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BETA | TOTAL WAR BATTLES Mobilising armies


The Creative Assembly recently announced a newly formed mobile division, and an iOS reworking of the Total War concept. Will Freeman looks at the opportunity triple-A mobile offers long-standing PC and console studios


THINK OF IOS developers and it’s easy to fill your head with clichés. Easily romanticised concepts like bedroom


coders, grass roots indies and microstudios have established themselves as the de facto stereotypes of the mobile gaming revolution, and they’re proving enduring as truisms. And yet a new breed of predator is circling


Renaud Charpentier, head of The Creative Assembly’s mobile division


the iOS market. Triple-A teams are zeroing in, armed with tools and techniques that once seemed impossibly distant from the mobile space. Just last month Epic president Mike Capps told Develop the million-dollar iOS dev budget was coming to stay. Seeing the likes of EA producing casual


content for the mobile space is nothing new, but since Epic’s Infinity Blade debuted there’s been a fresh wave of studios competing to dominate iOS with games more typical of high-end console and PC releases. The latest established studio to debut on


the Apple devices is Sega-owned outfit The Creative Assembly, which has moved its strategy series Total War to iOS. Long famed for its intricacy, the technically ambitious series is hardly the most obvious choice for the gently casual waters of the App Store. Still, the decision makers at The Creative


Assembly took the chance of establishing a dedicated mobile team, which ultimately resulted in the creation of the newly released Total War Battles: Shogun. The mobile division started with just one


man; Renaud Charpentier, project lead on The Creative Assembly’s move on iOS.


40 | MAY 2012


“I was given the chance to work alone, which meant I was given the chance to work without the pressures of a huge team behind me,” says Charpentier of the first move to bring Total War on mobile to life.


At some points I went back to my


desk, and I'd think 'how can I possibly fit a cathedral in a cup of tea?'.


Renaud Charpentier, The Creative Assembly


“So we started doing research in a back


and forth with Sega, and things looked very interesting. At the same time The Creative Assembly were also developing Shogun 2, so we decided to use the same background setting to make an iOS game.”


FROM SMALL ACORNS At that point Charpentier began to build a small team, mostly pulling in new staff from outside the company. The Unity engine was selected as the game’s core tool, and a process of furious prototyping began. “Making the game has really gone very


well, technically speaking,” confirms the project lead. “It is one of the smoothest


developments I have ever seen. Within two weeks of starting to work on this game we were working with the high-end visuals.” That’s not to say taking Total War to a new


audience on a new platform was easy, even with the might of Sega and The Creative Assembly backing the development. By Charpentier’s own admission,


reworking the DNA of Total War to fit the iOS was a ‘monstrously’ difficult task at times. “At some points I went back to my desk with an iPhone in my hands, knowing exactly what Total War is, as I have worked on it for a long time, and I’d think ‘how can I possibly fit a cathedral in a cup of tea?’. That was basically the challenge.” The solution to compressing the Church of


Total War turned out to be a simple one. Concentrating on the core strengths of iOS, and deciding the minimal elements essential to Total War as an experience became an obsession for the team “After that it was really about taking our existing high level design ideas and fitting them to that brief with the lower level design,” elaborates Charpentier. “That was where we had to look at the game’s economy and unit fighting and so on. And there Unity’s strengths kicked in. It let us try things, even crudely, and then immediately beam that concept onto the target device an see if it worked. We had to iterate a lot” With a small team and a popular engine in


place The Creative Assembly had everything ready. But manpower and technology alone


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