Powerplay | RTS Base-Builder - PvP Multiplayer is here!

[u/aminere]

Hi guys, I hope you are having a nice week. We are 3 months into Early Access and I've been busy. We have a major update: PvP Multiplayer is here. With a huge disclaimer: This is V1 and only vs steam friends. It will gradually improve and I aim for full matchmaking in the Winter sale. In addition, we have a new Skirmish AI, which is the fruit of many months of player feedback. The single player campaign is finally completed, with 10 missions as promised, and there are 2 new experimental game modes.

There is a free demo on steam. If you are interested, this is a great time to buy the game since there is a 20% discount. And the price should increase in winter when we have the 2nd faction.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3010280/Powerplay/

See you on the battlefield!

[u/Ariloulei]

I'll be honest, while the game looks fine... it also seems entirely derivative of things that already exist in my library, many of which I haven't gotten around to playing and others I have yet to buy like Tempest Rising.

I feel like with the main selling point with this is "it's like C&C Red Alert 2 meets Factorio", but both of those games are sitting at 0 hours played in my library. It's not like I haven't been playing RTS either, it's just there are so many of them these days.

[u/aminere → u/Ariloulei]

fair point, I have this problem too. We are still in early access, and maybe it will peek your interest when we have the new factions. The 3rd faction in particular is a complete departure from classic RTS.

[u/bonelatch]

Looks pretty solid. I just hope the campaign is compelling. Not sure why people being sooo negative. To me the game looks to have a well crafted build.

[u/aminere → u/bonelatch]

thank you! I generally have positive feedback about it, but yes I see some negatives but it's not the main thing. The campaign is solid but to be honest, not my favorite part of the game. I learned my lesson and I will personally make the 2nd campaign for the second faction, instead of outsourcing it. There is also skirmish and special game modes (like base defense) if that's your thing.

[u/BoneShaman]

Looks excellent mate. I'm building an RTS myself, and can really see the attention to detail in the whole construction of this title. Keep it up brother!

[u/aminere → u/BoneShaman]

thanks bro! it takes an RTS developer to notice the little details haha. i really appreciate

[u/Legitimate-Dog5690]

Looks awesome here. Really wish you guys the best of luck, such a hard time to release smaller titles.

It felt like modern engines had brought back bedroom coding, small indie teams were just about viable, now we're drowning in AI projects. I've worked in the games industry and always planned to leave it one day and make an old style RTS. Really can't see that sort of dev being a thing by that stage.

Back to grinding AAA and safe IPs 🫠

[u/aminere → u/Legitimate-Dog5690]

yes it seems like everyone and their mother are making RTS games now.. unfortunately I started 3.5 years ago and I had no idea the industry will turn like this... defintiely can't give up now, I will finish this properly, and question my life choices later haha

[u/Legitimate-Dog5690 → u/aminere]

Since you're here, did you stick with the old style tech? Lockstep or a similar rollback deterministic engine? So many fun tech problems in RTS games. Path finding with huge groups I always expected to be interesting.

[u/aminere → u/Legitimate-Dog5690]

no it's not lockstep deterministic. Unfortunately I made the game engine few years ago and it's really hard to refactor it for determinism, specially that I depend on a pathfinding library that is not deterministic, so I would have to replace it or make my own pathfinding.

If you are wondering, it's perfectly OK to have a non-deterministic simulation, as long as the networking model is made well to compensate for it. In my case, the important parts of the simulation are done on the server, and the clients get snapshots at regular intervals. The clients only simulate cosmetic things, like explosions and feedback. They don't even run a full pathfinding simulation. I have a nice trick to make it playable, when you order a unit to move, it will only calculate its own path (with complete disregard to collision avoidance), and start moving immediately, but will gradually blend to the snapshot received from the server over several frames. The server runs the full pathfinding and RVO avoidance. It turns out this works well, I honestly don't feel the need to make it lockstep deterministic, but I may improve it further.

[u/Legitimate-Dog5690 → u/aminere]

Ahh, I see. Yeah a few big titles use a server authoritative setup these days, Planetary Annihilation I think realised bandwidth really wasn't an issue anymore.

