As a 40yr old developer of a FOSS RTS game (not released yet), I generally aim at games taking from 20 - 30 minutes. This is because I usually have only about 1 or 2 hours to play games with the bois after work. Additionally, I am usually extremely tired, so I try to implement a lot of QOL features that make the game less arduous to play.

Recently a popular RTS game that uses the same engine as mine has had a lot of sweats complaining about widgets (Long story, but they are unsynced bits of lua code that can extend things. They have limited access to the synced state, but are still pretty powerful). Basically people complaining about a specific widget that will make your units try to stay at max range when in a fight. While this sounds pretty useful, in the case of players who are relatively decent with rts gameplay, it’s more of an irritation to deal with than anything else.

But as a developer of this type of game, I have a vested interest in making players who aren’t as good be able to compete with players like myself who are really good. If that means some (very) rudimentary AI will try to make your units behave somewhat intelligently when you aren’t paying attention, I’m totally down for that. I find that as I get older, even though I am extremely experienced and good in rts games, I appreciate such tools existing for the players who simply aren’t that great. I don’t get my dopamine hits from steamrolling another player, I get my hits from good fights and satisfying battles. A lot of people I talk to make me feel like an outlier, but I know good and goddamn well that there are a lot of lesser skilled players that just wouldn’t bother with speaking up.

I have a very large problem with games that don’t respect my time. Elite Dangerous is a perfect example. I avoided it for a very long time because people went on and on about how hard it was to fly. Turns out, anyone who played descent 1 and descent 2 (And now Overload on steam (seriously, buy this shit, it’s modern descent built by the original devs and it’s amazing)) can fly the crafts with ease. The space combat is pretty shit tier. However, it’s gorgeous, and super cool, BUT, the developers refuse to implement any sort of fast travel. The sheer amount of time that it takes to get anywhere is mind boggling. I would spent 6 hours flying on a day off, and still not manage to really get anything done. This is the perfect example of a game that does not respect my time. I HATE games like this. I try to understand that time literally is money. That isn’t only a cliche. As you get older, you realize that time is a resource, and as you get older, you find that you have so little free time, that any time lost can be a really heavy blow.