Pocketwatch Games confirms new RTS

Pocketwatch Games, the team behind last year's excellent indie title, Monaco: What's Yours is Mine, has just revealed details surrounding their new game.

Talking to RPS, the studio, headed up by Andy Schatz, has described the game - currently under the working title Armada - as "an RTS you could play in a party setting," and one that will focus on gamepad control.

"I spent much of last summer prototyping games, and the first one I did was similar to Monaco in a lot of ways," Schatz said. "It's a game design I have been holding onto for years and years, and the first time I built some iteration of this was back in college with my room mate. It was called Dino Drop and was a split-screen strategy game with autonomous units."

"The idea of a real-time strategy game with autonomous units has always been something I have wanted to make. We only ever got into the very basics of the prototype of that game, but it stayed, and that's also the inspiration of the Venture games that I built: dropping characters into a world, and using your knowledge of their behaviour to develop a strategy."

It was that basic premise that led Pocketwatch towards this new project: "I'm not even ready to get into the narrative or setting of the world yet, which is an odd way to approach it," Schatz said.

When it comes to the reason for championing a controller-based RTS, an input that doesn't usually work as well as it does on keyboard and mouse, Schatz said: ""These days I don't want to sit at my desk to play RTS games with strangers. Even though I am a PC gamer, I want something more comfortable. One of the shells I'd like to crack here is to be able to play this game at a deep level, but also make it approachable for people who aren't familiar with or immediately comfortable with PC RTS games."

"What we're building, at its heart, is a multiplayer real-time strategy game, and that revolves around community. One of the things I found with Monaco was that just developing in the open from the beginning is fun. Every single time you have an idea you can test it in public. We'll have it on Early Access as soon we have a build that is playable," added Schatz, before later concluding: "We want to make someone's favourite real-time strategy game, of all time. If we can do that, we'll have succeeded."

There's nothing in the way of art for the game (hence the pictures attached), and no details on release plans, platforms, or anything like that. Details might be thin on the ground, but that doesn't mean we're not excited about what Pocketwatch could potentially deliver. More details when we have them.