Towards Integrating Role Playing Game Constructs in Real-Time Strategy Games

The computer game industry has grown to a million dollar industry with new titles coming out every month. However, with all these great achievements, the video game industry does have one significant problem: games are played in similar ways. One particular genre for which this is true is the group of real time strategy games. Almost all of these games have the same structure, in which players first build and upgrade a base, with the property that the more upgraded the base the more powerful the units that can be built, and the more powerful the units the better chance of winning. With prospects for making a successful game rewarding a company with perhaps millions of dollars more games are now flooding the shelves and quantity has become more important than quality [2][6]. This paper reviews our work on improving real time strategy (RTSs) games by incorporating aspects from role playing games (RPGs)[1]. In this case, the four major components from the role playing game are: character equipment, character advancement, character customization, and character classification. In addition, this paper describes a successful application of the unified modeling language (UML) to game design. By demonstrating game design through UML, programmers could see potential problems with game play before the entire code was written. This paper presents a pilot game which was developed in order to prove that real time strategy games could in fact be enhanced with role playing constructs.