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Battle Aces is a fast and furious mechabug RTS from Blizzard talent that turns Starcraft into a game of cardsA blizzard of potential
A blizzard of potential
Image credit:Uncapped Games
Image credit:Uncapped Games
Each is a mix of bug and robot, with a clutch of finely observed, quirky-but-never-gratuitous animations that immediately had me choosing favourites when I played the game atSummer Game Fest. “Our main unit design concept artist, his father was also an illustrator and nature illustrator at that, so he’s already accomplished with animal designs, but he also loves mechs and robots too,” notes Uncapped Games art director Ted Park. “So he’s kind of melded both worlds as much as he can.”
Image credit:Uncapped Games
As for the overall big “vision” stuff, I think Battle Aces has a shot at jogging the RTS out of its rut, though it does have precedents - not least in the endless world of strategy game modding. On some level, it’s a familiar but potent exercise in simplifying (or, if you prefer, streamlining) certain things in order to make other things pop more. Specifically, automating or combining aspects of the conventional RTS research process, resource collection, and base-building, so that you can focus on army composition, tactics, and the overall tempo of the match, using a zippy control scheme that’s built for PvP. The question I have is whether this is a shifting of the emphasis, or a larger transformation – a “new paradigm” asthe Steam pagewould have it. I need longer than 30 minutes of hands-on time to figure that out, but those 30 minutes have certainly blown the dust from my lapsed RTS habits and left me enthused.
Image credit:Uncapped Games
Among Uncapped’s figureheads is David Kim, former lead multiplayer designer onStarCraft 2. He came up with the idea for Battle Aces some time ago, and Park says there hasn’t been much change since. “The boon for our team is that the vision hasn’t really wavered a lot,” he told me. “So we haven’t done a lot of like, regarding pivoting and having to redo a lot of systems. We’ve had a very, like, almost linear process of getting everything into the game, and working the way we want. It’s been nearly three years of working on this game. But I would say many of us came from larger companies as well, and that timeframe has been fairly fast for us in terms of getting a game from absolutely nothing to what you see today.”
This thinning out of the typical RTS anatomy – no manually placing structures, no assigning and escorting harvesters – allows for and accompanies a control scheme that is designed for speed and micromanagement. All building and resourcing operations can be carried out with your off-hand, while your mouse hand moves the camera and units. Tab key unfurls every last one of your building options, tilde selects your entire army. There’s seemingly no need to click on a menu rather than using a hotkey once you’ve internalised the layout.
“A lot of it has been about kind of lowering the barrier to accessibility, where we can,” Park explained. “One of the things we did with the UI is we centred a lot of the controls just to the left side of the keyboard, the QWER layout we found to be very efficient. And then we try to simplify everything with just two menus. So that almost all of your controls should be within one hand’s reach, where possible, and then the rest through your mouse.”
Unit Sizzle Trailer | Battle AcesWatch on YouTube
Unit Sizzle Trailer | Battle Aces
I played a couple of tutorial battles at SGF, and while the AI didn’t put up enough of a fight to show me the intricacies or help me overcome my unfamiliarity with the controls, I can see how all this might add up into a distinct species of real-time strategy - if not necessarily that vaunted “new paradigm”. In my experience, new paradigms seldom position themselves as such in advance; they creep up on you like a squad of cloaked centipedes.
Still, this is a very skilful rearranging and condensing of things I love about the likes of Command & Conquer, and the deck-building element lends it a charisma you might not expect, given the ubiquity of deck-builders today. I immediately wanted to sit down and spend time thinking about different arachnobot line-ups and the match “scoresheets” they might give rise to. And yes, I do like the unit designs in motion. The headline for this piece should have been “this is the first game that has made me want to pet a Kraken”.
