features early on in StarCraft II. But what do these features look like today? What other social features excite the community?

Companies like Twitch, Discord, Reddit, and many others around the world have changed the landscape for the way players socialize around games. How does that changing landscape affect the way we should approach social features in a new modern RTS game? What do users expect out of a chat system today, and how can it not only check the boxes to meet those expectations but excel in this new environment? What is the right way to build a clan system that not only manages to co-exist among so many fantastic third-party community-building tools but also capitalizes on all of these new innovations? What is the right approach to supporting voice chat w...

Hello! We've been busier than ever working on our prototype, so apologies for the delay in the response to our previous topic. That said, once again, it’s time to revisit our last discussion topic, “Win Conditions”. As always, we had a ton of excellent in-depth user posts, and we’d like to especially highlight some of them in this month’s response.

First, /u/Maguro did a great job of breaking down three of the most common win conditions found in modern RTS, which he described as:

• Annihilation: Destroy all buildings (Warcraft franchise, StarCraft franchise)
• Assassination: Destroy a key unit or building (Nexus/Ancient/Core in MOBAS, AC...

How do you win a game of StarCraft? That is a complicated question and the subject of our next topic: Win Conditions in Competitive Modes.

Compared to the objectives of other popular esports titles (kill the nexus, plant the bomb, bring your opponent’s health to zero, score the most points), StarCraft’s objective is vague: in order to win, you have to eliminate all of your opponents’ structures. In practice, this is almost never fulfilled; instead, the true win condition of StarCraft is demoralizing your opponent(s) to the point that they leave the game. Sounds fun, right?

For newer players, this objective can be confusing, as often the best way to achieve that goal is, counterintuitively, to NOT attack your opponents’ buildings. Furthermore, there is no step-by-step methodology to direct players towards the official win condition.

Another challenge of this win condition is that because there’s no concept of points scored, damage done, or towers killed, it c...

Greetings! It’s been two months since we introduced our last discussion topic, “Teams”. Specifically, we asked you about your experience with team games in RTS and your thoughts on whether we should focus on solo or teams as the primary competitive mode for our game. As always, we received a ton of responses, and the following posts, which did a great job of highlighting the pros and cons of each potential path by aLepH_n0ught, ...

To add onto this, they've been written and ready for about a week or so. Just didn't want anything to be crowded out by the recent announcements, and trying to time it with a few moving parts, including the newsletter.

Here you go: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014514/AI-Navigation-It-s-Not

Hey hey. To be clear, the deal announced today was only for the use of the Unreal Engine. We're still a long ways away from making any publishing plans, but we sincerely appreciate the feedback and we'll definitely factor it in when making a decision.