You’ve probably heard of Planetary Annihilation, one of the more crazily successful Kickstarter games from recent times. Previously, we’ve seen visualisations and game engine clips of the Total Annihilation-inspired RTS, but today we get to see buildings and units — including the almighty Commander — running around in-game.
The video focuses on the user interface and construction, including the game’s extremely neat approach to replays. Thanks to the client-server (rather than peer-to-peer) model, Planetary Annihilation is a lot more flexible when it comes to playing replays and handling legacy recordings.
As creative lead Jon Mavor explains:
I put a few stakes in the ground of things that I wanted the game to be able to do. One of those was robust replays, so that we could basically have the game completely recorded … and have it work.
In a traditional synchronous RTS if you change to much — if you change balance, if you change anything about how the game works — the replays break and you have to come up with systems to run the replays on older versions.
One point of concern is the planned release date of “Summer 2013”, or a July-September window converted into southern hemisphere terms. That gives Uber five or so months to finish the game, which sounds like a fair chunk of time, but in reality is actually quite tight.
That said, I’m sure these guys know their stuff and given what Uber wants to do with Planetary Annihilation, I’m more than willing to give the developer some leeway with the release.
Planetary Annihilation: April 19, 2013 [YouTube]
Leave a Reply