Birth of Legends draws inspiration & ideas from several games on a variety of platforms.

Released as an exclusive on the Nintendo 64, RotBD puts the player in command of a futuristic (albeit this is an alternate history sometime during the 1930s-1940s) army in a variety of environments from the moon to Venus to the moons of Jupiter. It features a mixture of first person shooter & real time strategy elements resulting in a unique gameplay experience where you both are commanding units in the field & getting caught up in engagements personally as you as the player are also a unit in the field. The game features a variety of unit types such as your portable production facilities, main battle tanks, artillery units and deployable turrets.

Brothers in Arms is a PlayStation 2 game where you are commanding a small squad of US soldiers during World War II. It is foremost a first person shooter but it has elements of tactical shooters where during engagements you can order your friendly soldiers to reposition, perform suppressing fire against positions. In some cases, tanks can be driven & commanded by the player. Primarily you are working with squads of up to 4 soldiers.

Battalion Wars is a game closer in the vein of BattleZone but instead of you having a unit specific to your presence in the field, you are able to “headhop” to your other units in the field at will, allowing an AI take over control of the unit you were just controlling prior. Army sizes here can be pretty sizeable of mixed unit types ranging from artillery, main battle tanks, infantry and machine gun jeeps.

Birth of Legends will be partially an experiment in combining elements of all of the inspirational games above. This means there is two similar approaches, one that is the intention & desire, and the other that is currently a fallback for a scaled back game that is much more attainable for a small/single man development team.

The ideal will be a multi-stage game initially focusing on multiplayer with the following gamemode below. Behind these modes is a whole storyline that has been written but would be hard to execute on in the early stages.

Platforms will be Windows and Linux at minimum, MacOS as a stretch if it continues to be easy to support.

There isn't necessarily a large wide spread audience for this type of game, but it is apparently large enough for Rebellion to purchase the rights to Battle Zone and do graphical upgrades across several of the games.

It should generally appeal to players of tactical shooters of other types & maybe to some extent RTS players.

Standard deathmatch mode, primarily intended as a simple enough mode to implement for testing the first person shooter mechanics of the game.

On the lobby, players select their starting vehicle from the entire roster of the game and a map to duke it out on. Round ends either at a timer or if the kill cap is reached. Winner of the game is whoever has the most kills cumulatively.

This mode goes by the same name as it is in BattleZone 98 / Redux. It is intended as the primary game mode in multiplayer.

On the lobby, players select their faction, team numbers & associations, start points and finally starting vehicle (from any of the considered valid starting vehicles). Round ends either at a timer or if all hostilities (ie. only one set of teams all friendly are left).

This mode will have to answer several design questions that Battle Zone has failed to answer, listed below.

These two genres are fundamentally at odds with each other.

First person shooter wants you personally involved in the action, as the “hero”. Typically all of the complexity of the game is in the equipment selection, character selection, customization and the actual mechanics of engagement.

However, RTS is more standing back and ordering the cannon fodder to do the dirty work. This is further reinforced by the large amount of units typically operating by the end of a match.

They are at odds because FPS emphasizes individual performance while RTS emphasizes overall group cohesive performance. Further, there is a cognitive overhead in both approaches individually that may be too much for many to deal with simultaneously should both be fully fleshed out. This cognitive overhead combined with the active erosion of individual performance may encourage players to primarily play from the RTS overhead view.

Battle Zone tried to solve this by artificially limiting access to the RTS overhead view and forced you to command units from the first person perspective primarily.

Resource collection, the economy, is a key component of anything with RTS mechanics. In Battle Zone, you use scrap which comes from your starting pool, scrap fields that are finite, and most notably, recovered from destroyed units in the field.

Collection from destroyed units encourages players to push less as all lost units are reinforcing the enemy's economy. You are, in essence, delivering scrap to the enemy's doorstep.

This isn't in itself necessarily a problem, but it is a crucial part of the design considerations.

Battle Zone also has a secondary resource, pilots, that are literal bodies needed to operate the vehicles you construct. It is possible to raise this number through the construction of the Barracks at your base but can otherwise be used to set a unit cap.

The AI in the game should be satisfying to fight while still easily controllable by the commander. In Battle Zone, the AI was much more in line with the typical RTS units where there is little to no logic running which results in very boring behaviors from the first person perspective. This combined with overall low range weapons that often feel the same (but with varying stats) contributes towards a lackluster first person experience.

The fallback idea is a somewhat smaller scale possible game. While labeled the fallback, it is in essence approaching the game from the other direction - rather than multiplayer first, it will be campaign (still with multiplayer support) first. It will instead focus down on playing more like Brothers in Arms in the following ways:

• The player is in control of a smaller set of units (at maximum 20).
• The player may be outnumbered by large numbers of hostiles in some cases.
• The player will be focusing more on tactical operation of the units they have and less on growing the army or building the base.

Platforms will be Windows and Linux at minimum, MacOS as a stretch if it continues to be easy to support.

Most definitely players of tactical shooters because of the focus on first person combat in the most effective way possible.