GDC Plays Age of Wonders: Planetfall with Lennart Sas

Hello everyone. Welcome to the GDC Twitch channel. I am your host Brian Francis. I am here today playing a neat little game. Not that little, but a neat game called Age of Wonders Planetfall. Age of Wonders Planetfall comes to you from Triumph Studios and Paradox Interactive. With me today in the lower left-hand corner of screen is Triumph Studios co-founder Leonard Sas. Leonard, how are you doing? Hi, doing well. How are you? Good. It's it's out in the world and people are not super angry and they seem to like it. So, that's great. Nice. And with me also saying nice is Alissa McAloon straight from Gamasutra. How are you doing Alissa? I am doing well. Wide awake. Wide awake. Wide awake. No dogs any dogs hanging out there Alissa? She has been bribed by a delicious lunch. So, she's over over there minding her own business. You can also bribe me with a delicious viewers at home if you are

you can also bribe me viewers at home. You can also bribe me with a delicious lunch if you ever wish to apply my ear. We are here today with Leonard playing Age of Wonders Planetfall. This is a 4X strategy game that has some turn-based turn-based 4X strategy game with another layer of turn-based combat that debuted just a couple weeks ago. It's the latest game in the Age of Wonders series which if you're a strategy aficionado you may have played before. It's been in development since 1999 and Leonard you've been working on this series for like 20 years, right? Yeah, correct. Yeah, it's been we started this out in in university and we met with a couple of several like-minded friends. We thought to mix and match a bunch of genres together like strategy RPG even adventuring at first and that's when the Age of Wonders series start to emerge. Of course the first games were fantasy based and Planetfall is our first venture into sci-fi. And also the first time we brought the

game to consoles. Right on. Yeah, we're going to talk about that. We're here to discuss the design and development of Age of Wonders Planetfall. If you are one of the fine folks watching at home be advised you can ask questions for Leonard in chat and we will throw them to him when possible. To get things started Leonard um Age of Wonders has been in development for about four years. We were talking about this before. What for you has development been like and how is it like how has four years of development transitioned into making this game right here? Yeah, this is an awful long while. I think it's almost the longest that we spend on a on a game ever. Maybe the very first one but that's when we were working sort of like semi professionally on it. So, yeah, we we started off of course you know looking at how how do we make a new game a new turn-based strategy game. And the idea to make

a a sci-fi version came yeah shortly after we done the fact that we wanted to to keep on making turn-based games but we didn't want to make a direct sequel to Age of Wonders 3. And we thought it was a would be a great match to try a sci-fi universe. And Age of Wonders has always been a war focused game. With lots of like knights and castle sieges and and medieval war equipment. We thought it would be a great match if we try and model all those cool battles and with cool empire building in a sci-fi universe. So, replace archers with marines with machine guns and cavalry with tanks spells with orbital laser cannons and we basically started there and and soon after the ideas started flowing. But we wanted to do some radical shifts as well including the way the economy works the way you basically conquer the map using sectors.

So, there's been a a very long prototyping phase perhaps yeah one and a half year I would say where we started experimenting with these new combat mechanics new diplomacy new economic features. And when that all was sorted we went into production. The game features six unique factions all with their own tech trees. So, working that out with you know detailed units detailed animations sound effects and everything's just a big amount of production. And during this production period we um were acquired by Paradox Interactive which of course was a um a little bit of a wouldn't say distraction but I would say that it did prolong the the the development a little bit. You know of course a lot of like senior people during such a process are busy with the with other stuff. And then after the when it when that acquisition process was

completed started looking into okay how can we you know see what what can we do more with this type of game and soon the idea came along like let's try this on consoles a new IP as well. It's it's not a fantasy IP as we call Planetfall it's not a sequel. So, we said like okay let's let's see if we can transition this on console. And that's when the entire interface had to be reworked to be multi-platform friendly. All those hundreds of windows pop-ups panels all needed to be changed yeah that was probably a year of work I would say. Of course the port itself multiplayer working on all those different platforms too was a tremendous task. And that's how those years fill up. Yeah. The time flies, right? Yeah. With cuz this is the first you've brought games in Overlord to console

before but this is the first in the Age of Wonders series to come to consoles too, correct? Correct? Yes. Yeah, I can tell you that this this was actually a lot more work to bring to consoles than a than a game like Overlord. The entire control scheme of Overlord was a lot more suited to uh or easy to to port. I would say that turn-based game is very much suited for a console game there's just more work involved in transferring all these interfaces. I was going to say this is kind of like a this this whole genre like both of your your kind of duality genres you have here they both are kind of synonymous with PC for me. So, it's interesting the decision to kind of like branch out into consoles and Brian's playing on PlayStation 4 right now too. So, you can you can see that like it applies itself well to the controller and everything too. Yeah. Yeah, it is you know there are not many games out there. I mean Paradox recently ported Stellaris a

