This time I cover a very popular genre of games, the Real-Time Strategy title. Like most strategy genres, the RTS has a very specific definition to make it stand out from all the various other strategy types, which I'm hesitant to take a prod at without resorting to Wikipedia. It basically covers any real-time game where you control a force of troops and a gathering of buildings and installations, and continue to expand your operations across a map while expanding your operation, making new troops and buildings by mining the nearby resources available to you. The idea is to do this quicker and more efficiently than the other guy, so when the time comes you can roll all over him instead of vice versa.
Like any genre that has a bajillion games with miniscule variation, there have been various attempts at partitioning the RTS genre further for all its minor disparities. The most logical of which is the micro/macro-management system. Micro-management assumes that you have a small, non-increasble force and need to strategically plan on how your inferior numbers will take down the superior numbers of your enemy with guile, cunning or whatever. A lot of the squad-based tactical games use this method especially, such as Commandos or Fallout Tactics. On the opposite end of this management scale are the macro-management games, which involve a massive force of units and territory which the player must expand on with great speed lest the enemy overtake them in numbers. The final battle comes after each side has expanded as far as they can go, and then it's simply a clash of the titans to see who prevails.
My feelings for this genre is that it is one that appeals to me a designer and as a designer only. I hate playing these. For the most obvious reason: I suck at them. I just can't get my head around keeping an eye on a hundred things at once, and being innately aware of what's happening at all times so the enemy doesn't surprise me or so I don't end up having units not doing anything useful. It's also a game where knowledge is power, and memorizing the best way to take down a specific player type (one who is defensive, or focuses on units which are slow and powerful are examples) is something I'm not always focused on a game enough to bother learning. However, like I stated previously, on a designer level the complexity of these games has always intrigued me. I love how the screen can fill up with all these minutely detailed units and buildings, all clamoring at once to get things done, and how there are always a hundred ways to finish a particular level based on your own personal style. Of course, the number of potential paths to take rather narrows down as the opponents get so difficult that only those using the most efficient methods can hope to defeat them.
So now I come to what I can hope to bring to the genre should I be given the chance. My game idea today feels so much like it's been done before, but for the life of me I can't seem to find any trace of a game using the same general idea. Simply, it is thus: an RTS game that takes place entirely within the human body.
You control the white blood cells, and various other agents in the blood stream able to tackle infection and other ills that plague the human body. It is your task to find the problem area and eliminate it, all the while protecting the more vulnerable areas of the body from damage. This includes vital organs, but also various cartileges and nerve areas which repair very slowly and so must be protected. As the game progresses, you'll meet stronger pathogens, viruses and malignant bacteria and may even have to take out a clump of cancer cells or other potentially fatal ailments.
The story of the game will follow a new drug, which supercharges the white blood cells and allows them to combat illnesses that would normally overcome them without outside medical assistance. The white blood cells of a given test body will mutate into various forms and gain almost a sort of sentience, which is where the player comes in. Using the powers of the drugs, the white blood cells can mutate to tackle whatever problem is currently in front of them, assuming the roles of penicillin or other cures (which will make up your inventory of unit types) while farming the necessary nutrients for these changes from the bloodstream. As the drug is tested on even worse cases to monitor its efficiency, the player must deal with more complex and difficult problems.
Obviously a game like this will require a knowledge of anatomy and medicine far beyond my meagre understanding, but I could see a RTS game as frantic as any other situated entirely within the somewhat alien environment of the close-scale human body. It's when I starting thinking about combating nanotechnology that had infiltrated the body for some of the later levels that I started thinking that maybe I'd heard of this game before somewhere, but I still don't know where. Maybe I'm just thinking of Innerspace?
