June 1, 2010

Game Design Analysis: World of Goo

1. Introduction
2. Analysis
   1. Actions and confirmation
   2. Varying the mechanics
   3. Consequences of the rules
   4. Mods
3. Conclusion
4. References

Original essay here.

Introduction

This is the second essay for the course Game Design and this thime I will be analysing the game World of Goo a bit.

The first level

The game is very simple. You begin with a structure and a few Goo balls, the charming balls bobbing around there, which you can drag and drop to build on the structure. Your goal is to reach the pipe and it will suck in the surviving Goo balls and you need to collect a certain amount of balls, in this case at least 4. All you ever use is your mouse and one button to pick up and place the balls.

A step by step of the core mechanics

The beginning levels are very easy but it will get increasingly harder and you have to plan your building so you don't use up too many Goo balls.

But as it's a physics game you will also have to think about gravity so your tower won't topple over and crash, which will happen to you a lot in the later levels.

Oh noes my bridge is collapsing!

That's about the whole game concept right there; build structures to reach the pipe but use so few balls, or building blocks, as you can. You might think that it's a shallow game with doing the same thing over and over – but you couldn't be more wrong, there are a lot of different Goo balls to play around with; sticky balls, dangling balls, exploding balls, shooting balls, removable balls and more which will force you to change your build process in different directions. The level design is simply fantastic and it challenges your constructions and it makes the game very varied.

The levels are both fun and diverse

The game which inspired World of Goo, namely Tower of Goo was an experimental one week, one person game with the aim of simply building a high tower and you can still do that in World of Goo in a sandbox mode and you can compete online on who makes the highest tower.

The level chooser screen, be proud of those flags!

If you like challenges there's more to do: for every level there's this extra hard ending criteria – a challenge – for you to get gray hairs from. There's time challenges, constraints on number of moves and a minimum of balls collected and some of them are extremely though. If you're successful you'll get a nice little flag on the level chooser screen.

The game is quite large with 5 different chapters and there's around 10 levels each. Every chapter has it's own theme and they vary quite a lot; there's focus on explosions, balloons and there's even Goo balls you can shoot! This gives the game fairly long but it manages to stay fresh all the way through.

The 5 chapters + sandbox (Tower of Goo) is the World of Goo

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Analysis

1. Actions and confirmation
2. Varying the mechanics
3. Consequences of the rules
4. Mods

Actions and confirmation

One of the things World of Goo does really well is to communicate to the player. When a first time player loads the first level it's almost always clear what to do, you have this helpful sign showing your first move (drop a goo ball here) and you have this curious looking pipe just above you and not much else to distract you. After each level you get a score screen on how you did and both the level and world screen are helpfully showing your progress and what to do next. But to me the most impressive thing is how your actions are handled.

When you hover your cursor over moving Goo balls or removable joints you'll get a clear marker around the selected ball and it'll stop and give you a cute look just to show you 'Hey! It's me you wanna pick up!'. Likewise when you have a ball selected and you're moving it around for a good spot you'll get a small notion of where it's going to connect and always you have a nice big clear marker on where your cursor is.

Selecting, building, shooting and moving

Visual confirmation in all honor but what really makes actions clear is the sounds. For every Goo ball hovered over and every joint constructed there's a short confirmation of your action and for every dead Goo and every block crashed there's an unique sound to let you know that something bad happened here in your little world. Every Goo that go down the pipe will emit a happy little laugh and you just love the hear that extra peculiar laugh which will tell you if you did complete the extra level challenge.

I didn't find any sound or visual effect for when your action fails, for example there were no error sound when trying to click in an empty space and the mouse pointer never acknowledged my clicks if they weren't valid. But you can say that they aren't necessary, because for every valid action and for every click you can make, where something actually happens, there's always a confirmation sound and that is enough to let you know that something was successful and unsuccessful.

Although simple the visual and auditive feedback works absolutely wonderful and I never had to wonder if my actions were registered, it felt like they always were and if things didn't work as I wanted to I realized pretty quick that I was doing something wrong.

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Varying the mechanics

The concept of the whole game is really quite simple, create structures with drag n' drop Goo balls, add in some simple physics and you're done. It's amazing how captivating something simple as this can be and I believe it has a lot to do with the small incremental changes the game makes all the time.

One thing the game does is introduce new Goo balls all the time; balls you can remove multiple times force you to climb and restructure, balloon Goos create interesting aerial acrobatics and a sticky Goo makes the structure mobile.

