// caseydunham.net

I read this article the other day about the paradigm shift that Real Time Strategy (RTS) games are currently undergoing and I think that it is a bit unfortunate, but I think most everyone has seen it coming. Consoles are becoming more abundant and with it a huge market. The PC has been the leader by a long shot in these style of games, but with the ease of PC piracy I can’t say that I don’t blame the developers for trying to move away from it. The move to a more console friendly RTS game has really been a  move to less resource management and more focus on building units quicker and getting into the action which ultimately means a simplification of the game leading to quicker campaigns and skirmishes. This makes sense as well for the console since the majority of best selling console games are action oriented and once you bring online multi-player into it, it would be hard to sustain a single game for even three our four people for a traditional style strategy game that would often last friends of mine and I hours for a single skirmish.  While this move to a more console friendly RTS is going to attract more gamers and most likely introduce the style to younger players,  it is also going to open up a market for the more traditional game style. I think this is a great opportunity for the indie developers out there to fill in the need for more traditional turn based games. I grew up playing quite a few RTS and Turn Based games, my favorites among them being Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Civilization and Lords of the Realm II, and for the most part haven’t really found much that interested me in this genre of late.

I have been playing a lot of Gratuitous Space Battles but that doesn’t really fit into either mold very well. If you are a stats junky though, I would highly recommend it.  I have also been playing Battle of Wesnoth on the iPhone over the last couple of days and am really enjoying it.  I steer away from a lot of the social “strategy” games, as I can’t stand knowing that I am supporting a bunch of people who aren’t into games, just making a buck so maybe I’m missing something there, but from what I’ve seen I don’t think I am.

With the work I’ve been doing with the XNA framework on the Xbox360, I can’t help but wonder if a classic strategy game could be successful? It would require a well thought out control scheme that would probably be very different from what we would expect, but I believe that there is definitely  a market for it as you can only stand so many platformers. I wonder what would a successful execution look like? What kind of control scheme would work well? How stats heavy can you get with a console audience? As with all games, it would definitely be a balancing act, a difficult one at that. You would want to keep it fast paced enough for online play but not at the sacrifice of the traditional RTS values. I can see game configuration or having various game play types like those that are common in the FPS world, would be a definite need here.

 I recently moved into a new apartment with my wife and son and with it came an inevitable downtime in internet access. However, being offline for a bit has allowed me to think about my current projects and where I am going in the next six months and what I should be focusing on. I have realized that I have too many side projects that may or may not add anything to my real goals and getting rid of these projects for good was necessary so that I can stay focused on what it is I really want to accomplish.

 Earlier this month as I moved to working almost exclusively from my laptop, I did a lot of housekeeping across all of my hard drives to get everything in one place and backed up. Looking at the list of all of the Visual Studio solution files of half started projects or all the random Eclipse projects, I decided that some action was sorely needed.

 I usually keep all of my development work, whether it is C++, Java or something else, under the same root folder usually called projects. This makes it convenient to see everything at a glance and to make sure that everything is backed up as needed. I started my pruning by making sure everything that I was working on was under this folder moving things as needed. I than started to ask myself the following questions about each project in the list:

• What, if anything, will I gain by finishing this project?
• Will completing this project teach me something that will help me achieve my long term goals?

 If a project didn’t pass both of these questions, it immediately went into a separate folder that I called shelved-projects. I may or may not come back to these ones but I also didn’t want to just delete them forever as they may have pieces of code that I may need again for some reason. I am going to start making this a monthly routine to keep more projects like this from cropping up and to stay focused on my real goals.

 I encourage everyone to do this as often as they feel necessary. It doesn’t even have to be software projects. It could be anything that you had it in your mind to do but for some reason or other you were unable to see it through to the end. Unless it is something to do with remodeling your house. You had better finish it or pay someone to finish it less your spouse gets mad at you!