a big space 4X game to console and that yeah was an experiment which turned out well. Of course in the past there was Civilization Revolutions on the previous generation of consoles. And of course we have the very popular tactical turn-based games. Of course our our game has a very large tactical component as well. So, games like XCOM or Fire Emblem do very well on consoles. Right on. To move on into the next question. So, you you you go from you said you want to make a new game um that a new Age of Wonders game after Age of Wonders 3. What was kind of the foundation like you you made a sci-fi version of a series you already had. What was the decision to to sort of adapt the series you had for a new franchise as opposed to building a new IP ground up that would be like strictly

science fiction only. Which you've sort of halfway done but there's still kind of a fantasy component to it I guess. Maybe a little bit but the IPs are as different as for example Warcraft and Starcraft or Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. If there's any links they're very subtle but it's mainly the reason why we keep on kept on calling it Age of Wonders was that the gameplay formula is is similar. The split between the strategy and the tactical layer. So, just like you have like the Total War games or Starcraft and Warcraft you you have the same sort of formula applied to two different settings. Which which are not just reskins but actually the the a large part of the gameplay I think has fundamentally changed. Right on. What then was kind of your foundation for I I was reading some interviews where you and your teammates were talking about with making making new

factions. One of your goals was to make sure that all the factions that every single unit within each faction was unique from faction to faction. By comparison in Age of Wonders 3 every unit had a soldier an archer a a cavalry unit kind of that. And then then some unique just emerged from there but but that was that's obviously a big design choice change to to make instead of a top-down structure for your units to make every single unit unique. What was kind of the process for executing that? Yeah, it was a bit of a um Yeah, long iterative process basically. We started off you know making good rich gameplay mechanics that allow for these various play styles especially when you talk about units you talk about combat. To ensure that the the core mechanics the systems are diverse and rich enough that allow for various combat roles units that can

you know, have a more of an assault range weapons support units, units that use cover, units that can fly, units that can heal, units that um you know, have all sorts of various uh area of effect damage units that can hop around the battlefield um you know, units that can dig, units that uh can stagger or be immune to stagger. That So, that it starts with basically with the with the mechanic and just a radical upgrade of the combat mechanics that we had in in Age of Wonders 3. Right on. Uh Alyssa, I'm going to toss the question over to you cuz I'm trying to juggle a bunch of objectives that just popped up. Yeah, so unlike Brian, I haven't had hands-on uh time with your game quite yet, but uh so your campaigns, does each faction have their own campaign there? Or is it all kind of Okay. So, um how I'm trying to figure out how I want to word this, but

with each of the factions being so different, they're obviously going to appeal to different kind of players. Um how do you kind of design those, I guess, to have kind of like mass appeal while also encouraging people to get out of their comfort zones while giving people more of what they want when they finish one campaign and going into the next. I guess, how do you kind of like accomplish that entire beast of making each faction interesting but appealing to as many people as possible? Um well, we we obviously have um various factions that that have a like a So, some of them are some of them are more mainstream, I would call, like like sort of like a mainstream pop song that is, you know, sort of friend to everybody, not too complex, not too quirky. Uh of course, most games or most strategy games have what we call the human faction. Mhm. Which are easy to identify with and when you look at a unit, you sort of see its function. Mhm. You know, a tank is a tank, a walker, an an aircraft or a ship. Uh you know, maybe they will have different types of

rifles. Um but you know, what you see is what you get, basically. And um you know, from there you go into more extreme forms including like alien insectoids or um you know, sort of like cyborg trash assembly you um units which which are harder to um sort of immediately put your finger on what they do. You need to click on them and look at their ability list and say, "Ah, you do this." type of stuff. And uh yeah, we have a single-player campaign, which is basically used as an introduction to the entire um series. Um and next to that, we have uh the standalone scenarios, which is a lot more similar to sort of like your Civilization um open-ended type of gameplay where you basically choose your victory condition that you want to proceed and it's sort of like a free-for-all. And uh just a lot of people actually skip the campaign and just go straight into that. Mhm. Especially the more advanced players. And of course, you can also play these scenarios in multiplayer.

Mhm. Um but yeah, if you if you're a beginner to this type of game, we encourage you to to start playing the campaign and and maybe start with human faction first. Mhm. Which is exactly what we've done as you've knew that as you came. Um uh just quick reminder for chat, we are happily taking your questions if you've got any for Lennart. Uh don't be shy, we'd love to hear from you. There's like 20 folks out there, that's a good sign and some of you are interested in Age of Wonders. Um uh I'm going to go to my question pile. Lennart, um what I would like to know um uh you there was something interesting that was pointed out in one interview is that compared to previous uh unlike other strategy games, when a game of Age of Wonders starts, Age of Wonders: Planetfall starts, um you don't jump right into your research tree, your your uh your your your sort of you exploit exploitation system is what it's called in this game, but just like telling your cities what to focus on producing. You don't jump into those right away with this, it's deliberately staggered out. Um

