Hello followers,
Welcome to the new year and it seems it might be an interesting ride foreword. Mod of the year is behind us, Wars of the Firstborn is almost 2 years old and we managed to grow our team!
I promised I will take some time to make a review of the last year for the project. The progress on it has been very good and we made big steps in completing the Mirkwood faction. We threw our best ideas, we tested them out, we made adjustments, we improved so all can have a pleasant experience while playing the Mirkwood faction. You can see all of this in our faction plan, which you can already view it.
In this article, I said to myself, I really want to focus a bit on the challenges we faced in the past year. I would start with a simple question that is probably on everyone's mind: Why is it taking so long? Excellent question, let's get to it.
A complete faction
In the past, while still working on RC Mod, we used to release half-completed factions or without any thought on the play ability of them. Many people didn't necessary treat bugs as bugs and the majority complained about the "lack of depth" of the factions. All understandable, given that even after some time we didn't address these issues. It was something I wanted to avoid with this new project. The faction will be released when I feel it is "done", or almost done. For this reason I want to deliver a full experience (at least for the faction) where all the pieces are in their place. Of course, there might still be missing things at the end of it, and I do hope the faction in itself will improve in future release, but I want to have a good starting point, that will drive other further development.
Attention to detail
If it isn't obvious, I'm very passionate about representing my art as accurately as I can. This takes time, of course, and it is all for the greater good of the experience. If the elves move like elves, have a throwback animation to the movies and a valuable ability for the game in itself, then I hope this will immerse the players even more in the game and that is what I want out of this project. This means a more thorough process on the art, more details and several updates to each model.
Visual Identity - or how to take underground elves and place their buildings outside
A very big chunck of time is spent on the design itself. I'm not a very resourceful designer and so coming up with architectures on the spot is not something that happens to me so there are entire days that I just look up references and try to smash them together to make something new and believable. At the same time, I really don't like half-measures, so this is a very dangerous combination. Probably one of my greatest challenges when starting Mirkwood was their buildings aesthetics. Most of you probably don't know this but I'm not very found of making buildings (designing or modeling/texturing them) and I have struggled in the past of making believable structures that also conveys the particularities of the respective faction.
Designing the Mirkwood buildings was, even harder, as almost all the references we had from the movies were about the underground halls of the Woodland Realm but we still wanted when you look at our buildings, you will immediately think of what you see in the movies and feel from the same place. Obviously, some of you out there might not think this but I can sleep safely knowing that I did my best. Moreover, we had do add a lot to the table being an RTS game and, of course, we wanted to add our spin to the faction as well. For example, the Glade Tree, winch was a very interesting concept I wanted to implement into the game that also makes sense for Mirkwood (Tree houses).
BFME 1 Mode
Last time I promised each faction will have it's BFME1 style of play which means I had to go back to the drawing board and concept and redesign some of our ideas to match the BFME1 style of play. This was probably the most difficult task until now but I think it was worth it. I've spend dozens of hours coming up with concepts of the Mirkwood castle, and how will it be different from the already existing ones. And all the implementation of it, it really feels like you are making the same faction, twice, or almost.
Ideas first
In the mod I always tried to come up with crazy ideas that would also make the faction more interesting, and try to do this at every level of the development. Every unit or building, or power is thought inside out, and try to make it the best it can be. More often than not, this meant more development time spent on it but we never discarded the idea if we truly believed in it. The one example I really love is the Mirkwood Ram. Trying to come up with a valid idea of siege for Mirkwood (Rams are the most simple siege engines), designing something not seen before in the game (to my knowledge), a ram-cart, make it fit for Mirkwood, choose the best approach to represent it in-game, make new animations for the Ram and the carriers, make sure integrating all of this gives a smooth experience.
Reforged
While the development of Mirkwood started about 7 years ago (even tho there were years when not work was done on it at all) and when I decided to stop RC Mod and continue with WOTF and started rebuilding some things to new standards, what actually happened is that I redid 90% of the faction, maybe even 95%. So what you will see in the next release, is the culmination of the last 2 years of development, where I intensely added vastly more things to the faction, and redid the old content.
King of the hill
While I usually don't want to talk about this, it was another big challenge for me, and it was at times, daunting. Another big reason for things moving so slow is the core faction is made just by me, in my spare time, which i tried as much as often to get it free. Sure, we have Samsara taking care of the faction design and AI and Oswald working on maps. Obviously their role never stopped at just that and we act as a team in many decisions or ideas but there were times I could have used an extra hand. There are many other people that help me with various things and I am appreciative of every single one of them, you know who you are (I will credit you obviously at the end of all things). Luckily this might have changed now, since we have TheRogueWombat joining our team as a coder and Matt (our beta tester) is now officially part of the team!
These are the major points I wanted to touch in this review and hopefully give you some insights on all that has happened since the announcement of WOTF. Soon we will restart updating you more frequently as I will resume working on the mod after a small break.
This is all for now but more news about Mirkwood will come in the coming weeks. You can share your thoughts in our discord channel you can find the link on the main moddb page or at the bottom of this article. Also, we share there bonus stuff in the #sneak-peek channel for the very curious ones.
Sincerely,
NewErr and the Wars of the Firstborn team
