War Stories: How Homeworld brought the third dimension to real-time strategy, Ars Technica

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So when we sat down with Relic co-founder and Homeworld designer Rob Cunningham, it was a bit surprising to learn that from his perspective the Homeworld we got in was less a refined and polished set of ideas and more like a minimum-viable proof-of-concept — what Rob describes as a series of sketches rather than full paintings. The small team, buoyed by Sierra’s publishing dollars, pulled together an iconic game and invented new gameplay systems more or less by the seat of their pants, finalizing working concepts without really having the chance to iterate and refine them. Even during a development cycle that took three times as long as originally planned, there just wasn’t time to do anything more.

The problem of how to translate the core concepts of a unit-based real-time strategy game from a flat playing field into a three -dimensional playing field ate up a lot of time — in fact, it’s the thing we focus on in the above video. As with many of our previous War Stories, there was a single solution to the problem. Rather, the designers had to take a step back and develop a string of fixes that adapted to the new challenges of strategic command in 3D. Playing in space had its advantages, of course — with no terrain to render, the developers could plow their entire polygon and texture budgets into the units themselves, allowing them to have sharply detailed spaceships with multiple levels of detail depending on distance. On the other hand, with no ground for orientation, helping the player not become disoriented and lost within the map (and even how to draw the map in the first place!) Was a major issue. What’s next?