Battle Realms Designer Diary #5
Ed Del Castillo revisits these developer journals with a look at the challenges his company faced while designing the Battle Realms' interface.
Entry #5 - 01/22/01
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.
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