Prev

Dune: Game Design Skinny (pg.3)

The Global View
The global game view provides an overall planetary view of Arrakis (Dune), where all the action occurs. The player's Fiefdom and other Houses are present as some of the many available overlays on the rotating image of the planet. Specific areas can be selected and zoomed-in, such as encampments and mining operations. This interface is used to achieve the player's primary charter: the production and delivery of Spice to the player's Lord.

The player at this level monitors Global and fiefdom-wide events, including: trade and personnel ships arriving, edicts of the Emperor, sandstorms, activities of the Fremen (indigenous peoples), etc. Some of these events are known to occur at certain times on the game clock. The player has control of their primary trade outpost, any bases in the their fiefdom, and harvester fleets. At the Global level the player can engage in communications and trade with other players, follow the distribution of resources (fuel, personnel, equipment, convoys, Spice) from one place to another as they move in game time, search out new resources, spy on opponents, hire administrators, acquire Heroes, initiate and respond to missions, establish space perimeter (satellite-based) defenses, pay "visits" to the Bene Gesserit, Fremen, or other faction leaders for requests and influence, etc.

Influences is accrued at this level with the various factions through positive trade and by responding to their requests for items, regional access, support or directed military conflict. Influence can be spent to get favors in return. For example, with enough Imperial influence the player could get a legion of Imperial Sardaukar from the Emperor, perhaps get him to pay a personal visit, get the trading rights of a rival house revoked by the High Council, or get a hand-picked Judge of Change to oversee the takeover bid of the Major House of Arrakis.

Of course, treachery is fully allowed. Treachery against another faction results in a partial or complete loss of influence with that faction. Under the right circumstances such a loss may be worth it - and it may result in a net gain of influence with other players.

In many ways this level of play is a real-time game which just operates on a fixed clock. The player can enter a turn any time they like, in the meantime, while the clock runs, they can consider, move, set, reset and then finally commit their strategy in one fell swoop. Events will still take a fixed amount of game time to occur once set in motion. In this fashion players can execute asynchronous turns, as the commands provided by a player don't execute until the turn is registered. All events happen in relative game time, regardless of how many "turns" the player allows them to execute.

Opportunities for special missions occur during the single-player campaign while watching the Global view, or alternatively can be played as tactical multi-player combats. The nature of such missions may be to assassinate one of the other faction's Heroes, take out a force field generator, or something equivalent in which the player pits a handful of operatives or Heroes against the might of a base. These missions can either be micro-managed or the AI can resolve them automatically from the Global level, as in any combat.

The Builder View
From the Global scale the player can zoom-in to any tactical zone that makes sense, making a transition from the planetary view to something very much on the scale of a Warcraft "board".

The structures visible at this scale could make up a remote sensing outpost, a harvester zone, a hidden weapons cache, a supply depot, a full military base, or a central command facility or city. At this level the player can build structures, explore the surrounding terrain, place units, instruct them with default strategies, assign their Heroes, etc. Additionally, the player can assign facility administrators so that structures are automatically built to a certain template or so that battles do not have to be micro-managed but will take place in a certain fashion. Building structures requires the materials to be handy on the site; if not, they will have to be transported from other sites, perhaps ordered from the Space Guild, another player, or the Emperor, all of which will take game time to deliver. Better materiel allows for more rapid Spice acquisition (and therefore more money, which can buy influence as well as men/equipment/etc.) or better offensive/defensive capabilities or better training, resistance to spies and assassins or a variety of other things. This level of micro-management is not necessary to engage in, as facility administrators can be purchased or assigned to oversee operations of any zoomed-in area. Minor Houses that owe fealty to the player operate as administrators over what could be multiple sites and tiers of facility administrators. These Houses can be fully micro-managed by the player, but such heavy-handed involvement in internal affairs will certainly breed resentment and loss of influence. This detailed micro-management can be engaged in to any level desired by the player, or almost completely ignored with the assignment of administrators and heroes. Note that global game time continues to elapse at a constant rate while the player is micro-managing at this level.

The Tactical View
This is the scale of combat or infiltration missions. At this scale players are in control of a variety of units on a highly zoomed-in field of battle. All placement previously done by the player at the Builder View is present here - however, note that the Tactical View is yet another level zoomed-in from the Builder View. At this level buildings are very large, and individual troopers can be made out and ordered as desired.

The time scale of tactical operations is much smaller than of global operations, being measured in seconds and minutes rather than hours and days. This means that tactical operations cannot be concurrently executed while global operations are also occurring, necessitating the multi-player game division between Global dominance and Tactical combat.

Of course, this view will look ultra-cool, with big pyrotechnics and other flashy eye-candy. Additionally, a level of autonomy will be manifested by all the troops, especially by the Heroes the player may command at this level, with their special abilities demonstrated graphically. If the player doesn't order their troops to the exhaustion of their movement capability for the turn and instead allows them autonomy (which can be somewhat guided from a menu of directives) the units will spend their additional movement during the turn in not-necessarily-predictable ways. By executing such movement individual units will attempt to execute the player's orders as they and their morale see fit. The results of Tactical operations are immediately reported in the Global View once complete, with resulting effect upon the overall flow of the game or the reactions of other Houses. In a multi-player game this is not an issue, as tight tactical operations only occur in that mode of the game, and the resolution of operations at the tactical level indicates the end of the game. Resolution of Tactical operations in single-player mode may result in another step being taken in the campaign path, with an associated cutscene presented and the story progressing to the next chapter.

In Summary
Dune stands to be one of the great games of its time. Dune is founded on game elements that embrace the cutting edge of game design: strategic turn-based combat, a user-scalable level of micro-management, economic, construction and political simulation models, all possessing spectacular 3D effects in every view. Additionally, all of the design elements owe their flavor to, and are melded seamlessly with, the original awe-inspiring vision of Frank Herbert. We have in Dune a game whose time has come; able to take advantage of the existing technology base and unify that technology with advances in game design, delivering on its promise of a breathtaking foray into the vision, the feeling, and the dream that millions around the world have experienced as DUNE.

Prev