Hi there 
,
I’d like to slowly start introducing a project I’m working on: Age of Rites. It’s a grid-based isometric 3D RTS set in a fantasy world where gods are central to the gameplay. Besides building a base and an army, you devote yourself to one or multiple gods whose demands will shape your play style.
Taking heavy inspiration from Age of Empires 2: Definitive edition (In play style, speed and depth), I am aiming for a game that’s easy to learn, hard to master.
Everything in this post is very early and can still change.
Gameplay loop
What I currently have in mind for the gameplay loop is as follows:
- Gather: Collect resources to fuel economy and military
- Build: Construct buildings for production, tech, and divine worship
- Devote: Invest in your chosen god(s) through prayers, sacrifices, and rituals
- Fight: Engage the enemy with units shaped by your race and divine bonuses
- Adapt: React to opponents god choices, army composition, and map state
Resources
It’ll have the resources you’d expect: Food, wood stone, gold and faith. The first four are gathered from the map, but faith is gathered differently, depending on the god(s) you’ve chosen. For example, for one of the gods I’ve drafted the idea of needing sacrifices. You’ll get a special unit that needs to collect bodies (Either after a fight, or sacrifice your own) to sacrifice at a temple. (I realise this could very well be a “sounds good on paper, but not in practice” type of idea, but we’ll see).
Priests, rituals and win conditions
Every player has 1 priest. It can defend itself but is weak in combat, but relatively fast. If this unit dies, it’s game over (Also known as “regicide” gamemode in RTS games, or defend the king), but traditional win conditions are also possible. Such as domination, enemy resign, or ascension (After reaching the last tier of a god’s progression and building a wonder in it’s name, that you’d protect for a given duration). I envision priests to be a high risk high reward type of playstyle. To “age up” you’d have to perform rituals physically at the temple. The priest must remain stationary at the temple for the duration of the ritual.
Each ritual consumes real resources from your stockpile as offerings (food for feasts, wood for pyres, gold for adorned altars, stone for shrines)
Different gods demand different resource mixes per unlock, pressuring your economy in specific directions.
I want to create artifacts. One per god. They need to be collected with a priest, and put into a shrine (one shrine can hold one artifact). They give a trickle of faith, but cannot be too close to other artifacts in shrines. Once a shrine holding an artifact is destroyed, so is the artifact, and the player destroying it gets a single chunk of faith. (Again, with artifacts I’m hoping to have priests go out as a high risk high reward type of play).
With this, I hope to create a point of interest. Enemy players might target and attach the temple area to force the priest off the temple, which’ll slowly decay your ritual progress.
Gods
I’ve roughly drafted 4 gods concepts currently. I will share more info about them in a later post. Rather than picking bonuses at fixed age-up moments (AoM style), players have access to all gods during a match and continuously invest in them via in-game progression trees.
Besides, I envision gods to have demands besides bonuses, forcing you into a specific playstyle when you align yourself with a god.
Each god has a rival, progressing in one causes regression in its rival (internal to the player, not cross-player). This might change, but for now I have this idea to prevent maxing out everything in a match, and enforcing specialisation over generalisation.
Races
I currently have 6 races roughly sketched out, but I doubt I’d be able to do them all so I’ll focus on just 2 for an eventual demo down the line. Races share core unit categories (villagers, infantry, ranged, etc.) but with meaningful stat and visual differences. Each race would have a unique passive mechanic that changes how you approach base-building, expansion, and combat.
Every race can align with every god, so you’re not too restricted.
Progress
I learned that building an RTS is a lot of work before you can really see or do anything. Because one of my goals was to build it lockstep deterministic from the start (In case I ever want to dabble in multiplayer, but also for logging, replay, etc.). But it’s slowly shaping up to be something. I’ve got a pretty ok pathfinding system in place for now, and some placeholder models (as I’m learning 3D modelling with this project also with BlockBench). But obviously it’s still very rough.
Currently working on the resource gathering and economy for this epic. And the next one will be focussed on unit production from buildings.
I’ll be sharing more info over the coming time, probably ask for input and help from you, the community, but continue to slowly chip away at this project.
Here’s some impressions of the current state:
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