ART's original purpose was to be a simple RTS engine which could support a variety of computer-controlled strategies. AI is still a focus of the project, but the primary design goal of ART has changed to simply making a full-featured 2D RTS game which can be enjoyed by someone with prior experience playing RTS games. Graphics are important, but have significantly less priority than most other gameplay elements. Instead of creating 100s of unit and building types, a focus is placed on creating a handful of units (no more than 10 unit types and 10 building types) such that there are several different feasible winning strategies. Therefore unit and building balance is important, as is game pacing in terms of construction times, movement rates, and mining speeds.

Except for some QA testing and discussions with friends any my fiancee Rina, nearly all of ART has been designed and implemented by me. Once the first public release has been completed, I will probably take on other developers if there is interest in the project. But given that there is only one person working on development now, I am trying to keep the project's goals feasible given limited time and resources.