Long Have We Waited news - Expanding Fronts mod for Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds

The story of the Expanding Fronts mod is one that stretches back over 12 years, to the small community at HeavenGames.com. It can trace its beginnings back to a user named Sarthos, and his modding project the 'Uber Mod;' a compilation of various individual mods uploaded to Galactic Battlegrounds Heaven across nearly a decade of the site's history. At the time, the ability to add new units and objects to the game rather than simply replacing existing assets was considered a rather groundbreaking achievement. Thanks to the efforts of GBH users - particularly Sarthos, Rossk, and SidiousInvader, the seeds for what would eventually become the mod we see today were planted.

In 2011, a small gathering of GBH members, including Sarthos, Orrion Carn, Rossk, and myself (Gen_Rhys_Dallows), decided to come together and try to expand on what the Uber Mod initially did. We strived to not only add even more new content to the game but to essentially rebuild it by allowing many of the new units to be used during typical gameplay. We presented our initial ideas and work in a thread simply titled 'Somebody must want this."

It wasn't until almost a year later when the project finally had a name; Expanding Fronts, and was officially posted to HeavenGames and ModDB. The rest speaks for itself. Our small team has since inflated to include nearly two dozen talented modders and countless contributors. Thanks to the skills of these volunteers, both past and present, Expanding Fronts has accomplished things previously thought impossible. New, fully-functional playable civilizations, increased framerate, widescreen support, new terrains, and larger map sizes make Expanding Fronts the definitive Galactic Battlegrounds experience. But we're not done yet.

The team is incredibly excited to announce that two new playable civilizations will be coming to Expanding Fronts very soon. In the not too distant future, Players will be able to bring forth the technological might of the First Order and use the cunning of the Resistance to outrun, outmaneuver, and outsmart opponents.

The First Order is a ruthless powerhouse of a civilization. Their technology tree and bonuses are tailored to allow them to advance through technology levels at a faster rate than other civilizations, where they gain access to a variety of devastating combat bonuses tailored to quickly annihilate any opposing forces with ease.

The Resistance is a very unique civilization with a gameplay style intended to center around stealth, sabotage, and espionage. Their specialized traits allow them to carefully observe and avoid enemy forces before crippling the opposition with lightning-fast raids. When fighting on the defensive, they make up for their lack of brute strength with an uncanny ability to reposition forces and bounce back from near-certain defeat.

Unfortunately, due to many life circumstances across the team, we cannot give a reliable date as to when the next update will be publicly available, but we are shooting for sometime in January. We'll reveal more about the new civilizations, as well as our upcoming campaigns and other new elements as we draw closer to their release. In the meantime, we would like to once again express our thanks to all of our players for your continued love and support, and our various contributors for your endless efforts to make Expanding Fronts the best mod that it can be. We never thought from our scatterbrained ideas over a decade ago on a forum with only a handful of active members that we would achieve even a fraction of the success that we have today.

Our plans for expanding fronts don't stop with what we've done. We have new campaigns, new units, and entirely new civilizations on our to-do list, but we need YOUR help to make them possible. We are currently looking for:

Concept Artists - We are looking for skilled concept artists to help us visualize and design structures, characters, and vehicles for our planned new civilizations. The more art we have, the better our modelers can put new in-game art assets together. Battlegrounds, like Age of Empires before it, uses a very distinct set of visual qualities for its architecture. Just by looking at a building, you can immediately tell what type of structure it is, what civilization it belongs to, and how far down the Tech tree they've advanced. We need artists that can meet those criteria with new and interesting designs for the new content we have planned. In addition to this, we will also need designs for new infantry, droids, tanks, spacecraft, boats, and artillery where pre-existing canon designs aren't available.

3D Artists and Animators - Modelers are responsible for bringing our new planned new units to life. The requirements to help us out aren't very demanding, amateurs are certainly welcome to lend a hand. Because SWGB is a sprite-based game, the amount of detail we need on infantry models and animations is not particularly high, as can be seen in official renders of the original art. Most units have five main animation sequences: Standing, Walking, Attacking, Dying, and Decaying. Special units like Jedi and Workers have additional sequences such as using force powers or gathering resources. Generally, all of these animations are rather simple, typically ranging from 8-16 frames each.

Technical knowledge of SWGB or AoK modding is certainly welcomed, but not necessary; we can handle most of that on our end. All that's required is a program capable of orthographic/parallel projection, and the ability to render the needed animations as a series of 2D images (using the correct camera/lighting setup for Battlegrounds) that we can convert into in-game sprites.

AI Scripters - Scripters teach the game's AI how to play the game. We need scripters capable of writing new strategies for the computer players that take advantage of the many new units, buildings, technologies, and gameplay elements available to players in Expanding Fronts. Scripters will also help to write scripts for new campaign levels. Anybody interested in learning AI scripting can take a look at the Computer Player Strategy Builder Guide for more details about the AI process.

Writers and Scenario Designers - We are looking for users skilled in the use of the Scenario Editor, as well as talented creative writers to help us craft our planned new campaigns. Our designers should have a good eye for map design and trigger use.

If you or anybody you know has the skills and would like to contribute to the Expanding Fronts project, please let us know. You can get in touch with us here, or on our Discord server.