When I was a kid I loved playing with Playmobil Castle. My siblings and I would spend hours inventing kingdoms before acting out battles between them. While the battles were fun, we always spent the longest building our castles.
The great thing about Playmobil was it’s modular construction. We could combine pieces any way we wanted to create our own designs for walls, towers, gates and prisons. This creative expression was what made it interesting to keep playing over and over.
Once we were a little older, we discovered Age of Empires 2 when my cousin got it for christmas. I remember spending all afternoon in my grandparents’ basement gathered around their computer, making decisions together to fight a computer player.
What I loved about Age of Empires and other RTS games were the elements of strategy and competition. I still play it with my family today, because the replay value of coming up with ways to counter someone else’s strategy is so high. However, the creative construction element that I used to love from playing Playmobil is somewhat lost. Castles and buildings are all pre-built rectangles and laid out on a 2D plane. There’s no opportunity to build freeform structures of your own devising.
This is what I want to do with my own game, tentatively titled Monarchs & Masons. My goal is to make a medieval RTS game with freeform 3D construction to enable both strategy and creative building design. Here’s a screenshot of the game so far:
In this example, I used simple building blocks to build up a castle on a hill. Ramps create an easy to defend entrance surrounded by guard towers. I’ve sent some archers to the tops of the towers to provide protection. Further back, I built a large keep to add a second level of defense for the king.
The game in it’s current state already works for multiplayer battles and I’ve been regularly playing games with friends and family. It’s already possible to build, fight and manage resources, and I’ve already been impressed with some of the crazy castle designs that other people have come up with.
There’s still a long way to go though. It’s an interesting challenge to balance fine grained control with the time pressure of competition. I want to make something that enables and rewards finding interesting new uses of structures and units.
Ultimately, I want to make a game that lives up to my vision and that I can enjoy playing for years in the future. Of course I hope that other people will be interested too. As I make progress I’ll post updates here.