Hi All,

With the advent of SCBW being free and SC1 Remastered, I am looking to throw myself back into the ring.

This post is to gauge how people feel about my ideas, and to also discuss ideas.

I want to recreate Temple Siege, but in a Round Based, Arena Style, 1 life, 3 wins/5 rounds format. Much like Battlerite.

Big Differences:

• Each hero will start with 3 abilities (Z, D, and T) immediately, with their Ultimate ability (K) unlocked at Round 3.
  
• The units in the gateway themselves will no longer cost gas. Instead, it will have to be trigger/text based, allowing for more variety in mana costs. This does mean the mana costs will need to somehow be effectively shown.
  
• The units in the gateway must now be produced immediately, rather than a build time of 1 like in TS1. Delay can be introduced onto the abilities themselves. This is to allow some Combos to work (being able to press Z, Z, and have something different occur)
  
• Each hero will only have 1 life each Round.
  
• Arena will be small, but will still have at least 1 wave of minions that pushes, with a Lower HP Temple to Defend/Push, with Lower HP and Damage Cannons that defends it.
  
• Round is won once the Temple is Destroyed, or when all players are Eliminated.
  
• Healing at Temple will now require time, instead of instantly healing you to your current HP level.
  
• At the beginning of each round, you can pick your upgrades (Increase Max HP, Increase Mana Regen and Max Mana, Increase Minerals for Attack/Armor upgrades) (these are the civilians you get per level up in TS1).
  
• At the beginning of each round, you pick One of various "Talents" (name pending) that alter your abilities. Much like Battlerite and HotS, each round is a "talent tier", with unique talents for each hero at each tier. For example, as a Warrior, before Round 1, you can pick one of A B C Talents. Before Round 2, you can pick one of D E F Talents, and so on.
  
• Talents will work to change your playstyle. For example, the Ranger, instead of spawning Mutalisks for Burning Arrows, it will spawn Guardians for more range, but less splash damage.
  
• Regular upgrades (HP, Mana, Minerals) is awarded after each round. Extra Civs are awarded per Assimilator your team has in the arena when the round ends (you will need to make a probe at your temple, and bring it to the vespene geyser and build an assimilator. You will also need to defend it before the round ends). This is the equivalent of "Jungling", creating fights outside of the path of the minions. Vespene Geysers will be placed on the sides of the Arena, and maybe one in the center. This is the only way to give yourself a statistical advantage over your enemy team each round (of course, this can change)
  

That is it for now, I will continue to edit this post. Please share some thoughts and ideas complaints and death threats.

Thanks!

Post has been edited 6 time(s), last time on Apr 7 2017, 10:22 pm by UnholyUrine.

Can I contribute some terrain?

The 1 life idea is very nice. However I think the items should be very minimal in this game. Items, upgrades and the like, I would like to see very little of. From your description I am imagining each round lasts maybe 5 or so minutes. This would make 5 * 5 = 25 minute long game. That's already really long! Items are usually involved with HP/Mana, and HP/Mana regen in these kinds of games. However without much of a leveling up/grinding style, these kinds of items do not really support the core design goal of round based fighting.

It could be really cool if there were perhaps only 16 items in the game. During a 4v4, each player could take on some kind of team role. So 16 / 4 = 4, or in other words, each role would have an item dedicated to that role with varying styles. Perhaps 4 defensive or crowd control items, and 4 bursty items, and so on.

My personal motivation for expressing a small item count is mainly the learning curve and game duration. A lower learning curve is more fun for StarCraft maps. We aren't all 16 years old anymore with endless spare time. We want a well curated experience without sinking in too much up-front learning time. Additionally, we don't want super long matches anymore, we want the core experience to be good rather than to be entertained for a long time.

Hope these thoughts are helpful in some way

One more piece of advice. May I suggest to use a pretty small arena? Smaller arena and smaller scope in the game will allow you as the developer to make a higher quality experience without spending too much time trying to make too many features. Less items, less terrain, shorter game length, all in trade for higher quality design and core experience. That's the idea anyway.

P.S. items, updgrades, what have you, it's all the same to me Just make less of them!

P.S. P.S.
Also as far as upgrades or ability upgrades go. If you try to design such that each hero can upgrade abilities, suddenly the amount of dev-work to get all the upgrades completed balloons as the number of heros goes up. Instead I propose to make all upgrades/items hero-independent by design. To go with my 16 item example, if by design all heroes can use any item then it is suddenly not nearly as much work to implement. Only 16 different things. However if the design is solid, each player can pick a champion, and then pick some items, and in combination with the rest of the team's configuration there are endless possibilities for strategies and styles. It's a good setup for interesting emergent behavior.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 7 2017, 8:51 pm by CecilSunkure.

Hi Cecilsunkure

Thanks for the feedback.

If I understand correctly, you are saying that, instead of Talents unique to each hero, it'll be 16 generic talents for that every hero can pick. Is that correct?
I am certainly against generic items, though, as it feels uninteresting to me, and I feel it frontloads a lot of information. Having "Talent tiers", where talents are introduced each round feels better.

I don't think it's possible to do 4v4 as there still must be minion waves. I'm still debating it, but a lot of the nuances of ability damage in TS1 is based on if there are minions nearby, which spreads out the damage, lowering the burst damage of the abilities.

I've always known that 20 minutes is the sweet spot for UMS maps, perhaps I should even change it to 2 wins/3 rounds. That will make the "Talent" choices a lot harder to do, and I will need to frontload all 4 abilities, rather than spread it out. I may have to test out both 2wins/3rounds and 3wins/5rounds.

If ya wanna do the terrain, go ahead, but make sure you have a max of 192x192, as anything bigger than that will make the unit dots in the minimap a lot smaller (I think is 192x192, gotta double check)

I was thinking smaller than 192 by 192, but yeah after you post up the map and have in basic functional terrain I would be happy to take the map and make some contributions