Thank you 💂! Ya I loved War3 as well. It defined a lot of my childhood. I moved onto DoW, DoW2, and COH later in my life and they really redefined the genre for me. Since playing them its been hard for me to see War3 and SC style RTSs in the same light. That's part of why I made this game. War3 melee maps hold up pretty well, but IMO its less of a strategy game and more of a like a "fighting" game. The arena mode in this game is partially inspired by War3's combat. When making this game I invested a huge portion of my time creating the macro aspect of the game. In retrospect I wish I hadn't and just focused on the micro arena battles. I think had I had time, adding some hero classes that level up and more balanced focused on the arena it could have been really fun. But obviously a very different game.
So unfortunately movement had to be tuned between two very distinct modes. The arena mode, the movement was too fast even now its too fast and the macro mode its way to slow. I think if I had more time I would have made the arena maps larger to allow for more regularities between the two modes.
"explain to him how RTSs worked to play it." I ran into this issue with a friend play testing it as well, particularly the resource gathering maps. I ran out of time to create enough polish to make the game truly accessible to non-RTS players. It's unfortunate, especially as a majority of the time I invested in this project already went to polish. That coupled with the intentionally obtuse mechanics, it was hard to balance QOL with staying true to something that poked fun at the genre.
When I started making this game, I had to make a choice between going full "goat simulator" or actually making something challenging and fun. I chose the latter. Ultimately I think just doing something extra goofy would have been better but less of a valid critique of the genre.
Thanks for playing!