Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by forrestthewoods 695 days ago
> Planetary Annihilation was close to being a good game

PA: Titans is 85% positive on Steam with over 10,000 reviews. It's objectively a good game!

> I got the impression the engine was consuming too much of their attention.

I think you have the order of operations wrong.

Having multiple, spherical battlefields was arguably a mistake. It absolutely limited the game's audience and made controlling things much more confusing and difficult.

But you have to remember this game started as a Kickstarter. We didn't have a prototype, just a vision. The game was sold on multiple planets of combat. There was no way we could have possibly changed the game from multiple spheres to a flat 2D plane after raising $2.2 million on KS.

In fact I'd argue there were multiple "bad ideas" that we were forced to ship because the community decided they were PROMISED those features. Sometimes those promises were things like the core vision sold on KS. But sometimes the features were small things casually mentioned as ideas being considered. Managing community expectations is very difficult!

PA 1.0 was a bit a flop for reasons. But PA: Titans was quite good. The game was shipped on a custom engine in just 2 years, or 3 years for Titans. In hindsight it's one of the most impressive team achievements of my career. I don't know how we did it.

1 comments

I bought grew up with Total Annihilation and tbh Planetary Annihilation is a step backwards...

I still play TA ...

I also still play TA from time to time. It is kind of annoying that if your screen resolution is big enough to display the entire map at once that it crashes.