Developing An RTS For The 360

Gamasutra is running an interesting piece entitled The Battle for Console Earth. Louis Castle of EA describes the process of making an RTS title for the Xbox 360 console. From the article: "Castle's approach to the Xbox 360 version of The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth II was to approach the RTS genre as if it were never on the personal computer. Let's go back to the beginning. Let's look at these strategy games, as if they were new. How would we approach it now? Let's pretend that there never was a mouse, and all we had were consoles. How would we bring this about?"

Re:Huh, What?!

[Dysproxia]

Wow, you pasted something from the summary without even reading it. He's talking about designing a different kind of RTS that fits a joypad.

Learn from the past, maybe?

[Rapter09]

I don't quite understand how a mouse existing or not existing effects the design of a console RTS, unless you're considering implementing PnP mouse for the 360 in the coding? You're designing it for a controller, so exactly how would a mouse factor into any of this? Same with the genre of RTS in general. If you're imagining the genre never existed, then you're essentially just *recreating* the genre in ignorance? I love how they say "What made Lord of the Rings a great series of films was just as much about the actual human actors, the sense of heroism, as much as it was a spectacle of graphics and fantasy and all, and it all came from the literature". Like the books never existed, I suppose.

Battlezone

[ultranova]

There is no need to imagine, since someone else already did. Go look up the old PC game "BattleZone" and its sequel. Especially the sequel shows how its done: the commander doesn't say "attack enemy base", he says "follow me" and charges the base himself.

Of course a more cowardly/wise commander may sneak near the base and mark targets for ballistic bombard, or simply order his troops around from the command bunker. But a real man will lead the charge himself ;).

And the whole thing doesn't need mouse for anything but aiming. A hierarchical menu behind the function keys is used to command units. Newer consoles have easily enough buttons for this to work.