One of the main design goals of Stone Monarch is to allow free-form 3D construction. People should be able to build castles, walls and villages however they want. It’s very important that the construction system works well. I had these goals in mind for the construction system:
- It should enable creative freedom
- It should have strategic value
- It should be easy to use quickly
Creative Freedom
Building a castle entrance
The game provides many small building blocks that players can use to build their base. I tried to avoid any unnecessary restrictions on building. Building segments are allowed to overlap each other, and there aren’t any rules for which segments can connect with which other segments. Segments can attach to existing solid surfaces in any direction, so it’s possible to have giant overhanging structures even if they wouldn’t be entirely plausible in real life.
An example of a more unusual castle
Strategic Value
The design choices that a player makes should not be purely cosmetic. They should have a strategic impact on the game.
Structures that are larger get stronger, so it will be harder to get through a tall wall than a short one. Units that are higher up get an increase line of sight, and they are more easily able to attack enemies below them. This gives an advantage to posting guards on walls and towers (at the risk of reduced mobility). Solid obstacles block attacks, so it makes sense to do things like build a roof over very sensitive locations.
Various structures give additional benefits, such as line of sight (torches), population benefits, resource storage, and transportation (rail, pipes).
Archers wait on top of towers to defend against any enemies coming up the ramp
Speed and Ease of Use
Since this is a real-time game, it can’t be too cumbersome to build things under time pressure. Over rounds of user testing I’ve gradually simplified the building process.
Originally, I followed the traditional RTS building system where villager units need to stand next to a building and construct it. This ended up being impractical in a 3D world. It was too difficult for villagers to reach anything high up in order to build it. Although it was still possible to make this work by building a bunch of temporary scaffolding, it was too slow and cumbersome to do that during an RTS game. Maybe in a different sort of game it would be an interesting challenge on its own.
I fixed this problem by only requiring villagers to be within a certain radius of the buildings being constructed. This greatly simplifies building things but it still doesn’t break the game by letting people build anywhere at any time.
After further testing, I still found that it was difficult for people to build complex bases. The reason was that I was forcing people to wait for segments to build, which took several seconds. This is a good mechanic in traditional RTS games because it forces people to plan ahead and be ready before an enemy arrives at their doorstep. It didn’t work in Stone Monarch because you need to have segments already built before you can build other things on top of them. It’s very difficult to plan a base when you have to keep waiting for each ‘brick’ to appear.
Instead, I allowed instant building, but restricted building when enemy units are too close. This lets people build easily during peace time, but doesn’t break the game during battles.