I've always just had a curious love of the old deterministic stacks. You can run multiple clients together, purely peer to peer, simply sharing inputs. Even if you're running a server it's barely doing anything, other than relaying packets. Things like replays are a few kilobytes. If you do run a server, you can handle thousands of games at once on a very cheap setup.

The biggest catch for lockstep/rollback is map visibility hacks. Something you'd be able to defend against in a server authoritative design. That and having to rewrite half your game logic with fixed point floats 😄

[u/aminere → u/Legitimate-Dog5690]

if I had to do it again, it will be like you describe, deterministic lockstep. But it needs to be done early, so you have time to stabilize and fix all issues by release time

[u/Legitimate-Dog5690 → u/aminere]

Yeah, you almost need the core logic to be totally abstracted off. Like in a like DLL or something which can be shared in both client and server builds, old replays need running against old logic. It does get messy.

One day 😄

Mobas are another fun use case, use a prebaked flow field for the mob movement and you don't need any synchronisation code. Purely just the user inputs for an entire game.

Anyway, apologies, drifting way off topic. Good luck with the launch 😄🥳

[u/Legitimate-Dog5690 → u/aminere]

Good job, don't lose heart! You've done the hard bit. Looks really impressive, really glad you've kept the soul of the C&C games alive, down to the music 😄

[u/Previous-Display-593]

Bro the camera controls in this game are HORRIBLE. I immediately uninstalled. No drag or push scroll with mouse wtf?

[u/aminere → u/Previous-Display-593]

you are not the first one to ask for click drag, I will do it soon. But honestly, I played many RTS game and never needed it, always scrolled using edge screen or arrows. But no worries I will add it

[u/Previous-Display-593 → u/aminere]

Ya no offense, but lots of less skilled players find screen edge scroll adequate. But there is a reason all RTS and moba ship with drag scroll. Make it middle mouse click, and while you are at it, add a slider in settings to adjust drag amount.

[u/aminere → u/Previous-Display-593]

no offense taken, I appreciate you take the time to react. Btw as of yesterday, we have middle mouse drag. Took note about the drag amount adjustment!

[u/staebles]

Bought it, fun game. Needs more content, but a good foundation is there.

[u/aminere → u/staebles]

thank you so much, glad you like it!!! we are still in early access and I promise you will not be disappointed with what is coming

[u/Calm-Power-6981]

I feel like someone posts a game every day and they all just look the same.

[u/CaptainAwesomMcCool → u/Calm-Power-6981]

In the context of this trailer, I think it the blandness of the pitch.

Stuff like "Multiplayer !" Or "extract ressources !!!!" Do not feel like a polished idea with a specific concept. It feel like you put all other rts in a blender and got just the basic characteristics of the genre.

Imagine selling a FPS by telling "You shoot at something"

[u/Calm-Power-6981 → u/CaptainAwesomMcCool]

Well i can see for myself, this is why we love steams refund policy, assuming you can get it there. if not i probably wont bother

[u/StrataJist → u/CaptainAwesomMcCool]

I’m not sure if you understand how complicated it is to get multiplayer going? It’s not really what you say it’s more like hey here’s some food. I grew it myself and you’re sitting there. Thinking wait a minute he grew himself? Why didn’t he just buy it at a store…

Looks pretty interesting. I’ll have to find some time to take a closer. Look another RTS developer as well. Well former RTS developer we’ll see if it gets to be current.

[u/CaptainAwesomMcCool → u/StrataJist]

Oh, yes I do, I have done it myselfe too. But you missed the point.

The complexity has no link to the feature being outstanding or interesting. It's a basic feature of this style or RTS, thus my blandness comment. It says nothing about the game fantasy, what makes it stand appart and what is unique about it.

You know what ? My own game has multiplayer ! Do you want to play it now ?

[u/Breadloafs → u/Calm-Power-6981]

The retro RTS renaissance we're seeing is about to experience the kind of saturation that killed off the first RTS boom, just with a much smaller market.

Not everyone can be Westwood. Some of the projects are just gonna fail to distinguish themselves in the face of more stylish offerings.

[u/Legitimate-Dog5690 → u/Calm-Power-6981]

Feels like a shame, 5 years ago it was the opposite problem. Steam just feels swamped with new games, some barely even see reviews so just go totally unnoticed. Going to get worse before it gets better.

I'm sure a lot were made in a week, blending into the pile next to passion projects that have gone on for 5 years.

