Dear friends! We would like to congratulate all of you with the anniversary of the end of the WW1! November 11, 1918 Armistice of Compiègne was signed. As a result of this war four empires have ceased to exist: Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman.
But today we're not going to talk about the lessons that humanity must learn as a consequence of these horrific events, we want to tell you more about process of development Battle of Empires and about the challenges we faced in that moment.
How to start working on campaign?
“The ideas themselves are good but they are worth nothing without people who can perform them.”
These words of Henry Ford, every one of us (the authors of the game) considers 100% truthful. Especially considering that we are the very same people.
Everything starts from the Idea.
Let’s take as example the campaign for Russia.
That’s to say a plotless campaign - no general heroes and no any general storyline.
Why it came like this?
The development of any campaign starts with determining the number of missions and identification of the main battles and fights that we would like to show in the game. In the case of the campaign for Russia, we immediately faced with many difficulties that had to be overcome. Firstly, not every battle or fight left its mark on history. Secondly, sometimes it is impossible to make an interesting mission within the engine of those left battles. A classic example - "Attack of the Dead" from Osowiec. The mission was planned, but after we realized that in order to implement it we need a large-scale intervention in the engine (it would be necessary to change ready AI so as to perform the AI of empoisoned characters and their enemies), models (needed the empoisoned models) and new animations of empoisoned. It was decided to illustrate the siege of Ivangorod - our resources (mostly temporary) - are not unlimited.
In general, during development of the plan for the campaign and selection of suitable battles, head script writer takes into account many factors.
1. The necessary resources for missions - the list of new content.
2. The complexity of the implementation of events of the battle on the level of scripting and partly on design level.
3. Creation of the exciting atmosphere inside the mission - the large amount battles of WWI took place on the scenario: the enemy is ahead and why don’t we send a couple of regiments on him? Oh, everybody was killed? Then - a couple of divisions! Did not help? Then we send 10 divisions! You understand that to reflect the endless rush of infantry can be interesting one time ... Well, maximum 3 times.
4. It would be great, all things being equal, to choose the battles that led to the victory. Hardly anyone would want to command troops of XX Army Corps in winter 1914, knowing that the battle ended in defeat. Although ... that is the most important point of script writer skill - to find a loophole in a similar situation.
5. Time, time and time. It is a very serious factor. To test a mission with 30 minutes of game time is necessary to spend about 50 hours of testing. And for the mission in three stages, such as the storming of Buchach (Kara Celestial) – many times more.
Be in touch - in the future we will tell you how to we were looking for battles, how historical figures were chosen for their introduction into the game and we continue to talk about the challenges of development.