uh can you walk through the decision to sort of slightly tweak traditional conventions of the 4X genre and what it means for players uh to not be diving into those choices right away or every single turn? Right. Okay. Now, you have to go to the nature of uh of of Age of Wonders and how it differs from the other games and basically what also I think one of the reviewers, I don't know if it was PC Gamer or uh IGN, basically said that Age of Wonders is sort of like a fast-paced 4X. The what we call turn density, so the amount of things that you do in a single turn is um is higher than than in uh other titles. Uh so, you can fight multiple battles, multiple pickups, also the for example, the research times tend to be shorter. Uh so, there's a lot going on and part of that comes from the the sort of war game multiplayer-like uh nature of the game. So, in this scenario, so especially in the those early turns, a lot could happen if you basically open up research

and open up uh the scouting doing your first battle, making recruiting your first hero, and doing that everything in turn one would sort of like front-load that entire turn uh before you really get your bearing. Mhm. So, we said at one point is that, "Okay, there's so much happening in turn one, let's let's delay research one turn." So, you you at least get to see the lay of the land a little bit. Just just to maybe spend your first turn scouting and see whether or not you have water nearby or um what sort type of enemies you'll be facing in the in in the first couple of rounds. And then the turn after, you can start making your your research decisions based on the um uh lay of the land. And the game is a little bit more welcoming to to beginning players so that they don't get, you know, that first turn isn't loaded with all sorts of decisions to make right away. Mhm. Right on. Um uh what do you think um as far as acquiring like like the 4X strategy genre has been around for a while and

some of the games in it are really popular, some of them are a little more niche. Um what do you think is part of the and this is sort of part of Paradox's overall marketing strategies, what do you think is essential for for the strategy genre to grow and to keep acquiring new players as opposed to just sort of I mean, like there's there's obviously value in in in treasuring and nurturing the player base who's been with you for 20 years, but you know, people aren't finite, I guess. We expire. Wow, that got grim. Thinking about mortality while discussing video games. But yeah, no, okay, like but eventually people will move on, they try other genres, they their life changes. Like, what do you think is sort of essential to to getting new players interested in these games in the first place? Well, actually uh we we've seen quite some growth in the strategy genre over the years. Uh I think mainly it is because um you know, people uh gamers they they don't stop gaming when they're 20 years old, you know, they they um start keep on gaming when they have kids or when they go to work. And a strategy game like uh Age of Wonders or

Planetfall is is very easy to wrap around your life because it's turn-based. Mhm. And um also for example, with the multiplayer options that we we have, also what we call the adaptive multiplayer system. And basically you you you put your turns in the cloud and uh you can play you can download the turns when you have time to play your turn and you can upload it again. But if your friends are online at the same time, you can switch that same session to sort of like a live session and and this game switches to simultaneous turns. Yeah. All play at once. And then I say, "Okay, it's now late at at night and we I'm going to log off." and the game switches back to the sort of round robin uh turn system again. Mhm. So, that's an innovation that we um that is brought to by by by newer technology that that allows this type of game to to adapt to future age. And uh hopefully to a growing group of of gamers who uh who you know, even when they become more mature, they you know, they they keep on enjoying uh

this this medium. That's wild. I remember back in when I was playing Civilization 3 back in the old days uh when I was 8 years old. Um uh um that was the email you Yeah. emailed like your turns to to Yeah, it was manual, yeah. We had to just Well, now everything's automated. Yeah. How How did you What What did it take to implement a system like that? Uh of course, very good programmers with very good ideas. Uh an AVS cloud system. Which wasn't around uh when Civ 3, I think. And um yeah, and of course, bandwidth has gotten a lot cheaper. You know, just just you know, because these basically would we we foot the bill for those transfers, but you know, like earlier on, you paid per megabytes and now, you know, same money buys you terabytes of data. Mhm. Right on. Alyssa, I'm going to toss the question over to you while I move some troops around. I'm really curious about

that feature cuz I like I I wasn't quite the emailing turns to friends thing, but like my sister and I would hurry up and we'd be in the middle of like a StarCraft match and have to like, "Oh, we got to hurry up and finish this before Dad comes in and yells at us to go to bed." So, like that's really cool. I didn't know that I didn't know games did like strategy games had that feature, this one particularly, but um Oh, where was I going to go with that? There was a there was a thought there and it's gone. I'll come I'll come back to it. But it's really neat and that's really interesting. Um Fishy or sorry, Fish21 in chat wants to know what your favorite part of making a 4X or strategy game has been after doing it for as long as you have been. Ooh. Uh well, I think my favorite part is is with each iteration is is is looking into how we can innovate and um part of uh the work I enjoy is is looking back at like long-running series, necessarily 4X series which is long running genres and to see how they try to survive and how they evolve or

fail to evolve over the years and why genres or even or individual game series rise or fall and that is um of course that that makes trying to walk the fine line between innovation and and and you know not losing the connection with your fan base and trying to innovate that's I think one of the main challenges that that you have when running the series along and when it comes to 4X design in itself yeah it's just the the enormous challenge of of making a game that is so um complex and and so there's so many subsystems you know the economy the diplomacy the combat and that needs to play out over like session can last anywhere 6 to 12 hours typical session and you can play it on in so many different ways and and the game needs to be stable and it basically adapt to people playing in a particular way and and that experience a lot of people

