This guy got sick of losing in Starcraft, so he made his own strategy game

Back in 1998, Jeremy Lee was playing Starcraft in LAN shops in Singapore. A self-described competitive gamer back then, he was appalled at how the popular real-time strategy game rewarded player reflexes and quick movement rather than true strategy. He felt it was unfair he could lose in games simply because he misclicked, rather than because of a true strategic gaffe.

So when Lee met a potential investor from the IT industry in 2008, the 34-year-old seized the opportunity to develop his own strategy game: Foresight.

Together with his silent investor, Benny Tay, and his wife, Lee began development.

Conceptualization for Foresight began at the end of 2009, with development officially beginning in May 2010. Lee resigned from his full-time job as a technical manager to work on the game in 2011. He is a self-taught developer who started out making mods for strategy games.

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Initially a “semi-casual” development project, Lee says he made use of the Foresight project’s progress to attract talent to the team. His ambition wasn’t just to make a strategy game, but to also develop his own engine, which would help streamline development and could be used in future projects. A total of 20 individuals have worked on Foresight in its four years of development, with a core team of seven and 13 other freelancers.

From 2013, Lee has been working at home to finish the game, and it’s finally almost ready to launch. Many of the individuals who worked on Foresight were profit-sharing partners who moved on to consultative roles after finishing their allocated job scopes, so Lee is the only active developer for Strides Interactive at the moment.

What sets Foresight apart from other real-time strategy games like Starcraft is its focus on actual strategic play. While strategies are important in_Starcraft_, so is micro-management and speed – better known as your actions-per-minute or APM. Foresight focuses only on the strategic aspect, and will feature three different campaigns with 31 missions in total. There are three playable factions: the Slavic Siberians, the United Nations Confederation, and the North-South American Union.

Lee’s master plan for Foresight, which will be distributed by the UK-based Kiss Ltd that also recently published the Myanmar RPG DarkEnd, is to launch an expansion pack with an extended storyline and additional features for the game. Eventually, he hopes to also develop a version for console, which will make use of a third-person perspective.