Anniversary Post

Still early days

Unity of Command is now 3 years old.

The years went by rather quickly. I remember pushing the button to go live at precisely midnight three years ago. Well, not precisely as we ended up being a few minutes late while some people were already banging on the doors (as documented for posterity on the release day thread on our forum).

Then, a little later, I remember getting the “we’d love to offer your game on Steam” email on a Saturday morning and thinking if it’s April Fools already. This was back in the bad old days when just getting on Steam was a big deal for indies. Turns out they weren’t kidding, someone there was actually sending out these emails on what was a Friday night in Seattle, bless them!

I get an enormous buzz that thousands of people really dig this game. Whether it’s a post I find in some forum, or if I bump into some players in real life, it never gets old. That’s why, after Black Turn, we just turned around and started working on a new one. It was never in question.

Emotional Progress Report

We’ve been working on our new game for quite some time now, and while I’m not ready to do a proper media announcement just yet, I can blog about our progress for anyone who’s sufficiently interested to drop by.

Don’t get too invested in the graphic to your right. I put it there so you know this thing is not entirely vaporware. There will be quite a few of these progress report posts before you can get your hands on anything playable though.

We are adding significantly to the game’s repertoire of mechanics, while hopefully not overcooking it. This will enable us to represent things like amphibious landings, para drops, intelligence effects, some naval action etc. The new system should be more versatile, so we could represent much more of WWII in it, and not just the maneuver-rich campaigns on the Eastern Front.

The campaign system is very much in flux right now. It’s possibly the weakest part of the original game, so I feel like we need to offer something awesome this time around. There’s no shortage of ideas, it’s more of a question of “which concept is right” for the game. I’ll be sure to post about campaign/metagame issues a lot in these progress updates.

Currently my main focus is on making the graphics engine work. We’re not doing ourselves any favors by writing the engine from scratch in OpenGL/SDL2/python, but that’s how we did it the last time around so why change now. Note that this means progress reports might be heavy on graphics programming lingo for some time. Consider yourself warned/invited as appropriate.

I’ll try to post at least monthly. Feel free to yell at me if I’m being lazy.

Thanks again for all of your support so far. Cheers!