come into such a game also with entire different expectations some people just want to play very casually and do some empire building build cities while others really are super aggressive competitive players who like to digest every little unit ability and see how they can use that in their favor and they you know they they play such a game very differently from the more casual empire builder but still we need to appeal to both both of these type of gamers and just having a game that that tries to do it all is is is is a challenge and is also a lot of fun to do In your Taking a question go no you go for it Alyssa I was going to say picking into that process a little bit what's like obviously you're working on this game for 4 years what's kind of like the iteration the trial and error process to making sure oh this is leaning too heavy in one direction so it's not fun for players who play this way how do you make everyone happy without kind of like sacrificing the character of the game Yeah that is very difficult I mean

during the process of prototyping we basically split the the team up into various mini teams which all get assigned to work on a particular um function and especially when at first you don't have the full backbone of the full ecosystem of the game running and you you know some of these features are created in a vacuum it is very hard to see of if such a feature is fun or not so you try to sort of simulate an environment and try to sort of like role play or or or maybe board game it or something that if a feature will be fun or not and sometimes it you just end up spending 3 months of a significant part of the team just throwing a feature away because it just didn't end up being fun one of the examples is a sort of large sort of orbital system that we built like an entire sky layer around the planet where you could maneuver aircraft death stars and

satellites and missiles in order to influence the world below but that just yeah didn't work it totally undermined what was happening below and it was because there's almost no obstacles there it sort of turned into a a game of its own which wasn't fun so you just had to take bite the bullet and and and scrap those uh those those many man months worth of work but that's that's all in the game if you would try to try something new Right on Fish Twitter 1 just wants to thank you Lennart for answering their question and Lord Sloth um uh it jokes that people don't have the resurgence trait in real life um uh Lennart just shifting the line of questioning for a moment um uh um

what would you say um was kind of a sorry that was not I that was a not a good way to start this sentence um I was reading one interview that one of the another one of the reasons that you all transition to making Age of Wonders the way Planetfall the way you did was after Age of Wonders 3 there was kind of a criticism that people wanted more options across the gameplay that's sort of broadly that builds off what we talked about before about making units unique but like you know they they're they're 4X games can kind of get no matter how great and varied they can get they can also get a little similar you you build your city you colonize new cities and then just kind of the the loop repeats what was your process for finding we just sort of talked about you know trying new ideas but like what was sort of your process for finding new ways to play 4X games I guess to look for new options and new ways to get people into the game play Yeah when you're talking purely about mechanics the yeah the main criticism on Age of Wonders 3 was that people missed some sort of like

strict strategy layer depth including the economy and the cities like that when you build cities you sort of follow the same system and the same strategy over and over again and you know there are very deep strategy games where you yeah intricately manage your your cities like Civilization obviously and you don't make a lot of like little decisions that stack over a very long period of time and we said well we you know the the essence of our game is is that it's it's it's it's a bit more war gaming and so we didn't want to have intricacy and we didn't want to have too much micro management into the city so we started to look into a system where where you could upgrade cities and expand in a more sort of like broader strokes and make make very large decisions that um so we thought into dividing the world up into sectors and

cities expand by claiming new territories that sort of thing led to another you could easily like on paper sort of see that such a sector system would have like big ramifications for diplomacy so if if you you know builds up the world into these sectors you can trade them you can sort of call the flag and this one is mine instead of having a you know like everything that's just done on a hex level so that's that's that's when the thing started rolling on the on on the world map game play for it took a lot of iteration as well as to like how you upgrade all these sectors how you attach them to your main colony that that took a lot of time a lot of iteration but eventually we we saw yeah this this really works and we hope that that people will will like this and although it's it's something entirely new for for our series and I think also in the in the genre as a whole so

yeah that that sort of innovation isn't easy it's always easier to say like okay let's take a look and and how has another game done this before and trying to do something different is always painful Right on don't mind me over here I'm just trying to figure out I got a lot to juggle on my plate Alyssa I have the question ball you're away It's kind of enjoyable to watch you try to like talk and make complex decisions at the same time though um this is a little more in the weezy about strategy games that I don't understand might not might be a little over my head but Satya in chat wants to know while we're talking about play styles are there any plans to enable tall play styles I'm not sure that's lingo I'm not familiar with there so I don't know if you can talk around different play style implementation there Yeah I don't want it all is a strategy saying whether you're sort of like specialized like one city and build it up as big as you can

and another one is wide as by spreading yourself thin and claiming a lot of territory for example that's different and currently our city upgrade three is our city upgrade is sort of capped you know with the number of of of provinces that you can attach to a a colony number of upgrades that you can build and obviously we're looking into expanding the game in the future a lot of these type of games they they are in development for years on their initial launch adding additional options for city upgrades is absolutely something that we'll be looking into but first we need to digest and see like how people playing what are people's wishes and you know getting very you know like like solid feedback from the community saying you know we'd like to have deeper city management and uh is is something that we can do something with and uh I guess like a one week now out from

