The Question of Radio Commander’s Sequel
I’m Jacob, the lead developer of the original Radio Commander, released in 2019. I was responsible for the game’s design, programming, and production, and worked with a few collaborators on art, writing, and audio - fantastic people who will eventually become the backbone of our studio, Serious Sim. Radio Commander was our first commercial video game.
At the time, I was working in academia, and the game started almost by accident - during Global Game Jam 2018. The theme of that year’s jam was “Transmission.” During that game jam, we decided to explore what a game could look like if the player didn’t directly see or control the soldiers, but instead had to communicate with them and make decisions based on incomplete information. That little game-jam experiment stuck with us. We kept working on it after hours, and eventually, almost two years later, it had grown into a full commercial game. Looking back, that origin story is important because it also explains one of the biggest problems I had with the idea of making a sequel.
Call for Backup - Global Game Jam 2018 version
After the release of Radio Commander, and later the Squad Management DLC, I became fairly sceptical about the idea of making another game in the series. I knew the original game had its problems. There were things we would have done differently, and plenty of lessons we learned during development. But I didn’t want to simply make the same game again.
One of the things that made Radio Commander interesting in the first place was its concept. You were sitting behind a radio, trying to understand what was happening on the battlefield through fragmented communications, maps, reports, and your own decisions. Sure, we could change the setting. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about different conflicts and theaters of war that could work with the same kind of approach. The Yugoslav Partisans during World War II were one of the ideas I considered, among others. But changing the uniforms and the battlefield wasn’t enough. I wanted the setting itself to bring something new to the formula.
Radio Commander 2019 mood art by Katarzyna Haptaś
At one point, we tried going in a different direction. We went back to some of the ideas that had been present in the original game jam prototype - particularly information asymmetry and local co-op - and developed a prototype called Call for Backup. The idea was to take some of those original concepts and push them further, rather than simply making Radio Commander 2.0. Unfortunately, the prototype didn’t meet the expectations of our publisher at the time, so it never turned into a full game.
Call for Backup - 2020 prototype
And eventually, we decided to move on. We started working on something completely different: a narrative racing game. That project eventually became Heading Out, which was released in 2024 after four very long years of development. It was a completely different beast from Radio Commander, and working on it consumed most of my attention for a long time. But even though we had moved on, I never completely abandoned the idea of a Radio Commander sequel. Somewhere in the back of my head, I was still looking for that missing piece - the right setting, the right mechanism, the thing that would make me think: yes, this is why we should make another one.
The spark came from a video essay. I watched a fantastic video by Lord Hardthrasher about the Battle of Britain. There were plenty of fascinating things in it, but one particular part immediately caught my attention: the Dowding system. If you’re not familiar with it, the Dowding system was the network of radar stations, observation posts, command centers, and communications that allowed the RAF to gather information about incoming German aircraft and coordinate the response. And the moment I saw it, something clicked.
An illustration of the "Dowding System" of defensive air control, from a 1941 Air Ministry pamphlet
The Battle of Britain wasn’t just a historical setting that happened to fit Radio Commander. The actual way the battle was organized and fought contained a mechanism that could become the core of the game - the information flow, the incomplete picture, reports arriving from different sources, decisions having to be made before you knew everything. For the first time, I could see how a sequel could take the fundamental idea behind Radio Commander and transform it into something new. Instead of commanding troops on the ground through a radio, you could be sitting at the heart of an air-defense network, trying to understand the battle unfolding over Britain and deciding where to send your limited resources. It felt like the perfect match.
Not long after that - I believe it was sometime in the last quarter of 2024 - we started prototyping what would eventually become Radio Commander: Battle of Britain ’40. And this time, I finally felt that we had a reason to make the sequel. It wasn’t about recreating the original. It was about finding another historical situation where information itself could become the battlefield.
The Battle of Britain Bunker is an underground operations room at RAF Uxbridge
Of course, realizing that and actually making the game were two very different things. The road from that first prototype to the game we have today was very challenging. There were plenty of dead ends, cursed design problems, and moments when we seriously questioned whether the whole thing was going to work.
But that is a story for the next tale.
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