“We are betting on an original gameplay”: HeroCraft about the new RTS

Ilya, tell us a little about the project. What is he like?

Ilya Denbrov

In one phrase, it’s “squad-based RTS” about tanks.

In the game, you control not an army, but a platoon of four or six units. Direct microcontrol, no base construction and resource extraction. Tactical missions only.

As the game progresses, you will have to open and pump different cars, make up squads of them suitable for various tactics.

All tanks in the game are unique, it is impossible to take two identical cars into the squad. In fact, each tank is a hero, individually pumped and having a unique ability and a set of characteristics, and, as a result, its own role on the battlefield.

The game has a campaign of small missions, a survival mode, and a fully realtime PvP (the campaign has the ability to pause the game and give orders within it).

We experimented with mechanics, including turn-based combat, with alternating phases of orders and action. While this mode is still quite raw, and we have temporarily postponed it, but we do not completely discount it.

What’s with the controls? Real-time strategies usually do not take root well on mobile platforms due to problems with it.

Yes, management is perhaps the most important stopper for developers of such games. This is really the biggest challenge. We have already changed it many times and for sure we will change it again. Now we are just collecting feedback from the beta test.

But besides the endless polishing of touch control, which in any case will lose to the convenience of the mouse and hotkeys, we want to go from the other side.

The idea is that we want to reduce the role of control by increasing the role of meta. This game is not so much about how accurately and on time you move your units, but more about how meaningfully you make up a platoon of units, how well you maneuver them, how you plan your actions.

But is it possible to control something with one hand in the game?

Yes, you can manage, while our feature with a tactical pause was invented so that the rich gameplay could somehow be stopped, paused, calmly think about everything.

Let’s turn to development now. Do I understand correctly that this is not an internal HeroCraft project?

The work on it is divided in half between us and the external team.

Initially, an independent team from Hungary made a game engine. They even created and released a game on it, but it, let’s say, didn’t go very well, and they brought it to us. Now we are working together to finalize it.

Why did they take up their engine? There are so many great alternatives right now.

The reason is simple: they started developing the project a long time ago, even before the heyday of the Unity era. Then it was relevant. Many then experimented with graphics engines. Maybe someone else remembers names like Horde or Ogre 3d. It also turned out to be important that their lead programmer is a convinced “plus”. Of course, if we started the project from scratch, everything would be different.

Since its history began before the heyday of Unity, the project, it turns out, is not young.

Yes, they have a small team, they did it for a long time, but with a soul.

The development of the initial project – it was a classic RTS for PC – lasted three years. They released the game two years ago.

Why did you take the project that didn’t go in by itself?

Initially, we considered it only as a ready-made toolkit and a set of assets, i.e. we were preparing not for polishing the old game, but simply for creating a completely new one, but on the basis of available resources, editors, etc.

We were then offered an engine, graphics and working hands, we needed a game design and publishing house. This seemed to be a very promising option for cooperation. We went to Budapest, met the developers personally, made sure of their motivation and adequacy, and after that decided to start joint development.

The development team is external, and foreign, how is the process of working with it built?

We work with the team remotely, completely in English. This significantly slows down the work process, because the language is not native to anyone: of course, a lot of time is spent on communication, drafting documentation and setting tasks. But this is an unavoidable evil. Shared chat, SVN, online documents and task-tracking system tailored for Agile are an integral part of our developer’s everyday life.

The entire project team is actually divided into two parts, working on different processes and in different conditions.

The Russian-speaking half (game design, UI and network code), respectively, is located in our office in Kaliningrad, and the Hungarian half (client code and graphics) is distributed between Hungary, the Philippines and Japan.

We don’t manage to meet as often as we would like, but we try not to miss such opportunities. After all, there is no substitute for live communication.

How many people are employed in the project in total?

At different times, the composition varied greatly. At the start, the team consisted of only four people: two developers and two people with us – the ideological inspirer, the leading game designer, and me, who was engaged in everything else, from signing contracts to cutting sprites into place holders.