launch how has that initial feedback been how is the reception for the features you have gone over so far I think overall very positive we are at the like around 80% positive user reviews I mean there's some people who of course compare it to to Age of Wonders 3 and they miss a particular feature from that game and they say like oh you know we wish you would have this in this game as well or some people think that you might have strayed too far or not far enough so it is a it's a fine line that you that you need to walk Yeah but overall we we are happy with the reception and we we look at all feedback where it doesn't matter if it's it's it's just constructive or people are really angry at a particular thing. We take everything at heart. and Um but we we do like to respond to to the more polite kind. Um but yeah, it's it's it's it's been a very

interesting and a good launch, I would say. Yeah, it's always scary when you make when you run a series for this long and see see how people react to it. Yeah. I guess even go yeah, going into like I have on my notes here I have 20 years like circled and underlined cuz that's a long time for a studio to make games and also for one particular series to keep going and especially with as much like the IP changes you've made this time around, too. And I guess how did you guys kind of how how did that conversation go where like, "Hey, what if we do like a slight reboot? What if we go to space?" Like how did you kind of worm your dev team into that idea as well as like warming the community up to it? Um yeah, for the dev team that's of course you know, the dev team exists out of many individuals. Some people have you know, like hopes maybe you know, some of them want to go back to like an Overlord style game. Others might want to try another genre and others say like, "Okay, we we've invested so much in in this engine and

this tool set and and the experience from our people that that it would be crazy to uh uh to to to try and swap everything around. I can tell you that when you make a drastic shift in genres going from um 4X strategy to action RPGs and back it's it's not the wisest business decision that you can make. It's it's fun, of course, but they are various types of games. Such radical such a radically different types of games. But it's it's not good for your sanity on the other hand. Um But yeah, you it's it's a process that you you can it's it's part of that's just a business decision. And another one is is a a decision of like like how do we play to our strength without keeping things, you know, and keep things interesting for everybody. It's always very important for us what do you know, as a team

what's the level of buy-in for a particular project. We wouldn't want to make a project where people say like, "Ah, this is really not my thing. I'm going to quit my job." Yeah, that's uh would be very bad. Yeah. Let's see. Oh, we got a good question from chat. Wesley would like to know why sectors show the resource that can be exploited instead of icons for the climate and terrain or they they are concerned that players are confused when they see the icons on each new sector. Um I kind of have no opinion about if it's confusing or not myself because when I look at a new sector, I'm looking at say this sector right here, I just see the world ceiling and I'm like, "Oh, that's a really good name for a place." When you click on it, you see a couple of of of icons which indicate the potential resource potential of a sector how it can be upgraded. So it doesn't list the the output, but it actually lists like this particular section like I've got a very small

screen because I'm as research, production and two energy. So that one could be upgraded as a as an energy exploitation and then you build energy stuff to in order to use the natural occurring stuff. So we basically took that um uh what is it? That step that translates resource type into what sort of resource sorry, climate type or overlay type into resource what out of it so people could immediately see, "Oh, this is energy and I'm going to choose my energy upgrade here." Mhm. Right on. Um let's see. I was going to ask about you touched briefly on putting this over to consoles and which is a series first for you guys for this particular series. And can you talk about maybe some of the this like UI changes and decisions that were made to kind of make it more readable on consoles or so it would work

both on PCs and consoles equally without negatively affecting the other, I guess? Mhm. Um so one of the first things that we did did was basically take took a look at all of the interfaces and which ones could be sort of like be the same with slight modifications like swapping yes no buttons with A and B buttons or or whatever. Um and then interfaces which needed to have like a radical difference like like adding a radial menu as an example. Then we started to look at readability and one of the things that we added was interface scaling so you could scale the interface up and down relatively to the how far you are from the screen or your screen size. And so that was another yeah, must have in order for the the conversion to start. And that of course it also benefits PC if you're playing on a small laptop screen versus a very nice

large 30-in monitor. Um so that that's another one. Um We one of the principles that we that we applied was that we wanted to make the people move the um uh the the the map as little as possible manually so people would use the event list in order to take them to all key actions that that needed their attention. So you don't need you don't need to already center on it and just you you select a new destination or research is ready, you just get taken to the interface. You can very quickly cycle through these screens without having to um to do many manual mouse pointery things, basically. Um So those are a couple of the of the principles that we that we applied. Another thing is like in combat, you select units, but then immediately you

see highlighted which armies it can hit from a particular location. Um just to avoid the large number of manual movements. And of course consistency Yeah, and of course consistency with with other games like of course you know, you have like mouse and keyboard conventions, you know, when you scroll the map you have W A A S D and you know, left click to select, right click to move which is sort of like an RTS thing. Same for console, you know, you try to use conventions. You know, use the D-pad and the shoulders for the right type of stuff. It's always interesting to hear how like bringing a game to a new platform and will make like a result in these changes that actually benefit the entire thing as a whole and not just that new platform. Oh yeah, I mean I think this has been a tremendous benefit to the PC users as well. The amount of QA that we put into this game is massive