Lifting off and climbing is possible thanks to different Goo balls

Even Goo's with minor changes like industrial Goo which you can't control or dangling Goo which will only dangle down gives a lot of depth to the game thanks to the great level design.

There are lot's and lot's of levels which change the way you play

It's not just build straight up; it's build around, use balloons to topple the tower from island to island and it's surprising how hard it is to build a tower in water or in a tumbler, you really have to stop and think or else it won't work. The game is constantly varying it's mechanics and you have to change with it, you have to evolve to keep up.

Perhaps the most radical experiment is the fourth chapter. We get new Goo's that shoot! This is different from our regular balls that we can move around freely and they usually build or attach when we release them but these launch themselves when we drag n drop them. It's the only way we can move them around and with one type we get to shoot and build.

Shooting Goo?

Still staying true to the basic mechanics, select ball, drag n drop for effect with some physics and this could easily have been a game of it's own.

Going the other way around World of Goo also experiments with the drag n' drop of Goo. They introduce block Goo which is immobile and it doesn't walk around your structure like the other Goo and the only way you can move, the only way you can interact with them is to move them around and use them to block and for support or just to create a very unstable tower.

Block Goo; immobile and blocky but yet they manage to add something to the game

All in all World of Goo uses their simple core concept to it's limit with a ton of variation and experimentation and it makes the game feel novel all the way through those 50+ levels.

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Consequences of the rules

World of Goo is a physics based game; when building structures you need to compensate against gravity so your tower won't collapse and you need to make sure your structure has enough joints so it can withstand tension and compression. Physics games are hard to create, you can't rely on a perfect representation as it's too hard to simulate perfectly and there are many edge cases you'll have to handle.

You can for example make it easier through this level if you force your structure into the wall and this “break” it. In real life a structure like this would completely break but in the game that doesn't happen, the joints simply turn inwards and now you have a nice and short structure to move around.

Small structures are easier to move around

This happens because in the rules you can only break a structure if you either drop it into the ocean or on spikes, and loose them forever, or if you connect with a special construction destroying cogs. Here we exceed the tension and the compression and instead of breaking we get our joints twisted.

You even have to abuse the rules because the extra hard level goals can't be beat otherwise. I'm sure the creators chose to incorporate the bugs into the game and they even call them features in a way to create bigger challenges in the extra level requirements.

Some core game rules abuse

The left picture:
In World of Goo in some levels there are sleeping goo balls which you can't get control of if you don't get your construction close enough. But you can pick up and move around the balls and even throw them and if you do you can actually make the sleeping balls bounce around too. If you throw at the right angle you can bounce the sleeping balls close enough your structure and they'll wake up.

The middle picture:
Your ultimate goal is the pipe and it will start sucking in your goo balls if you get your construction close. But if you have the green goo balls which you can remove from the structure you can get a small structure hanging from the pipe's suction! Then you proceed to move the rest of the goo balls freely onto the structure and you will get a lot more balls collected. It's so good you can actually get every goo ball, except one, if you do this trick. Incidentally the creators noticed this bug, or feature, when testing and so they set the extra level goal to precisely one less than your total balls.

The right picture:
In a level there's a huge head which hangs from a small hook. When you've exploded the head you can get the hook to attach to the wall by throwing goo balls at your dangling structure. It will then connect to the wall because it doesn't make any distinction to exploding heads or walls, it just sticks to it.

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Mods

The game is more or less a closed system but if you're interested it isn't too hard to create new levels, alter the online scoreboard (which has happened a lot) or even add new Goo balls. The site goofans.com is a dedicated site which collects fan-made levels and mods.

Colorful balloons and a new Christmas level

There's even a tool, GooTool, which is a tool which let's you manage your installed mods, manage your profile stats, general options like screen resolution and even add in your own language.

These changes, these mods, are mainly geared towards resources and not the actual game rules. It is possible to change them but then you more or less have to rewrite and mod the game on assembly level. This could be said about every computer game but it's really hard and time consuming to do, but it sure is possible.

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Conclusion

I think World of Goo is an excellent game and there are so many things it does right. The game is good about telling you what to do and when you've done something good by using both visuals and sound effects. The game basic foundation of the game is really quite simple but they manage to create a lot of diversity and this fresh feel throughout the whole game by introducing small, and big, variations to the core mechanics.

The simple rules will create a few bugs and surprising side effects but they turn it around and they even call them features when they force you to use them if you want to complete the extra hard level requirements.

