OPINION | ALPHA //COMMENT: STUDIO MANAGEMENT Choose your battles Tim Heaton, The Creative Assembly
WE RECENTLY ANNOUNCED Total War Battles: Shogun, Creative Assembly’s first mobile game. It’s a strategy game reconfigured from our PC Total War designs but built for shorter playtimes and a shallower learning curve. We think it will stand alone on iOS and
Android (and possibly other platforms to come), and we made it for several strategic reasons. Interestingly, but not totally surprisingly, some of the early responses from one or two of our hardcore fans wasn’t totally positive. “Wow, I know people will get angry over this” said one. That’s an interesting response. I think
they’re worried that any time we spend on something other than the tent-pole release of Total War will somehow diminish it, which I think is the wrong assumption. We’re very careful about that. Once we decided to make a mobile game
we built a ‘start-up’ team away from the main Total War team, mainly made up of new staff. We did this to ring-fence what we were doing on both PC and mobile. We were worried we’d just not be able to resist moving people around to solve short term scheduling issues within the main team, and slowly we’d rob Peter to pay Paul and fudge our mobile opportunity.
STAY ON TARGET Focus is one of the key tenets of the studio, and it’s so much better to let teams understand they have priorities that won’t change at management’s whim. We’ve deliberately built a wall – both metaphorically and in reality – between the Alien console team and theTotal War team too. We also needed some fresh eyes to look at
Total War in a new way. We’re very protective of the Total War design pillars – perhaps too protective at times – and we needed someone not afraid to challenge our assumptions on a new platform. We wanted the team to be led by someone who had a strong history of games development, but also had an entrepreneurial spirit. We were lucky to find someone who had both. Creative Assembly also likes to create its
own bespoke technology. We have very specific needs for our tech, and we like to stay in control. We use third party libraries where it makes sense, but we like to make our own tools, and we still like to get pretty close to the hardware when we can. We constantly appraise what’s available at all levels, but so far we’re happy with our decisions. However, for Total War Battles we deliberately didn’t want it to be a technically led project. We wanted to prototype quickly and visually, and we wanted to keep our options open to move onto different platforms quickly. We chose Unity as our engine provider, and we’re confident we made the right decision. It
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has allowed us a relatively easy technical learning curve and a great set of tools, and allowed us to get on with making the game. With the current exception of Windows Phone 8, we can get onto the platforms we want far more simply than with a bespoke engine. We’re quite excited about Windows Phone 8, so we hope to be there at some point.
There are design ideas defined by
some of the unique aspects of mobile, touch screen and so on that could influence future PC work.
Most importantly though, we’re making a mobile application – and other things we’re not ready to talk about – not just because they’re extra Total War products, but because they are helping us build our knowledge. The future is interconnectivity. Whether it’s
players taking a game with them when they travel, augmenting gameplay with mobile apps, or supporting activities on another device, there are already many examples, and not all of them great. We want to understand what our options are and how we can deliver them, and we’re aiming for best-in-class, so we want to control them.
A TWO-WAY STREET Equally, there are design ideas defined by some of the unique aspects of mobile, touch screen and so on that could influence future PC work. In addition there’s the integration of the social aspects of gaming, which we’re very interested in, and which are relevant not only to individual platforms, but even more so for reaching our cross-platform communities seamlessly. I think some ‘traditional’
developers see mobile and social as elements to be farmed out as support operations, or worse, as distractions. We see them as opportunities to drive core strategy games in the same direction as our players. For more on Total War
Battles, turn to page 40.
Tim Heaton is studio director at The Creative Assembly, the UK-founded studio behind the acclaimed Total War series of PC games, as well as numerous other works including original and licensed products.
www.creative-assembly.co.uk
MAY 2012 | 13
Shogun: Total War Battles (above) takes The Creative Assembly’s famed RTS series to iOS via Unity
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