there are quite a few PC players who like to play using controller for from where if they use Steam Box or um they just like, you know, sitting hanging on the couch. And uh so we have that option available for PC players, too. Uh the interface scaling is available for PC. So yeah. Right on. I I am diving into the the turn-based kind of XCOM-y combat right now. One thing I I guess one thing that jumps to mind um is that games like X games that are dedicated to sort of the the turn-based tactical like this are often focused on there's a lot of fog of war concepts like where is your enemy and how is that this, but this game is pretty like these battles start out pretty out in the open and you're able to make you know, you're able to plan two or three steps ahead much easier than you are in those games. Could you sort of talk about your process um uh for designing these sections of the game and like what and how

and really how you're able to balance it while still trying to make an overall like overarching 4X game that still works? Cool. Yeah. So first starting point is that we create a war. We don't create like a like a sort of a skirmish between like hero characters that you want to keep alive. Mhm. Of course you obviously want to keep as much units alive as you can, but the combats tend to be a lot more lethal in in a game like this. They also are we want them to to be over quicker. You know, our combats can involve a large number of units, not just infantry types, but also tanks and and aircraft and whatnot. So the battles need although superficially might sort of look the same, you've got cover, you've got your your overwatch, you've got um grenades and and all that type of stuff, but they generally they uh they play faster and they they're more deadly. Mhm.

And that's why for example, fog of war doesn't really fit in that thing because that would really prolong the typical battle. Mhm. Although in earlier Age of Wonders games, we did have single-player dungeons or PvE dungeons basically which you which had sort of a cover of darkness which you needed to sort of Diablo style you needed to go in and explore and find the baddies before you could close them. We will go back to that one day. Right on. Um uh um going to chat, the Crafty Blog has dropped by and is really impressed with the game. They are asking about a possible Nintendo Switch port. We sort of we we try not to there's sort of if a feature's not announced it's a little hard to ask about from a dev perspective on this channel. But I guess you know Leonard the Nintendo switch is out. It's it's a new thing that people even Paradox is shipping games on cuz they've got John Romero's game Empire of Sin coming on Nintendo switch. Have you been enjoying Have you do you

have a switch? Are you enjoying the platform? Yeah yeah I have a switch you know I play games myself but also with my son. Mhm. Yeah so we play all the Nintendo titles uh but in Mario Rabbids game Yeah. like a like like an XCOM light type of deal with It's so weird. That game is so wild. The XCOM the XCOM devs were saying it's influencing how they make their next game because the movement system in that game is really good. Yeah. Yeah so we see uh soldiers soldiers jumping on top of each other. Uh but yeah no I'm curious like so what do you think about developing for the switch? Like what do you think um has to happen for for sort of your studio to be able to tackle that challenge? Uh I think first of course there there is the um the the you know that the the the overall business proposition needs to make sense to the the amount of the the cost versus the the benefit. And in terms of cost the our game is quite demanding

and it of course you know they can make you know The Witcher on switch. But one of the the key things is what what's in our game is the the the AIs would take a lot of time. So the CPU load um so when you see one of these battles here uh they can take up to a half an hour or so to play out a typical battle or 15 minutes. Mhm. Um but the AI fights these battles as well. You know when it's an AI turn and they they they take over a a city of of independents or a little bit of loot that they captured the AI actually plays this entire battle using uh the exact same um uh battle map Mhm. with all of the abilities and everything uh just in a in a fraction of a second. Mhm. In in and in in a hundreds of a second actually if you've got fast CPU. So

uh and a lot of these battles can spawn during a turn and and you know we already have had to make optimizations for lower spec CPU machines like lower spec laptops for example uh to keep the the speed up. Well yeah the switch is of course in in architecture is a handheld device. And and the question whether or not uh we could get everything like that on the switch is that's one of the first questions we we need to look at. Mhm. Um so but ensuring that the CPU load would uh would be manageable. But the switch is a is a beautiful machine fast machine maybe it works but I I can't answer that now. Of course yeah. But it is interesting to know that like the challenges aren't just say graphical or getting things running but you know allowing the AI to to properly do what it needs to do and in the background and run simulation like this. And there's practical things as well like screen size you know we

if you play it undocked and just going on the screen we might want to change some interfaces you know to make them clearer when seen on such a small screen uh using a magnifying glass. That's a that's a good point. We are uh we are coming up at the end of our hour here as I try to uh um make my way through this battle which he said can take up to half an hour so this might be we might be still be playing this battle by the time we're over given the way I play games. Um ooh burning ground that's not good. Um uh if you've got questions for Leonard we're still happy to ask them. Um uh Leonard I guess here's something interesting. Um we're talking we're playing a turn-based you know like tactical this is a tactical encounter um between you you're playing Fire Emblem or XCOM the percentage chance to hit is

