News From the Back of Beyond

*Tap Tap*

***BUZZZZZ***

~~~ Beeoooooppp ~~~

Okay...
So I think this thing still works...

Blitzkrieg 2 is an ooold mod, and it was getting pretty experimental by Release 3. There's been very little activity from the team and I've not had any input in years. It still blows my mind that anyone still cares about it but the statistics page reliably tells me that there's a fair few people still out there fighting the good fight, viewing the pages and downloading content!

So I figured an update was in order. Well also a review - a bit of history of the mod and an idea of where it might be going in the future.

Going back, the last significant output from the team was Release 3. The mod had grandiose vision. Anyone who's played it will know that it's pretty weird and defies a lot of standard RTS conventions. That's because the vision was never fully realised. Partly that's my fault. My skills of game design left a lot to be desired. The other major problem was the clunky engine. Zero Hour was showing its age even back then.

So what has happened in all this time?

I migrated to greener pastures. I knew we needed a new engine to make significant improvements and to really do the mod justice. Although I had high hopes for C&C3 it turned out to be a bust. After wresting with that beast to help produce Mid East Crisis 2 I came to realise that it wasn't going to offer much that was new or interesting for Blitz.

Another candidate I saw and ultimately rejected was Supreme Commander. The bottom line was that the UI (while awesome) didn't have enough control to really make the scale workable. I tended to spend the whole time in zoomed out mode and never got to see any of the cool action. I can't see any way around this for a future Blitz mod.

Ultimately the game engine I've settled on is Starcraft 2. I've been working on other projects using the development tools and I'm really impressed by how versatile it is. It's incredibly powerful and a very cool engine. Very well optimised with great multiplayer backend (mismatches are history!)

I'm pretty convinced that I can achieve all the mad crazy grand designs I always wanted for Blitz with the power of SC2's engine. What do these grand designs look like? Well it may surprise you to see but this was a major inspiration:

Yep! Hex games!

It's hard to really convey the idea fully. Hopefully some video will be possible in the not too distant future, but think Hearts of Iron 2 meets Panzer General... INSIDE an RTS engine. The whole hex game type of grand strategic gameplay fought out in real time with actual RTS units, everything moving exploding and looking awesome like only an RTS can!

I recently got some help from an engineer friend who helped me with some of the most challenging coding problems.
There's not much more I can really say, nothing cool to show or anything like that.

I'll just leave you with the confirmation that progress is still happening on this crazy project, just probably not in a way that most people probably would have expected!

The good news is that we still have or huge back-catalogue of WW2 units. The main challenge is code and maps rather than art (and typically that's the area most projects get sunk by).

Have a happy 2014 - more to come as and when, or as we always say "Soon" (tm)!

Korona