As the 2017 Game Developers Conference draws nigh, organizers want to make sure you don’t miss out on a neat talk from longtime game designer Soren Johnson about the unique challenges of creating a real-time strategy game without guns.
In his GDC 2017 Design track talk on “Offworld Trading Company: An RTS Without Guns”, Johnson will explain how he and his studio (Mohawk Games) set out to make a new type of real-time strategy game, one that focused on economics instead of combat.
According to Johnson, following this initial vision led Mohawk Games to shed other standard tropes of the genre, such as unit selection, on the way to creating a unique gameplay experience, one that de-emphasized micro dexterity challenges in favor of macro high-level strategy while still hewing to the standard half-hour RTS format. This postmortem details the twist and turns of Offworld’s design process, from conception to prototyping to Early Access to final release.
It promises to be an intriguing talk, so don’t skip it!
GDC 2017 itself will take place February 27th – March 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2017, visit the show’s official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas
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