Time to settle back into the proverbial leather couch and let out some more. It’s actually incredibly therapeutic, last time it literally felt like a massive weight had been lifted from my shoulders practically from the moment I hit post. So we concluded that fear is a big motivator to progress this thing. Seems a little extreme, but everybody is motivated by fear – if we don’t find the means to provide for ourselves or those who depend on us then we perish. So really fear as a motivator is part of the process of being alive. But then, it’s not the only motivator. When anyone decides to leave the comfort of their jobs to go at it alone either consciously or subconsciously they decide what it is that ultimately drives them and I think it basically boils down to power, money or success. I wouldn’t say I was motivated by power. I’m a Beta male, quite happy to lead but just as happy to follow. I’m also a techy and I find that power gets in the way of the pursuit of knowledge because ultimately, by virtue of the man or his surroundings, power changes people and the way people deal with you and I’m weary of that. Money is nice, but if I were motivated by cold hard cash I’d have stuck with my day job. A few more vocational qualifications and business breakfasts and I’d have been minted. No, the more you have the more you spend – it’s relative, I just want to be comfortable. Then we settle on success. Some might argue that power and money equals success; life has taught me to be very weary of those people. But, I’m interested in success in its purest form, which is simply to build a quality game. So how do we define success or quality? Well we can strive to make the game look and feel the best it can be. Use the potential AAA status as a golden carrot to drive it to making something that is directly comparable to other high budget ventures. That’s a pretty standard objective and dare-I-say, a bit of a cheap shot. So what else can we do? Well we can take the subject matter, in this case the RTS as a genre, slice it open from tip to stern, scope out the insides and place them to one side. We can then climb inside the skin and dance around in it, have fun with it, pretend to be it then toss it to one side. Then we look to the pile of innards and we start arranging them in their new form. You see, it might be enough for most developers to simply pick up a famous RTS and clone it; I have the say the idea of that bores me to tears. If I look at the list of strategy games I loved, not enjoyed, actually loved; they are actually pretty short: World in Conflict, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, X-Com (originals too) Starfleet Command, Transport Tycoon (really you have to try out that last one, it’s free too search ‘OpenTTD.’) They are all pretty unique. They don’t feature the immersion breaking mechanics of somehow building units in 15 seconds and the mindless selection box combat. They don’t adhere strictly to the template and simply sprinkle in something extra over the top. They are grassroots different, from the base code to the external presentation. Sadly we don’t leave in those sort of times anymore. If a game doesn’t play like every other it’s normally damned by critics and Player alike as being ‘unintuitive’ (if it even gets a look in at all.) So now we find ourselves cherry picking the best parts from the classics; the fluid controls of Homeworld, the concurrent activity of Sins, the consideration of tactics like Starfleet Command, taking all these things and tastefully merging them together. Originality doesn’t pay in this industry, so we have to be sparing with it. If I’d farted out another RTS I’d be bathing in cash right now and likely would have finished this a long time ago and looking back, it probably would have been the best option. But I’m not happy with that, so instead we’re going to be intrepid but have to mimic the classics, because that’s what people recognise and consciously or subconsciously that’s what majority of people want. Apparently if people are putting ‘looks like Homeworld’ or ‘looks like Nexus’ all over your stuff then you’re doing well. I suppose like me, you too are inspired by classics and how they changed your lives. Perhaps you were in a bad place and that game was your escape, perhaps you remember being a teen sitting on the bus on the way to school daydreaming of playing, dying to get the day out of the way to get home. This is how a game should make you feel. So the measure of success isn’t how many copies we’ve sold (money) or how many people are following us (power,) leave that to the big-boys. My measure of success is to make something that is visually beautiful, something that endears and reminds us of how games used to be and why we play them, build upon the reasons for such with a degree of originality and unifies it all into a quality product. Because in the end, no mater how twisted the path travelled, quality always prevails and is therefore the only real tangible measurement of success. James