Assignment 3: Real-Time Strategy Game

Due Date: Friday of Week 14 @ 23:59:59 (no late submission allowed)

Forum (please check daily)

forum for assignments 2 and 3 discussion.

Please be sure to read my posts there. They are part of the assignment 3 specification. Feel free to ask questions in this forum. If you ask questions by email to me (amichail@gmail.com), then I will likely answer your questions in the forum.

Late Submission

Submission after Friday of week 14 but by 23:59:59 Monday Nov 7 will result in a 3 mark penalty (assignment 3 is out of 30 marks).

For example, if your mark is 24/30, then it will be reduced to 21/30. Observe that this is not like the ceiling penalty used in previous assignments -- the deduction always occurs during the late submission period.

Submission after Monday Nov 7 will result in a zero.

Updates (please check daily)

Oct 17: rts2.gm6 shows how you can provide two-player support in an RTS using the keyboard

Your second game is a real-time strategy (RTS) game of your choosing. You can incorporate RPG elements into your RTS game if you like (e.g., by allowing the player to focus on character development of hero units; see warcraft 3).

Assignment 3 is worth 30% of your final mark.

It is acceptable for your game to diverge a bit from your design document from assignment 2. However, major changes will require permission.

If you have not done so already, please do the following:

read this document on what makes a good game: http://www.gamemaker.nl/tutorials/goodgame.zip
read the lecture notes on strategy games: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~ge8001/strategy.pdf
play the StarCraft demo and possibly other real-time strategy games (e.g., WarCraft 3 demo, Homeworld 2 demo, Age of Empires III demo, etc.)

In addition, I am maintaining a collection of game related URLs on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/amichail/games. You might find some of these URLs helpful. You can also use the CollaborativeRank search engine for del.icio.us (e.g., try searching for rts), although its index is not complete: http://collabrank.org.

Game framework: Feel free to use my toy code as a starting point for your RTS: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~ge8001/rts.gm6

Your game will be marked as follows:

[10 marks] Real-Time Strategy Game Considerations (e.g., a compelling mix of conquest, exploration, and trade (and possibly also RPG elements if you like); see the lecture notes on strategy games and the real-time strategy game demos)
[10 marks] More General Game Considerations (e.g., is it fun? interesting goals, interesting decisions, balance, rewards, flow, presence, immersion, etc.; see the document on game design mentioned above)
[10 marks] Difficulty of Implementation (not whether the game is ambitious but what was actually done)

Although we expect you to build a real-time strategy game that is similar in many ways to existing RTS games such as StarCraft, we would still like to see (and we will reward) creativity in your game. A simple clone of StarCraft (or some other existing game) will not impress us!

Note that if you submit a game that is not really an RTS game, then you are not doing this assignment and it is unlikely that you would get many marks (if any at all).

Although you were required to write an AI section in your design document, you may decide to build a multiplayer game instead that does not require opponent AI.

Again, you will be required to explain the contributions of each member of your group.