There are a few mods and new levels out there if you hunger for more and with a little effort you can create your own, even if most of the game rules are quite inaccessible.

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References

Salen & Zimmerman, 2004. Rules of Play. The MIT Press.

http://2dboy.com/
http://www.worldofgoo.com/

http://goofans.com/
http://goofans.com/gootool/about
Accessed may 1st

May 23, 2010

Generating ideas

So I got a fairly fun assignment from the game design course I'm taking for once. I should come up with 50 ideas using my own idea generation technique.

I used a sort of "notes in the basket" approach where you placed some notes with words in a basket and randomly drew two and then you should come up with something with the two words. But I'm too lazy to write a lot of notes and it's pretty damn hard to come up with a lot of good words too, so I tried to automate the process.

I searched for some random words and found this site: http://www.wordswarm.net/ and I pulled out a few pages and got a few thousand words. Then I made a very simple tool which randomly combines two lines from a file and creates a sentence, much like the you would with the notes but this is just so much faster. Granted I had a lot of shitty words and I got a lot of garbage lines but I could go through so many lines it was a very simple task to get these 50 one-lined game ideas.

These are not fully fledged game ideas, but merely seeds from which you could grow a game.

• Pensionere wheelchair race
• Fish and surf on the fish
• Deep sun exploration
• VimCity - A simcity but with ascii chars which will teach you vim
• Crazy units RTS
• RTS with important landscapes - Destructable, things moving, rising water, paths in snow etc
• House destruction - explosions!
• Hospital creation with strange diseases you need to cure
• Create Nautilus - an underwater city creator
• Prison diner maid - give lunch to hungry prisoners
• Prison break - with stealth, create stuff with different things
• Bread seller - bread maker tycoon?
• Night debt collection hero
• Imprison Berth the jewel thief - police hunting a thief in the night/museum
• Feed azimutal, the mythic beast in the sky
• The 59th beetle-killer squads patriotic killings
• Trauma center boom
• Make mt. 63 a tourist franchise
• Chop the mighty "King's wood" from the legendary forest of death
• Untagling Sarsenet - the predecessor to skynet
• The great pie theft
• Sawyer the egoist ant
• Herbsman Abdal, the lone man growing herbs in the desert
• Carving the first images - like caveman style
• Bart the Darting hero
• Brady the Big Eater glutton - Rush into restaurants and eat everything, then split
• The struggle against Montezuma II, A mayan RTS war game
• Industrializing Cakedoom
• Mini racers the beginning: Autobahn
• Saunter on thin ice - wannabe ice princess
• Clark the Corrupt and Ruler of the Rhen - screw your inhabitants and take all the money
• A wooden submarine - the first submarine, the turtle
• Aristocrat apartment building
• Managing the missionaries hygiene
• The world's best Toasts
• The raspberry in Cosmos
• The viking slap-up
• Digging after tea
• Colorizing the world with a trumpet
• Round Rod explores Square City
• Ordering the Oranges
• Smuggling over the boarder
• Life at the Toxic Waste Dump
• Creating a Ghost Town - with real ghosts who want to live their life
• Riding a Lawnmower and killing Gremlings
• Digging gold on Mars
• The life of a Bacteria, birth, mutation and world conquering
• Put the surfing Duck
• Butler who's carrying silver

April 23, 2010

Evolution of RTS games

1. Introduction
2. The Journey Begins
3. The RTS Boom
4. Life After the Boom
5. The Modern Age
6. Conclusion
7. References

Original essay here. This post is just a reformatted version with pictures.

Introduction

This is an essay for the course Game Design and I'm going to give you a ride through the evolution of RTS game genre. I like RTS games and I've played them for as long as I can remember, from the classic Red Alert and Age of Empires to the newer Supreme Commander and Starcraft 2 (beta).

First of all what is a Real Time Strategy game? How do we narrow it down? The first distinction I'd like to draw is the Real Time part. Games like chess and civilization are most certainly strategy games but they are not executed in real time. Instead you wait for your turn and then make your move. Turn-based games like these are in my mind not RTS games. Neither are “God games” like SimCity and The Sims. You have very few boundaries and you can do what you want, when you want and how you want. But I think of RTS games more as a competition – a race against time.

I'd like to draw a loose definition for an RTS: “harvest, build and destroy”. Practically all RTS games are based around the idea to get money or some kind of resources to build up an army and proceed to destroy your enemy.