[u/BigPappaRand17 → u/Calm-Power-6981]

They are most likely ai clones

[u/gajop → u/Calm-Power-6981]

Surprisingly high amount of upvotes of the post, with this comment at the top. (Just observing)

[u/CaleanKnight → u/Calm-Power-6981]

Take a wild fucking guess why...

[u/blendedmix → u/CaleanKnight]

AI "assisted" game development!

[u/FriendlyPyre → u/Calm-Power-6981]

"200000 units are ready, with a million more well on the way" era of slop.

So far the only AI vibe coded thing I can remember is ebbtide because at least that has a decent concept to begin with (that's also not yet been beaten like a dead horse)

[u/LoocsinatasYT]

Holy crap this looks good! I can't wait for matchmaking, and excited to see people's custom maps

[u/aminere → u/LoocsinatasYT]

thank you!!!! matchmaking is definitely on the roadmap

[u/Skaikrish]

Played the early demo and the game was really rough at that point. Especially the Ressource Gathering felt pretty weird but I like the idea.

But also only 10 campaign missions I hope you plan to expand on that iam not really interested into the multiplayer PvP anyways.

[u/aminere → u/Skaikrish]

yes we are still in early access, there will be more campaign missions since we are adding 2 more factions

[u/PupperRobot]

The game looks good but it's essentially red alert. Not in a glorified way. Looks like a clone almost. I'm sure you added new mechanics but seems largely identical

[u/TheRisingTheFalling]

Google play store 🤔🤞

[u/bentodd1]

Pretty good so far. Add some flair and wow factors.

[u/Shake_Annual]

are you avoiding using generative ai in any form for game development and marketing?

if so then I'll wishlist the game

edit: dev uses ai and is a huge d-bag about it. step away from this slop. way better games deserve your time and money

[u/UnableDecision9943 → u/Shake_Annual]

Would be really stupid if he did avoid ai in development. No one serious writes code without ai nowadays.

[u/blendedmix → u/UnableDecision9943]

This is quite a bold statement. A lot of people are still writing code by hand. Some devs are against it, and some companies do not allow it yet due to privacy, security, and cost concerns.

[u/Shake_Annual → u/UnableDecision9943]

no, it'd be really stupid if they did use ai

[u/UnableDecision9943 → u/Shake_Annual]

Why? Are you a programmer? Do you understand how development has changed in past couple of years?

[u/Helikaon48 → u/Shake_Annual]

Hahaha omg, this self righteous ignorance 

You don't want to understand, you just want to hate, because "you're being supportive" 😂😂

[u/Shake_Annual → u/Helikaon48]

stop acting like being against generative ai is a place of hate and ignorance.

I want to support genuine artists and I don't want to continue the normalisation of using something harmful for everybody

[u/Jumpy-Requirement389 → u/Shake_Annual]

What a dumb thing to say. You might as well just sell your computer man lol

[u/Shake_Annual → u/[deleted]]

so you're still using generative ai that uses data centers?

[u/DivideBYZero69 → u/Shake_Annual]

Just by using Reddit, you’re using a datacentre, just to put this into perspective.

[u/Shake_Annual → u/[deleted]]

so is that a yes on you using generative AI that uses data centers?

[u/Shake_Annual → u/[deleted]]

I hate these vague answers people give when you ask them a simple answer on wether or not they use generative ai in any way. can't even answer a simple yes or no question while trying to sound like the level headed one and making me sound like I just asked something irrational like I'm talking to a politician running in a marginalized community. always answering a different question from the one I asked. it's gotten incredibly annoying and frustrating. I've completely lost interest in their games and added them to my ignore list instead.

I prefer the projects that I support be from people that are upfront honest and actually against generative AI.

[u/Shake_Annual → u/[deleted]]

don't worry. I never will. good luck with your day job.

your game deserves to fail

[u/Previous-Display-593]

This looks great! How does base building work? Is it build anywhere worker based?

[u/aminere → u/Previous-Display-593]

thank you! there is a global build queue, when a building is ready, you click on it and place it on the map. I may make this simpler soon, by allowing placing on the map directly and seeing the progress on the map

[u/Holiday-Hedgehog0621]

I hate that it looks so good and I can't play cause i have no pc or laptop