Shit that Rocks

[ed: A tiny list of guidelines behind the making of a wonderful strategy game and the unconventional fiction that lies within...]

Shit That Sucks

• elementals, golems and cunning trolls
• little kids coming of age and saving the world
• male-dominated pseudo-medieval society
• goblins with grenades, elves with bows, salamanders that start fires
• shitty poetry
• excalibur, zeus, tolkien and all other popular mythology
• shark week

Shit That Rocks

• screaming little guys on fire setting other little guys on fire (all running to the nearest water)
• forking lighting from the heavens frying fuckers and their friends
• carnage sauce: blood-spattered battlefields littered with limbs, heads and smoking craters
• two giants pounding the fuckcrap out of each other at close range with their fists
• deforming the height map from impacts; bouncing small objects from impacts; transparent textured terrain-following triangular-mesh expanding shockwave toroids from impacts
• bloody limbs hurling up into the camera, and in general things involuntarily leaving the ground
• dynamic camera; intelligent, interesting views of what’s going on
• dynamic shadows and light sources
• the glory that is the metaserver and all that comes from it
• starfield, moon, comet, eclipse, clouds environment-mapped onto the water
• giants kicking the fuckcrap out of man-sized units and watching them turn into bloody mists
• visible rain, snow and ash falls to prevent flying, fire-spells and missile combat
• line-of-sight, hiding in forests and otherwise “thick” terrain features
• polygon models: villages, stone monuments, bridges, archways, etc.
• one-pass distortion maps for heat and teleporter effects
• celebration, idle and bored animations
• voices!: trash talking, cross-species insults, battle cries, relevant and irrelevant commentary, etc.
• flapping standards with custom textured flags
• transparent auras to show: disease, charm, selection, magic level, item possession, etc.
• crossfading tinting to show paralysis, stoning, etc.
• lens flares, white hot transparent explosions, lights, transparent clouds of smoke and disease
• bleeding objects continue to bleed when being carried by units, wounded units occasionally bleed
• live unit renaming, pre-game questions and “draft” in network games
• named, undocumented post-(net?)game bonus points
• quicksand, swamp, snow

Excerpt from the Myth: The Fallen Lords Design Document, assumed 1996