I will focus more on the beginning RTS games as they are still the main influence to all RTS games and then I will a bit more quickly go through the modern games and the modern ideas that continues to drive RTS forward.

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The journey begins

In the beginning there was no RTS games. Hard to imagine I know but that's the truth. When the idea of RTS was born the gaming scene looked a lot different from now. In the 1980's Nintendo had blown new life into the video game industry and it was the simple games that held us entertained, games like Pong, Tetris and Pac-Man. However the tides were shifting and more advanced games like SimCity were on the rise.

Dune II (1992) wasn't the first RTS game, there had been several games with RTS influence in them but this was the first complete RTS. The game was all about control. You chose exactly what units to build and when to build them and you could command every single unit at will – perhaps drive it across the map to check what your opponent is building?

The game introduced the concept of a tech-tree (Technology Tree) where you could “tech up” to stronger but more expensive tanks or you could continue to build cheap tanks. Gone where the days when you had to rely on a rock-paper-scissor balance between units, such as tank beats artillery which beats infantry which beats tanks, and instead you had the choice of countering a tank with a bigger tank! Or with a mind-control tank or you could choose to destroy the factory producing the tanks. Choosing the right time to climb up the tech-tree became vital to your success but it was complicated by “the shroud” which was a black fog covering the map where you haven't been. This in turn forced players to scout and check what the opponent is doing having to constantly revise what units he should build and if he had to tech up.

The sandy land of Dune 2

Perhaps the most revolutionary concept Dune introduced was the resource system. To build things you had to have spice, the game's only resource, and to get spice you had to harvest it on the map and bring it home to convert it to money and then units or buildings. What this practically means is the player had to have control of the map, he had to have a place he could get spice or else he would probably die. The concept of map-control is something that is driving virtually all RTS games to date. The first online capable game was Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) but the online boom wouldn't come just yet. Instead it was the game Command & Conquer (1995) who refined RTS a bit more. It wasn't a graphical masterpiece nor very complex instead it's simple but it just works. The game screams atmosphere and war. All the units were pretty straightforward (I mean who doesn't know an apache, a rocket launcher or an M1A1 tank?) so it was pretty easy to pick up. But beneath the simple exterior lay a surprisingly deep game.

The game built on Dune 2 and in fact some fans nicknamed it Dune 3; the shroud and the resource system was the same and the tech-tree was built upon and it introduced the concept of a BO (Build Order – a predefined order to build things to maximize unit production or similar). C&C furthered the sense of control, in Dune you could just select one unit at a time but here you could select several, you could then store it in a group 0-9 and whenever you pressed the number again the group associated with it would be selected.

Instead of the “tank, bigger tank, biggest tank” from Dune C&C furthered the unit differences with tanks and infantry. Infantry was weak and could even be run over by the tanks with a satisfying splat sound, but they were dirt cheap and vital for early scouting. Tanks on the other hand were strong and fast but they were expensive and they had to rely on driving over infantry in order to effectively kill them. This gave the game a whole new level depth.

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The RTS Boom

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) became the first mega-successful RTS game. For some the interface was a letdown with no groups or build queues but instead it introduced the standard right click. Example with a peon: if you right click on a gold mine he will harvest and if you click on an enemy he will attack. It also allowed you to build anywhere opening for the oh so popular tower rush (build offensive defense towers). For the first time we got to have full naval battles with battleships, submarines and even a very own naval-resource. They improved the shroud and turned it into the now standard Fog of War where the fog regrows if you don't have any units there.

But the thing that really set Warcraft II apart was the online multiplayer. A huge community gathered and spawned leagues, clans and ladders and essentially creating the base of modern competitive RTS gaming.

Command & Conquer Red Alert (1996) was the original C&C but more and better. It kept the defining pieces but moved up the pace with high yield minerals and a stronger focus on tank warfare. In fact the focus on tanks was so strong that it introduced the concept of a “tank rush” where you amass a lots of tanks quickly and then rush your opponent to catch him of guard. The factions were different and unique and featured for the first time full featured land, sea and air combat. Red Alert also has a crazy and good story where Einstein witnesses the horrors of Hitler and proceeds to g back in time and kill, but without the competition for Stalin a new war breaks out. This placed new importance on the story in RTS games, a tradition which still continues today.

