5. The dedication of the TOAW community cannot be underestimated, with some players bordering on fanatics in their enthusiasm. Did you have any reservations when you first signed on that you would have trouble ever delivering on the expectations of these die-hards?
That’s easy, I don’t plan to worry about it. :) I was a veteran lurker on the ‘war-historical’ newgroup before the forums existed. I’ve seen the arguments on almost everything, and the hyperbole that people use. I’ve already (on the beta forum) seen the posts about how I ruined the game when I tried out a new feature they didn’t like.
I plan to make the game that I want to play. I understand game design, and I know the difference between management and micro-management. I have some general ideas about where I want to see TOAW go. It isn’t going to be a ‘camel’, that is, a horse designed by a commitee. I’m doing it for the same reason that people create scenarios, it’s just a bit bigger than most scenarios.
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The dedication of the community is actually what’s going to make TOAW 3 work. When I see the amount of work that the community has done in creating the scenarios they have, it’s incredible. The number of hours that the beta team and the scenario design team had put in over the past several months is just incredible. It’s been an honor to work with them.
6. What’s next? In addition to TOAW 3, do you have any plans to jump into game programming with other titles?
I’m actually going to be happy with the TOAW engine for quite a while. Obviously, if we sell a million copies, I’ll re-evaluate that, but…
There is a lot of directions that we can take the TOAW engine from here. It’s one of the few games that should be immune from technology changes. I’m not saying that a 3D engine won’t be grafted on, just that it’s not necessary to have shiny water, and the rest.
There are a lot of things that can be done with TOAW still, anyone thinking for a minute should be able to come up with some obvious things. Air modeling, Naval modeling, Modern weapons modeling, PO Control of player units and formations. Team play, internet play, 1800′s combat. I read a newsweek article on SAMS (School of Advanced Military Studies) recently, and trying to modfy TOAW to understand the recent wars like Iraq (including the peace) would be an interesting challenge. Better event handling, a better PO (One that actually understands the battlefield.). Optimizing it for quick internet connected battles. I could go on for hours.
Right now, we’re waiting to see how well it’s received, and we’re going to take a break. After that, we’ll finalize a game plan. Whether it will be TOAW 4 : Modern Warfare, or TOAW Campaigns or TOAW Online, or something else is something I’ll leave you guessing about.
My long-range goal is that there is going to be ‘one true’ TOAW engine. I plan to use options for a lot of things, and I hope to keep older scenarios compatible with the newer versions. If we do branch off TOAW into a couple of different games, I plan to eventually bring them all together into a bigger game.
7. Some may say this release has actually come about in record time, while others are probably gnashing their teeth because it has taken as long as it has. Without placing ourselves in the latter category (we are patient — no really!) can you explain the process over the past six months?
A funny thing happened on the way to the forums… David Heath initially purchased the rights to these games because they’re fun. I wasn’t part of things then, but I think his plan was to have Norm Koger release the code he hadn’t been allowed to, and they’d test and release TOAW: Matrix Edition very quickly. After that, the main money would be made from expansion packs and various new versions. Unfortunately, nobody told me those were the plans.
I first contacted David in November, and by late December, we had all the paperwork completed, and I had my hands on the source code. The only real direction I had from David was that they were looking for a first quarter release.
My wife was sick over the Christmas holidays, and that left me with little to do except look at the source code. I spent about a week looking through the forums at where people were having problems, and decided to go ahead and dig in. I fixed as many of the ‘simple’ problems as I could then started playing around with the PO, hoping to do some minor tweaks. Instead, I found that it was actually very well written, but there were a couple of problems that I could fix, and give Elmer a major IQ boost. I’ve probably spent 40+ hours just watching Elmer play himself, and different versions play each other.
James joined the team as project lead in mid January, and he’s been fantastic. Up until he joined, I was worried because of a past experience with a shareware project, I expected to have to do most of the testing myself. James managed to pull together a bunch of dedicated volunteers, and encourage them to work in doing the boring tasks, things like making a map and using it to verify that the movement routines work. Their hard work and dedication are the reason that I expect to find few bugs in the release version. Without their hard work, I would not have been able to be nearly as aggressive in changing what I did.
In early March, the code was frozen, and we were gearing up for a release at the end of March. I still believe that we could have met that date with a quality product. That’s when I think David Heath took a serious look at what the group had done. David, James, and I spent a couple of hours debating whether we had enough to call this TOAW 3. David suggested that I look at using smaller sound files, and decided that we should upgrade all the music and graphics. That’s also when the scenario tree and the additional documentation button were born. I also mentioned that TOAW 2 had been fully ready for a French/German release, so it was off to get that working in TOAW 3.
Here we are in mid-May, the scenarios now gleam, we’re going to release support for multiple langeuages, and the main routines have been tested for another month with no changes. I think that the additional delay was well worth it, and I hope that everyone agrees.
Thanks a lot for your time here, and some in-depth responses. I’m sure you are probably ready to take a short break from the world of programming TOAW and maybe once again PLAY the game. In fact, should you want a light challenge in TOAW 3 PBEM I could probably line something up for you! :)
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