very important because it tells it sort of tells you whether it's a good idea to try this maneuver or not. I'm still feeling out in XCOM you can have a 92% chance to hit and those misses feel really sour. In Fire Emblem you can have a 92% chance to hit and those misses don't really come like 92% in Fire Emblem sort of means 100% like how do you accurately communicate to the player what that sort of means what different hit chances mean Yeah yeah yeah so we we we don't really skew the numbers maybe some games do I don't know. So when you have seen 92% is actually 100% so so we don't we we actually have a very clear rule and that is that um basically whenever you have a um there's always a 25% chance to grace and that starts over 100% so if you have a 75% chance to hit that basically means that you will always hit or grace so the 25% uh will

be grace and then if you go lower than 75% that's when the hit miss chances start to come in so if you have a 70% there's a 5% chance to miss. Mhm. So you don't have the extremes that you have a 90% chance to hit or 95% chance to miss and you would totally miss the shot. Mhm. You will always do some damage. So that's how we solved it. Yeah. And of course one other thing is that a lot of our units especially like when they're carrying like assault rifles and stuff they have fire multiple shots. And the number of shots depends on how far you move. So if you stay in the green area for this unit Mhm. um this is actually a single shot unit. Mhm. Uh but if you if that's that was a marine or a trooper Mhm. uh you could have three shots when you stay in the green area. Uh and that of course spreads out the damage more.

Right on. I'm about to see my favorite thing in any science fiction game which is uh dropping a laser on someone's head. All right. Woo. Woo. Yeah. I love doing that. Uh when's the live Sorry. When would live would like to know are there any plans to get the AI to approach auto combat carefully 12 versus four uh quote unquote should never result in a lost unit. I don't know if that's necessarily true from a from a how armies work perspective. If you send 12 people into fight four one of those people might get just totally wasted. So from a game feel perspective I certainly think it's fine. But I don't know they're curious like they they would like to know if auto battles which I was using to get through most of the stream so we could keep on the top sort of the top layer. How do you feel you did with those? Do you think do you think they're accurate? Do you think it's it's okay for for if you're overwhelmingly abusing the enemy's forces to if you go auto battle to have to sacrifice a unit to to essentially speed up time cuz when

you're in here you can make optimal decisions obviously. Yeah. Yeah you will I mean it's up to you if you want to take the risk. I mean we give some sort of prediction how the battle will end up. I mean it's a purely a sort of a value comparison so it's not necessary like how well particular stack of units is is kitted out to kill another stack. It's just purely the value that that these two so that that gives an indication. Um but yeah some people can't stand a a loss and we looking into maybe for a future update I can't really promise that yet but we're looking into ways like if you press auto and you don't like the results you can go back to manual so you you'll have a sort of like an an option to to retry. That's kind of interesting. I I I I think that's that's interesting. But then you don't get to re-auto. Ooh I like that. Uh um

Leonard I have a question. Games are more live now than ever they they don't you know you you guys just shipped this game but you're already we were talking with the stream you're you're you're tossing around update ideas. Um uh lots of other games have begun to adapt everything from you know quote unquote events where you know Apex Legends is having an event right now. Obviously that's an always live multiplayer game but then there's Paradox's really good DLC model where they sell individual DLC packs. How have you thought as a studio leader even though obviously you've got Paradox sort of there sitting there and uh coddling you in their great big publisher arms sitting off screen. Oh they're they're sitting off screen. Oh oh hi hi papa Paradox. No yeah. But no yeah but like what are your thoughts about making games like this work in a live games environment? Like strategy games are getting bigger people love to just sit down and spend hours they don't want huge microtransactions in this you know huge microtransaction structure in here or a or any kind of a lot of those systems might be alien but then at the same time they're also growing like they're growing more important in the world of keeping games afloat and

keeping players interested. What do you think is sort of the way strategy games can approach existing in a live games world? Yeah well live games for us means uh interacting with the community getting feedback and and listening to them and and dropping new features both as free updates and as as premium content and um premium content I mean you know not microtransactions we prefer substantial updates. What it can very well be that we make some some new outfits for commanders for example. But uh we do Yeah, it's all about just improving the game for as many people and for as long people for as long as we can. Um And that Yeah, yeah, like you say they Uh you know, like making a game like this sort of a free-to-play experience. People have tried that with strategy games, but not a lot have

succeeded in in doing that. Unless you talk unless you consider something like Clash of Clans a strategy game. I mean, I do, but not you know, like it's not like a strategy game. It's different. Oh. It's different. Yeah, it's different. It's a It's a different type of strategy game. That's just going to hurt my feelings. strategy game. Dude, so I'm just going to relive my my X-Wing night last night where I had to basically, even though I was ahead, I had to give up a shot on an enemy I really need to get. Okay, cool. Yeah, we Yeah. Um ba ba ba um oh, uh Crafty Dog would like would like you to know this is kind of a fun thing from chat. They've pre-ordered um uh top-tier Uh oh, jeez, something got in the way. They They bought the top tier when they pre-ordered and they're looking forward to what you are doing in the future. In terms of the uh the expansions. Yeah. And Neo Neo Angel home also says it's a wonderful game. Uh um uh ooh, uh this is kind of a good question. They meant You mentioned a uh the satellite system that got cut, you know, kind of that atmosphere level. Um uh they would like to know what other kind of features got cut making this game

