RTS User Interface Tools

Many moons ago, I blogged about how RTS game designers should be learning from user interface design by searching far outside the narrow box of traditional games. For example, back when I blogged about this, many advanced shaping, drawing, formation, layout and grouping tools had been widely available for years for industrial use in popular apps like Photoshop. The first decent implementation of this sort of UI approach came about two or three years later, when I had all but stopped RTS blogging.

Chris Taylor came out with Supreme Commander, and with it had forged the now iconic strategic zoom. A feature that had been used for years (albeit much more crudely) in graphics and design applications, et al. It changed everything for RTS — we now had space, vision, a sense of awesome scale.

Classic Article

This classic Gamasutra article grabbed my attention again recently whilst pondering some UI issues with my RTS concept. The article is entitled “Too Many Clicks! Unit-Based Interfaces Considered Harmful“.

From the introduction:

“Computer games traditionally have a player control one or more units on the screen. In early games, each player controlled one unit. As CPU power grew, players controlled more and more units. Today, a player might have hundreds of units, each one of which they must control individually. The unit-based user interface (UI) is no longer sufficient. This article will suggest a different way of thinking about UIs, and will discuss how to compare one UI to another, or one UI to the theoretical maximally efficient UI, to tell if your game can be improved. I’ll use examples primarily from strategy games, but it applies to UIs for programs of all kinds.”

Enjoy.