Three Moves Ahead 137: Episode 137

Three Moves Ahead

Idle Thumbs

Video Games, Games, War, War Games, Strategy, Games & Hobbies, Strategy Games

4.8 • 532 Ratings

🗓️ 6 October 2011

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Richard Cobbett bravely joins Rob for a conversation with Achron creator Chris Hazard, despite the fact that Richard is weak as a kitten and sick as a dog. They talk about the difficulties indies face in the RTS genre, whether reviewers should make allowances for coarse but inspired games, and how Hazardous software has reacted to weak reviews. They also dig deep on Achron's mechanics and how they developed over the course of the project. Along the way, they prove once again that Achron is one of 2011's most fascinating RTS games. This is kind of a "deep-end of the pool" discussion. You might find these resources helpful: Giant Bomb's "quick look" video Richard's RPS review

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.
0:26.7	With me tonight is freelance writer Richard Cobbett. Richard, welcome to the show. Hi, good to be here. Good to finally get you on here. And also joining us to talk about his recently released RTSA-Kron is Dr. Chris Hazard. Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So, Chris, I guess I just want to start with you. I'd like you to tell us a bit about the background on Acron. When did you first get this idea and when did it become feasible? Yeah, back in 1999, I was in undergrad,
0:32.6	talking with one of my close friends about the RTS home world, which was one of the first
0:36.3	RTS is to really take advantage of the third dimension in its full space. And he was jokingly said to me, what if he had a 40 RTS? And that idea just stuck with me. And I thought, well, you could do all these other sorts of things. And I thought it would kind of be a very, very niche thing about having things move through four dimensional space. But then I thought, well, what if you had a time travel RTS?
0:56.0	And that idea really stuck on.
0:58.0	I spent about a couple of weeks estimating what it would take to run that sort of thing, and
1:02.0	I figured back in 99 that it would be about 2006 or 2007 before computers would be fast enough to run it.
1:08.0	So I began it as a, what I call a professional hobby, as in the software industry for a while,
1:15.2	and working through my PhD, working on this all the time in the background.
1:18.9	It was probably around 2008 that computers really became fast enough that we started
1:25.3	setting our sites on releasing an actual game for it.
1:28.3	Along that time it was always keeping up with the latest thing saying what can we
1:32.0	incorporate it, what can't we because there's a lot of considerations with respect to
1:36.3	RAM and CPU usage and all the performance things that a lot of other games get to take for
1:42.3	advantage or get to take for granted.
1:45.1	When you finally started working on it,
1:48.3	you know, one of the things that seem to come up a lot in criticisms of the game is that,
1:54.7	you know, it was, I mean, pathfinding was very clunky.
1:58.3	The AI couldn't play the game as completely as a human. When you started
2:01.9	working on this, what sort of challenges does, basically, when you are creating a time travel
2:09.6	RTS, how does the scale of the challenge increase?
2:14.6	Okay, to put things into perspective for path finding, we have about
	...

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