RTS Design 101

Martin Snyder of Ethermoon has talked about the process of designing units for their real time strategy game, Strifeshadow -

"We start with a functional idea of what a unit, or a group of units is, and work from there to create a believable and interesting mythos. Take our Chaos Elemental for instance. The initial idea for this unit was a "fast, flying summoned skirmisher best used for air-to-air attacks" - not too interesting by itself. From this building block, we determined what exactly this unit .. would look and feel like in our fantasy universe."

Read the second part of his developer diary over on GameSpy for the full story...