We can spot Red Alert's mighty mammoth tank

If you think about classical RTS games the chances are high you'll think about Age of Empires (1997). The game is one of the most influential RTS games and if you've ever played it it's easy to see why. It's balanced, polished and very deep. It's one of the first games to introduce the concept of “Ages”, essentially tiers in a tech tree. There are four ages which let's you progress from the very basic clubmen to advanced bowmen and even war elephants. The whole system is nicely done and the progression to higher tiers is fluent and it adds a lot of depth to the game. The resource system is still one of the most complex in any RTS with a whopping four resources for you to balance. Another new concept was the random maps. This way every game was a whole new experience with lots of different chokes and the importance of scouting was set on a whole new level.

There are games that would introduce one or two novel ideas and then there is Total Annihilation (1997). The game was the first 3D RTS game and it featured real physics simulation. Gone where the days when your units would hit instantaneously and without fail, here everything was simulated; on bumpy terrain the shots could fire into the ground, the front units would absorb and block hits and higher terrain would give the benefit of an increased range. TA was one of the first games where units could shoot while moving, making for some interesting run and dodge tactics. Dead units would even leave wreckages on the battlefield, wreckage that would block movement and you could reclaim them and regain some of the metal you used to build them.

When we're on the topic of metal and resources – TA has one of the most unique resource systems to date: they're unlimited. Unlike games like C&C with a finite resource system you never had to worry if you had enough, metal and energy would be regenerated infinitely so it was never a question if you could afford it, but how long it would take to be built. TA reintroduced the “Hero unit” from the era before Dune II, where you actually were a unit and if that died you loose.

TA was more a game without limits than anything before – battles with hundreds of units were commonplace and when the big units in other games fired across the screen, the big guns in TA fired across tens of screens or even across the whole map! Where other games had strong Rock-Paper-Scissor counters TA had none. You could even fire artillery at airplanes (although pretty useless). Instead the balance revolved around unit speeds, turning times and overkill.

Until this day, almost 12 years later, Starcraft (1998) is still the most competitively played RTS. The game had a great story and had three completely different races. Other games differentiated their factions with units but in Starcraft even the way you built things was different. But the thing that sets it apart from anything else is the community and in particular the competitive gaming scene that gathered around it. It's so ridiculously popular in South Korea that it's considered the National Sport there and the players are treated as rock-stars.

Why did this game become so popular? I don't know; it took almost a decade to get it balanced good and it isn't extremely fast paced. It's really fun to play but almost more importantly is that it's fun to watch, the immersion factor and the excitement of a high skilled game is unparalleled and I think that's what sparked the formation of a dedicated community. Then the community in itself is a reason why Starcraft has stood the test of time – the formation of pro leagues, great map support and excellent coverage has made sure the community has flourished.

Starcraft 2, the most successful RTS game yet

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Life after the Boom

The success of RTS as a genre sparked the creation of a lot of pretty similar, but often very good, games like one of my personal memories KKnD (1997). However it didn't take long until the next big revolution: true 3D brought to you by Homeworld (1999). Total Annihilation had used 3D terrain but Homeworld set the player in space and gave the freedom of the Z-dimension. Instead of just moving on a flat, albeit bumpy, surface you could now move freely in any direction you'd like. In addition Homeworld became known for it's atmospheric and rich story and they introduced persistence in the single player campaign. It means that you would retain all of your units and upgrades from your last mission and if you had finished it badly with only a few units the next mission would prove impossible and you had to replay it.

Building on a concept and improving it has been heavily used in RTS and it has brought us some of the very good games. Age of Empires II (1999) was all of the original but better. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) upped the pace of of older C&C games and created a fun, with some good humor, easy to pick up but hard to master classic RTS game. Red Alert 2 still had a cartoony 2D look who many loved but it was to become one of the last 2D RTS games.

Age of Mythology (2002) was a spin-off from the Age of Empires with all its goodness but with additional “God powers”. Rise of Nations (2003) incorporated classical board game features such as territory and it tried out a resource system with a whopping 6 resources (crazy!).

Warcraft III (2002) continued on where Warcraft II left but with added focus on abilities and RPG like hero units. The game is very centered around you gaining experience and leveling up your hero by killing neutral monsters, called creeping, as the three heroes you could have are more powerful than the rest of your army. Instead of a hard unit cap like in Starcraft Warcraft tried the approach with upkeep: if you have a large population you'll gain less gold and it worked pretty well as multiple expansions would do more harm than good.

The focus on heroes and abilities made the game really micro intense (taking care of individual units) as opposed to the very macro (economy) centered Starcraft. (It's pretty amusing in the current Starcraft 2 beta where you can actually see what game the top players used to play, Starcraft players usually have great macro but pretty bad micro whereas top Warcraft 3 players micro a few units but their economy is bad.)

