Phase 1: Introduction And Postmortem

So as you can see from the description the project is divided up into various Phases, with each phase representing important milestones on my path to realizing the ultimate vision of the game. Phase 1 was about establishing a bare bones prototype Unit Spawning, world creation, target selection, and Goal Oriented Action Planning (GOAP), all inside Unity's Data Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) framework and utilizing ECS [Entity, Component, System] systembase specifically. Phase 2 is about trying to refine all of that and create an objective based scenario for you to go through. Phase 3 will flesh this out further as I get through Phase 2 and see where I can go after that, as that system worked well in Phase 1 to inform what I should do in Phase 2. The last few days of Phase 2 work haven't moved the needle much as I'm wrestling with some decisions and a lot of work centered around implementing a more robust pathfinding system. So rather than write about wheel spinning, I decided it'd be best to write about what's happened so far.

Planning for this game has been going on paper for probably almost 6 years in various forms. The core idea has always been a large scale RTS that scales gradually throughout your playthrough without losing the micro control. You'll move units over a large map, but on the micro scale you can still command troops and get into fights. The phases are set up around metastable builds that I can experiment with, but still have a base to work off of. Phase 1 is that base.

Phase 1, was about making a working, aggressive combat system. It needed to work at small scale with just a couple people, but needed to scale up to hundreds. Entities for each faction were spawned using a spawner script attached to a game object, entirely without authoring components and prefabs. The reason for this being in order to  Approximately 120 hours were invested to make this work.