Later, when they made a difficult decision to invest in the game and make a full-fledged PvP, the team began to expand. At the moment, there are two programmers and a 3D artist on the developer’s side, a server programmer, two game designers, a level designer and me on the HeroCraft side.

We also periodically involve outsourcers and employees of other departments that are not directly part of the team (design, testing, etc.). By the standards of the industry, this is, of course, quite a bit, but we always consider expansion options.

Tell us about the features of the engine.

If by the engine we mean not only the graphics engine, but also the whole complex of programming and design solutions that we inherited from the original game, then this is generally one big feature.

On the one hand, reengineering is always fun and, it seems, gives access to a lot of ready—made features, on the other hand, a lot of pitfalls and very non–standard solutions are discovered. For the first couple of months, we were mostly engaged in trying to understand how it all works, what can be changed and tuned, and what is better to take for granted and not touch it at all. About the love of indie developers for the compilation of documentation, I think, you can not tell.

Seriously, the engine supports a lot of serious features. For example, in the game, the logic of moving tracked units is based on a “virtual pilot” that controls the separate movement of the tracks. And the damage system calculates the probability of ricochet and damage reduction depending on the angle of the projectile hitting the tank body. Yes, yes, in the mobile strategy.

Projectiles are also calculated as physical objects with their own flight path, which allows you to realize misses, accidental hits into obstacles such as poles, trees, buildings, other tanks, etc.

In general, we got a lot of features that are now absolutely standard for tank shooter simulators, but extremely atypical for RTS. For us, this is, of course, a difficult, but very interesting task – to save or adapt them for a new gameplay.

What is left in the game from the project that was originally offered to you?

At the moment, there is almost nothing left of what the player can see with his own eyes, except for the models and textures themselves, as well as the logic of movement and shooting. And many changes have already been made there. For example, they added the logic of reversing and capturing targets.

Initially, it was a full-fledged classic RTS. You build bases, capture points that generate resources, with which you buy units and huge armies, wave after wave, you send them to slaughter. There were infantry, cars, and guns in the game. As a result, we abandoned all this and focused on managing a small tank platoon.

Isn’t there a feeling that people are tired of the Second World War and tanks?

When we published the news about our open beta test, of course, the reviews were different. There are also skeptics, there are haters, as they say, “fed up with potatoes” – those who react biased to any tank theme at all. But there are still more positive-minded, interested people. The feedback and comments we receive every day in our VK group speak for themselves.

Well, as they say, not a single setting. In addition to it, we rely on original gameplay. There are practically no similar games on the mobile market now, and the longing for RTS and hard PvP is clearly felt among the players.

Can you share the first results of the beta test?

We have about 5 thousand players gathered, and despite the fact that the first version of the game, of course, has bugs and flaws, many mechanics are missing, many users like it and cause lively discussions in the game community.

Reviews help to understand what players are missing, what causes discomfort and what needs to be worked on, as well as to determine priorities for future updates.

Players like live communication and we try to answer their questions as openly and honestly as possible, create topics for discussion and participate in them. The first active players are already appearing in our VKontakte group, who are beginning to answer the questions of newcomers themselves.

Now we have about 400 constructive reviews, error messages, etc. From day to day there will be a big update with a serious rebalance and a lot of changes, the beta test will continue.

What about metrics?

At the moment, we study only reviews, retention rates and game design analytics on player progression and balance, and catch bugs, of course.

The game currently lacks an inter-mission tutorial, monetization, user return mechanisms, social functionality and much more, so it’s too early to talk about business metrics.

There will be another softlonch between beta and release, on which we will check the business metrics when we finish all this. Adjusted for the country where the software will be, of course, but it has not yet been approved. In general, the indicators of the success of the project for us are retention 1-3-7-30: 50%-30%-25%-10% and ARPU is at least $0.5.

Now the game is available in an open beta test on Google Play, we will be glad to receive any feedback!