As more and more of my proposal is written more ideas start coming in with some being mechanics and others being design choices.
The biggest change in my project so far is how the resource system is going to work. Originally it was going to be similar to Age of Empires, where a villager is able to gather resources and return to either a town centre or a building that is appropriate for the resource, like a mill for food. However as I write my literature review I start thinking about other elements from different games, and one I quite like comes from Halo Wars.
Halo Wars is an real-time strategy game that was originally designed for consoles. It was a long shot for the developers to do this as due to advanced mechanics and the general style of the genre at the time it wasn't normal to have an RTS game on anything but PC. As it was designed for console a lot of features had to be optimised, but also follow RTS conventions. One example is with the resource gathering. No worker units exist in Halo Wars as it is all based off of a base you create, therefore to gain resources you just need a building. This idea I like a lot as it shows solutions to some problems that may arise.
Being a programmer and not a great artist I am relying on the Unity Asset Store as well as other areas to get my game assets. This is obviously not a preferred option as assets are never 100% how you want them to be, that is where having an artist helps a lot. However, being an individual project and at this moment having no good artist contact the Unity Asset Store is a safe option to go with. Therefore some intended assets I want to use don't have all the animations for this type of game, in this example any resource gathering animations. So using a style similar to Halo Wars I changed it to be based off buildings. The player will be able to create a lumbermill, place it near a forest and have a worker unit go inside and resources start going up.
A big design change was done by adding a siege unit for the human civilisation. It was made that an Ogre unit for the enemy civilisation was a siege unit to go against the base the player builds. It was an oversight that the enemy AI will be building a base as well, and for the player only having a melee and ranged unit that are infantry isn't going to do a lot against it. So a siege unit such as a catapult or trebuchet can hopefully be found and implemented to make this balance. At this point it was becoming clear that if the two civilisations are having similar styles, then as a could have the player could do a quick match as the goblins and ogres and vice versa the enemy could play as a human civilisation.
These are the biggest changes so far from my original idea, with some smaller changes to. These include unit name changes such as 'Worker' now replacing 'Villager' just to differ from Age of Empires more and by adding a few more research options that the player can choose. Similar to the past week the next week is going to be further work on my proposal before it needs to be handed in, and most likely some more gameplay elements will be changed.