Legion Arena Wrap Report

High-Level Goals

When we started out, we knew what the major competitor was going to be - Total War. We've always been compared to them, even though we felt our games focused on different things, and visually, they were way ahead of us. For years we complained that we were being unfairly compared, and tried to educate the press but failed. :) We decided that there was nothing we could do to stop the comparisons, and the only way forward was to actually try and compete with them visually.

each of the battles and surrounding story are extensively researched... Hundreds of hours were spent researching the army compositions, background story and maps for the cutscene movies.

I'm not saying we've created an engine with our team of three that blows Total War away, but with Legion Arena, we have created a game that visually is at a similar level, whereas before, we have been light years behind. They use higher resolution textures on their men so they look more detailed, but we use four textures per squad, meaning that you get a variety within a squad and they don't look like clones. This type of idea runs all through the engine, and rather than try to do the same as they did but better, we've tried to do things differently. Some people will prefer their method, and others will say ours is best. The point is that we feel it is now fair to compare the games.

Gameplay-wise we also wanted to do something different. As mentioned, we wanted to broaden our audience. RTS games are generally more popular than turn-based, so we decided to make an RTS - after all, we have to sell games to eat! We didn't want to create a pure RTS as we felt the market was already saturated with them. We wanted something that took the best of RTS gameplay and took it in a different direction.

Technology

Phil had a huge amount of experience with 3D engines, so we knew this wasn't going to be an issue. It would take time, but it was something we knew he would be able to produce. Multiplayer was the scary area and we used Gamespy to help minimize the development time. We've used Miles Sound System in all our games to date and used it again for Legion Arena, as we didn't want to write our own - we had enough to do! We used the basic version of bink player for the intro movies, which play before the game .exe actually starts. Inside the game, we play avi's on a 3D texture, which allows us to scale it to the resolution and avoids any screen flicks when changing between the four available resolutions, and also avoids having to pay licensing fees for the in game bink sdk.

Changes and Enhancements

When we started, Legion Arena was intended to be an online-only game that was given away and people paid for premium features. We wanted to boost our online presence and thought this would be a good way to do it. The idea was that there would be a series of scenarios designed by us or other players, you would fight against them, and each time, your men would improve. It would all be played through our central server.

As the prototype started to come together and screenshots were released, we started to get a lot of interest from publishers. Showcasing the game at GDC 2005 was the highlight, and many people were blown away by what our small team had created. Some people refused to believe how many of us there were, and one went as far as to blatantly call us liars and storm off in disgust! Anyway, the outcome was that we picked up some publishing deals and the game was transformed from an online giveaway to a boxed product that would be sold through retail.

Development Timeline

The changes we had to make for this were extensive. Apart from anything else, one of the major requirements was the addition of a multiplayer mode. We'd been avoiding this because we've all got experience developing multiplayer RTS games and know what a heap of pain it can be. We finally decided we had to bite the bullet and went ahead, adding around six months to the project. On top of this, we also added movie introductions, cutscenes between each campaign (43 in total), voiceovers and many more features that extended the development cycle from an initial plan of three months to around 18.

Major Challenges

Probably the biggest challenge we have is producing a game with such a small team. Legion Arena is going out as a mid-price title, but at that level, you can pick up some very good games. If the price is the same, the gamers don't care how many people it took to make it - and rightly so! If we can't make a game that can compete, we shouldn't be in the business. What this means is we have to be really efficient and avoid rework as much work as possible by getting it right first time. Because of the nature of game development you can never completely avoid rework - if something isn't fun, it isn't fun, and we also made some mistakes but we'll cover that later!

Multiplayer was also a significant challenge. With the number of people we have, testing a two-player game takes up more than half the team! Multiplayer always eats up a lot of time, and we were really worried it would not all fall in to place in time. With a bit of luck and Phil's experience, we managed to get multiplayer in, and it is very stable.

One area we didn't expect to be so much work was the research. There are around 120 battles in the game. Some are pre-history so we had to use a bit of poetic license for these, basing the scenarios on plausible situations. Pretty soon though, you get into documented history, and each of the battles and surrounding story are extensively researched. I already had a good working knowledge of Rome, but was by no means an expert. Hundreds of hours were spent researching the army compositions, background story and maps for the cutscene movies. If I ever read another book on Rome, it will be too soon!