uh when you were like what ideas were really good and I don't know. Like that's something I'd like to know about, too. Like what else did you have to cut to get this game out the door? Which sounds grim, but uh Um but, you know, we're all it's always curious like what what has to what good ideas just weren't as good. Uh well, some ideas are uh were were cut and we might want to go back to. So, I'm probably not going to talk about those, but Uh let's see. Well, we went through a couple of iterations of the sector system. One of them were uh was that the actual colonists that you had in your in your colony uh were slotted into slots that were actually living in inside of the um in inside of the sector. So, if you lost a particular uh sector, you could lose the colonists that were in that sector. But, that was quite a clumsy system, so we we decided to uh to cut it. Um Okay. Um I'm going I want Oh, Alyssa. I want I want to I want to uh Mohammed Kapil in chat uh

has a question that I wanted to ask earlier, but I forgot to follow up on. Um they were asking about that AI system you said where two AI battles will just uh simulate the entire thing on the actual map. Um what was the decision for doing a more like resource-heavy um way of determining the outcome of a battle versus something just like a statistical coin flip or something a lot more lot less in-depth, but more light on the resources. Yeah, we we had such a system in uh in the old age of one of these games because the computers weren't fast enough to do it. But, that led to all sorts of problems because you were basically creating two AIs which which which had basically because you weren't really simulating the battle, you were just like subtracting army strength. So, you had like you had like one particular unit which was immune to the effects of another type of unit, but you couldn't really model that. Uh you know, so like when you played manually, you you would get such very different results from a battle than when you played automatic. And And also,

you you couldn't really go back and replay the battle and see the battle as it would unfold. There was sort of a simulation without movements that that's sort of approximated it. Uh but in the end, just totally simulating the battle um Yeah, it allows you to see cool replays and immediately see how the AI did. Maybe for beginning player, learn the game. Uh you see how the AI would move stuff. So, basically, you you you debug one thing. And uh that's it. You don't have to work on two systems. Uh one of it's a sort of an approximation and the other is sort of the real AI. So, there's one AI that you write. And so, it stays true to like the strategy genre versus just like a numbers game. Yeah. That's interesting. Right on. Um with that, I'm going to start wrapping things up. Thank you, Alyssa, for jumping in with a good question. That was actually That was actually good. Um thank you all for joining the GDC joining us today. Thank you, chat, for giving it to us. I don't want to steal someone's good question. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You can

You can wrap up now. Stop. You can't see me. I'm glaring. Shaking your head. I'm just shaking my head. Alyssa, take You that was a You asked it. You can take credit. It was awarded in chat first. This is stuff we should not do live on camera. I'm sorry. Um anyway, uh thank you everyone in chat. You've been a great audience today. Thank you, Leonard, for for dropping by. Thank you all for watching the GDC Twitch channel. This is a place where we talk about talk to game developers about the making of their games, how they get made um because that sharing knowledge between game developers is kind of our mission. Um speaking of which, if you were a at home and you are a game developer of any stripe or experience or background, we would encourage you to check out the GDC call for submissions. Uh the core concepts call for submissions closes tomorrow. If you have a talk idea, if you're at home, if you're at lurking out there, I know you are uh one of you some of you people are game devs. Um uh if you are the kind of person who's worked on a game and has something in the last year or something interesting to share about it, we

encourage you to submit a talk. If you do in the next 24 hours, uh it will can go into the core concepts track. We will be opening our summits VRDC um No, it's it's all summits, but that includes our VR our VR summit, our narrative summit, our AI summit. Um those call for submissions is going to open up later this month. So, if you are developer working on uh um that kind of stuff, please submit a talk at the end of the month. If you're a VR AR developer, join us at the in October for XRDC. Um For more information on that, you can scroll down and check out uh um uh gdc.conf.com, which also will You can use that to get over to XRDC. Um if you're new to the channel, we would appreciate it if you clicked the follow button because if you do, you'll get notifications when we go live. We're talking to a lot of developers. There's some really cool games out there that are coming out in the next few weeks. I wish I could confirm which ones were were getting, but it's still I'm still working with some great PR folks to to try and get those interviews to you. Um uh but, rest assured, if you hit that

follow button, you will get a notification when we go live. And when we go live, we will go live with someone who knows more about making games than we do. And we know something. We know something about making games, right, Alyssa? You know about financials? Yeah. You know about I have to write some today. You have to write some financials up. Yeah, exactly. So, we know something, but we you we just want you to talk to people who know more somethings. Um with that, uh I'm going to uh resist the urge to just keep playing and just keep uh cuz that that that uh just one more turn it's just scratching really hard right now. Um but, I'm going to resist the urge to keep playing and sign off. Leonard, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thanks everybody for the questions. All right. Bye, folks. Bye. Bye-bye.