A human player harassing an Orc in Warcraft 3

Command & Conquer Generals (2003) shifted the focus for the C&C series. It made the building panel a bit more free, so you could easier build where and what you wanted, it had radically different factions and sub-factions but it had a very poor story but perhaps the most noteworthy addition was that upgrade change unit behavior instead of simply making them deal +1 damage. For example infantry was weak against tanks but with an armor-piercing upgrade they could destroy it.

Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth (2004) had a pretty interesting and different build system. Where other games placed no limits on where you could build the game only allowed you to build on specific places and they were very limited. This forced you to really think about what to build – one mismatched building and you could get your entire army mismatched against your enemy. It also had a sort of RPG experience points tree whit a lot of different power ups you could have, but these too were limited and forced the player to make hard decisions, and hard decisions are good.

Dawn of War: Warhammer 40,000 (2004) changed the well known resource system, instead of harvesting the player was given “map points” combined with an in-house generated resource. You also had squads, which were treated as one unit for easier control and as several when in battle.

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The modern age

Company of Heroes (2006) is a pretty special game. It fuses the cinematic experience from an FPS with the tactical and strategical depth from an RTS. You command a lot less units and you're a lot closer to the battlefield. The environment is almost fully destructible and your units will take shelter behind anything they can find. Things like where you attack a tank became important as the armor was considerably weaker in the back and ammunition and fuel was considered a scarce resource.

The immersion of Company of Heroes is simply stunning

World in Conflict (2009) took the tactics even further and is considered an RTT – Real Time Tactics. In WiC there are no resources, just a sum given in the start of the game for you to call in units with. When the units are killed the points are slowly given back ensuring you won't run out of units. The game is solely focused on controlling your units and thus isn't really a true RTS in my eyes but a game bordering between the two.

Supreme Commander (2007) is the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation and it stands in stark contrast to WiC's tactical focus – here it's about the broad strokes man. Given the strategic zoom you can zoom out until you can see the whole battlefield and all the hundreds of units are there for you to command. The scale is huge, nukes and experimental super units trashing around gives the game an epic feel. But there's a lot more to Supcom than watching huge battles, it's using the whole TA system with infinite economy, wreckages and no hard counters. We have new intelligence modes; in addition to line of sight as in almost every other games there are radar, sonar and omni (see all). To counter these we get cloaking and radar jamming units. Another thing Supcom does well is the improved interface with infinite queues which tie well with the infinite resources so you don't have to babysit your factories to get them to continually produce units.

Me and Toejams showing off in Supreme Commander

Today there are both big scaled games like Hearts of Iron III (2008) and small-scale like Company of Heroes. There are games that relies on the old tried-but-true formula (Starcraft 2 currently in beta) and other more novel (Darwinia 2005). If you look closely you'll notice the core the old RTS games are still here, unchanged. Starcraft 2's resource system is basically the same as in Dune II and grouping are still the same as in the original C&C. Games are still living on, and building on, the successful ideas of the past (the new C&C, AoE3 etc) and I personally think they will continue to entertain us, Dune II style, for at least a couple of decades more.

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Conclusion

We've been through the evolution of the RTS from the beginning with Dune II until modern games like Supreme Commander and World in Conflict. The simple one resource system has given birth to four and even six resource systems and some games have opted for “map points” or different infinite resources. The simple shroud concept has turned into the now standard Fog of War and there has been some advanced intelligence gathering going on in a few games. The Hero concept with borrowed RPG elements are now standard in many games and the tech tree has been branched into several different flavors. The scale has both been amplified and minimized and units has differentiated themselves from each other.

Thanks to the online multiplayer pioneered almost 15 years ago has turned a little niche genre into a mega-industry with competitions held in several different games and countries. But where the genre is heading is anyones guess, but whichever way it's heading I'm sure it will continue to entertain and surprise you.

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References

Everything accessed 21 mars 2010

gamespot1, gamespot2
History of RTS during the years 1989-2001. Pretty good.

Gamereplays RTS history, a great resource written by several RTS enthusiasts.

A top 20 list, take it with a grain of salt. Used for inspiration.

From wikipedia various stuff (mainly dates):
Dune the novel
Warcraft: Orcs and Humans
Darwinia
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
KKnD
Age of Mythology
World in Conflict
Hearts of Iron 3