One Long, Winding Road

BonusXP's Dave Pottinger checks in from GDC where he and Bruce Shelley are currently giving demos of Servo...

By Dave Pottinger

We finally got a chance to unveil Servo over the last week. The reaction has been outstanding. It seems like everyone is ready for a new kind of RTS game. Which is great, since that's what we're making.

As we've been demoing the game at GDC this week, we get asked a lot of questions. A common one is some version of "Why did you guys stop making RTS games?". That's a fair question for sure.

The answer is simple: we stopped making them because we got burned out. When all you do is make the same thing time after time, you lose some of the creative juice. We tried to make non-RTS games at Ensemble Studios, but we could never make it work.

When we started BonusXP, I don't think we had any plans to ever come back to RTS. After a while, though, we realized that we kept sticking strategy concepts into our games. Someone suggested that we make an RTS. After some initial shock, the idea took hold and we started working on a mobile RTS.

That mobile RTS (which is still in production) forced us to rethink a LOT of our perceptions about what an RTS game is. In a lot of ways, putting an RTS game on mobile is like putting one on a console. We have a fair amount of experience with that (see Halo Wars), but we still had to really burn the concept to the ground and rebuild it for that platform. That process got us re-invigorated on RTS as a whole.

Fast forward a bit and now we're working on Servo. It's got all the key pieces of an old-school Age of Empires game, but they're recast into this new concept. While you're not tasking villagers to chop down trees, you're still making those economic choices related to rushing or booming. You still have to decide how to counter your enemy's defenses. You need to think about splitting your forces to give 'em hell in more than one spot.

So, it's taken us a while, but we're back in a big way with a game that features huge mechanized machines beating the snot out of each other. I'm so proud of our team for pulling this off. It's exciting and scary all at the same time. I can't wait to share it with everyone over the next few months.