Call me a liar, but I really hadn't been working on any programming projects around the time of my last update. However, I seem to have this whole oscillating thing going on -- my interest in writing and programming move forward as though one is a Sine wave and the other is a -Sine wave. Er, yeah -- trigonometry to prove a point... Hey, the image in my head seemed clearer than it sounded when put in words.
At the heart of my current (or rather "in planning") programming project comes one of the problems I see with the RTS genre: units being produced from buildings. No, I don't have a problem with requiring a building to exist in order for a unit to exist, but it is the physical action of creating a unit from the building requiring the unit to exist. In my words, that no doubt sounded drastically more complicated than it needed to be, so let's get to the basics of my idea. Just keep in mind that before you continue, you should toss the ideas lingering in your mind from those existing RTS games you are so familiar with.
In the beginning, let's say we have a House, Residential District, or some other sort of living-based area built (or even, say, a school). From the House we can generate our base unit: let's refer to him as the Citizen. The Citizen will be the only unit that is generateable via a building.
At this point, we might want to build some other form of building. So, we rally together some citizens and build something: let's say we build a Military Academy -- our basic military structure. From this, funds from the player are expended in order to pay the citizens who build the building.
So now we have ourselves a Military Academy. Now having unlocked the ability to train some form of military unit -- let's just go for the generic term Soldier for now -- let's go ahead and train ourselves one. Enter a Citizen into the Military Academy in order to train to become a Soldier.
Let's say we build other buildings, which allows further unit types to be trainable at the Military Academy. We also build some buildings which allow for the Citizen to become other non-military units. As a general rule, the Citizen must pay the player in order to train to become something else.
There are a couple other Citizen-Player scenarios which would come in play in order for both to attain profits necessary to advance. Rather than simply training at buildings, a Citizen also has the opportunity to work at buildings. The Citizen gets a paycheck from the building, and the player gets a tax of the Citizen's pay. The pay the Citizens attain from working is otherwise not taken from the player, but an invisible source -- presumably the company/corporation that owns the building. If no Citizens are currently assigned to work at a building, the building is still in business, allowing the player to gain a set minimum amount of profit over a period of time. And don't forget, from mentioned in the building-creation process above, that the Citizens assigned to build new buildings get paid directly from the player as well.
And... that about covers the basics. Trust me, I'll eventually post more, but I'd like to tweak around with the idea a bit and actually make some test runs with this and some of the other more advanced thoughts I have before posting more. In the mean time, I might actually get around to posting a snippet from my writing on here soon...
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