Legion Arena Wrap Report

Best Decisions

During development there were some key stages where we made important decisions. The first of these was to strip out the campaign game and focus on the battles. We were getting stuck in a rut where our games were selling okay, but we felt we were not progressing to the next level and broadening our market. To be honest, all of us took significant pay cuts when we started working for Slitherine, and after five years, it was starting to feel like there was no end in sight. We needed to do something to shake things up, attract some new players and sell some more games so we could afford to pay ourselves a bit more. Initially, we were worried that it would leave the game too light, but we found over time that once we added the RPG elements, it was really good fun, and this was a great decision!

The 43 cut scenes are all presented in a History Channel style with superb voiceovers, so in between the battles, you get a mini-history lesson that's interesting and relevant to what's happening in your game.

Another key decision was to drop the online-only game. Unfortunately, a lot of work had already been put into creating the server and client model. This meant throwing away a significant amount of work, and for our small team, it was a hard decision. We've never done it before, and hopefully, will never throw away so much work again. I think the problem came from not believing in the game from the start. We didn't think it would be a game that you could sell in the shops, and so thought we needed an online distribution method. As it developed and grew in to the game it is today, our confidence grew, and we knew we had something better than anything we've created before. I just wish we'd believed in ourselves more at the start and been more ambitious as we would have saved ourselves a lot of work.

The last great decision we made was to sign a deal with Black Bean to publish the game in Europe. They have been a great partner. Our first game was signed worldwide to a publisher and the deal went sour, meaning we didn't get paid for a year. After this we always signed deals on a country by country basis to avoid having all our eggs in one basket, but this is a logistical nightmare as we have so many contracts! We were very nervous about signing all of Europe with Black Bean, but they've proven themselves to be a great partner, and we look forward to working with them again in the future.

Key Strengths

There are a few areas in which I think Legion Arena really excels. One is the UI and tutorial. The game is designed to be easy to use, so anyone can pick it up and play. There is also a great tutorial, which takes you through all the basics of the game step by step, which is often missing from strategy games. The idea is to remove all barriers to entry for young or old. The battle controls are designed to that they do not rely on fast reactions. The number of orders you can issue is limited by the experience of your general. This makes your pre-battle plan more important than in other games and reduces the need for fast reactions. Strategy really will win the day in Legion Arena.

The game model itself is extremely detailed. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it is probably one of the most detailed simulations of ancient warfare ever created. That doesn't mean it's complicated to control, as all of the clever stuff goes on under the hood. As far as the player is concerned, all the model does is provide realistic feedback to their decisions.

As mentioned above research was a significant task, and we're really pleased with the whole look and feel of the game. The 43 cut scenes are all presented in a History Channel style with superb voiceovers, so in between the battles, you get a mini-history lesson that's interesting and relevant to what's happening in your game. All of this helps build atmosphere. The only downside is that when you get to the end of the game, you don't want to stop using your army!

Areas for Improvement

Although most things went to plan, not everything did. I've already touched on what I feel was our biggest mistake. We designed the game to be distributed online only, and not release through the shops. We wasted three to six man months on this, maybe more, and as a percentage of the total programming time, it's a big chunk!

We knew multiplayer would be tricky when we started it. Initially, everything seemed to drop in to place easily, and we thought "Maybe it won't be as bad as we thought." Then, we started to get out of synch problems on some machines and not others. Reproducing them was a problem, and that makes them hard to fix. Multiplayer ended up taking as long as we had feared it would. It wouldn't have been so bad if we hadn't thought we were nearly finished with it so early on. :)

Although I've mentioned that the game model is one of the things that went really well, there were also things we wanted to get in to it, but just never found the time for. We tried experiments with unit behavior, to prevent squads from bunching up in combat and maneuver around each other. We found that it worked in certain situations, but no matter what we did, we always found a combination of factors that would cause it to behave in an unrealistic way. In the end, we simplified it a lot, and although it didn't do everything we wanted it to, at least there were no ways to break it and make the AI look stupid.