How to start off a 2D Top down RTS?

Getting Started
1

I don’t really know how to start this off but i guess i can go into some depth as too what made me come to this point:

I’m 15 and I love rts games, mainly games like supreme commander with all the unit production and sending units to each other in an endless war and such, and recently i got the idea to make an rts game.

Unfortunately i’ve never made a game ever, and i understand that the worst thing to start your gaming ideas off with, is an rts game because its an rts game, you just don’t whip those up on a sunday weekend (funny that i’m typing this on a sunday weekend)

While i’ve tried to make it as simple as possible (See paper example here), i have some problems, one of them being, How do i start off? I mean i have it open as i type and i never used unity either, despite looking at some tutorials, its all alien to me and i was wondering if someone could give me some tips on what would be the best way to start off?

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Well you want to start by studying these forums, and learning the correct place to post your questions — it seems to me that what you have primarily is a programming question, not a game design question. The Getting Started forum would be more appropriate.

Once there, don’t just post (and read responses to) your own questions; read all the posts, and the answers. You won’t understand it all, but you’ll gradually pick up more and more, including pointers to great tutorials you should go through.

Next, yeah, actually work through the tutorials. If you’ve never touched Unity, and never made a game in anything else either, then forget (for now) about making the RTS game you really care about. Your first goal should be to get a sprite on the screen. When you can find the Play button, and clicking it causes some sprite to appear in the game view, then that’s a victory! Have a little celebration.

Then sit back down and learn how to make the sprite move, at a continuous speed in a straight line.

And so forth. Take it step by step. I don’t think you would say “Hey Dad, I just bought a circular saw; I’m going to go build a 3000-square-foot house in the back yard, with all the plumbing and electrical and everything up to code!” The very notion is ridiculous, right? Before you can build a house, you need to collect tools and (most importantly) build a LOT of skills. The professionally-built houses you see are built by teams of specialists: plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers, etc., and to learn to do all that yourself will take years.

Software is the same way, only more so, because a modern software app is among the most complex (in terms of number of unique pieces) artifacts ever created by humans. The professionally-built games you see are built by teams of specialists: programmers, designers, artists, directors, audio engineers, etc. To learn to do all that yourself will take years.

But don’t despair! All that is incredibly fun and rewarding. And, just like in learning carpentry, you can do a lot of cool stuff along the way.

But your focus for the next year or two should be on learning to use your tools, and build the skills you’ll need to someday create the game you have in your head.

Good luck!

  • Joe
3 Likes
3

Agree totally. Start simple, remake pong then once you understand what you did try adding something slightly different to see if that works. Then move onto a shooter like space invaders, then make some small changes (one by one so you can test each works before moving onto the next change, doing it this way makes it easier to find the bit that broke the game, & yes it will break) like a power up that spawns a spread of bullets or an extra life or something equally simple. All the while you will build knowledge & skills as well as basic scripts that you can then reuse later on & modify as required. I’m only just starting out & this is what I’m doing (those basic scripts helped my team get 2 games out in the last game jam we did as we saved a lot of time by being able to start grey boxing almost immediately).

One of the things I did was make a shmup that had 3 different enemies that all moved differently. I used keyboard controls & balanced it to last about 2-3mins a game. I then added game pad controls & found that the game suddenly became incredibly easy & I stopped playing after 5 minutes when I was still at full health & energy. So then I made the ship shoot in four directions at once (up, down, left, right) & that small change rebalanced the game because the side shots destroyed the health & energy power ups I needed as I kept shooting the enemies above me as I moved sideways to collect the power ups. These were all fairly small & simple changes but each one highlighted how a minor change can totally change the balance of the game which was a surprise as I was expecting a minor variation to gameplay only. It was a valuable lesson to learn early & was easy to identify because it was in such a simple game.

1 Like
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Do everything the other guys said. Then once you are ready for an RTS read the rest of this post.

Don’t look to supreme commander for inspiration. It’s perhaps one of the most advanced RTS games out there. It took years of production with a large team.

Instead download Warcraft 1 on DosBox, and give that a play. Warcraft 1 could be done by a reasonably experienced Unity user in a reasonable amount of time. Plus there is far less graphical stuff getting in the way of the design. You can actually see each mechanic as it happens.

2 Likes
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Actually you should start off by some other project like Mario 2d to get the basic idea of 2d and watch some tutorials on it I will be uploading some tutorials on my blog and YouTube after my exams i.e after this month and will provide the links they will be basics of game development and 2d games…
After having enough practice start with some RTS tutorials for 2d the basic game will be the same by there will be some significant changes in pathfinding and at last don’t be scared from coding it will require at least 10 trys to. Perfect your idea.

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Start with cubes in an empty scene and try getting them to all move to where you click the mouse. That’ll be a good learning experience.

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I found a few sites that will help you in about 30 sec.

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/29038/creating-movement-path-displays-in-a-top-down-2d-rts

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Sorry to highjack but the OP has been answered.
Any update on those tuts @Swarnim2014 ? Although I’m not a coder I really enjoy listening and watching all kinds of instructional content.

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“…but I’m gonna do it anyway!”

Seriously, start small. Basically, I’m agreeing with everyone else here.