Their last hope was Wildman: an action RPG with RTS elements that they hoped to fund through Kickstarter. That left Gas Powered dependent on the next publishing deal for its survival, and those all fell through last year. The terms of publishing deals for medium budget games are just too demanding: if a developer needs 10 million to make their game, it has to make five times that before they start seeing any of it. Despite their critical and commercial success, none of their projects made enough money to start earning Gas Powered royalties. “Jon told me Planetary Annihilation was tailormade for me – it would give me the chance to exercise my passion for AI without the influence of having to deal with a publisher. “GPG was the only development studio that gave me a shot.” But Uber could offer him the kind of work he really wanted to be doing. Its maps span several planets, it raised $2.2 million on Kickstarter and, after much nagging, they've persuaded Mike Robbins to join them. But he and his team are now developing their own take on the large-scale RTS: Planetary Annihilation. Like Chris, he started by making something completely different: competitive shooter Monday Night Combat. Supreme Commander programmer Jon Mavor left the company when the game was complete, to form Uber Entertainment. The next game in the loose lineage of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander may come from outside Gas Powered. He was there in time to work on the AI for their fantasy RTS Kings and Castles, but development on that was suspended indefinitely when Gas Powered couldn't find a publisher. He joined towards the end of the development of Supreme Commander 2 – too late to do much to that game's weak AI, but he later helped to massively improve it in an official patch. Gas Powered ultimately hired Mike for his AI skills, but the timing was awkward. “If the AI sees an opponent building long-range artillery within firing distance of its base,” Mike says, “it will start building shields to protect itself.” "The next game in the loose lineage of TA and SupCom may come from outside Gas Powered." Sorian AI makes them much more efficient, and much better at reacting to how you attack. “Mike and I spent the next few months tweaking and refining the AI, and integrating feedback to make the AI as fun to play against as we could.” Supreme Commander's economy system was so complicated that even its own AIs screwed it up: they'd frequently overproduce, wasting time boosting their resource gathering when they didn't have the production facilities to spend it.
0 kommentar(er)
