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Developer's diaries
Please feel free to link to our developer's diary, but if you want to reprint it, please contact us at press@altarinteractive.com
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June 31st, 2003
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Developer's diary: Part XII: UFO: What's left
While the tactical gameplay is pretty much set for some time now and we are now balancing weapons stats and strength of enemies, the strategic game was in very much rudimentary state. Now, our strategic game is the less complex part of the game, yet still it is more than a mere engine for tactical mission generation. We always wanted the strategic game to be a game in it own right, it should be able to stand up on its own. UFO: Aftermath should be interesting even if you could win a tactical mission by a mere click of a button.
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May 31st, 2003
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Developer's diary: Part XI: UFO: Aftermath at E3
But let's go back to Kentia Hall and Cenega's stand. It was quite handsome and spacious, with two tiny meeting rooms and a total of seven computers, two of them running UFO. (Korea: the Forgotten Conflict and Shade: the Wrath of Angels also had two each. The seventh was running Gooka). As usual, the version we brought with us (having snatched it from the hands of our programmers at 4:00 a.m. before driving directly to the airport) didn't work too well, so on the evening before the show we went to a Counter-Strike game center close to our hotel and used their Internet connection to download a patch that, as usual, miraculously made everything work. We then spent a nice night burning this new version on fifty CDs we had promised Cenega we’d bring with us.
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March 31st, 2003
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Developer's diary: Part X: A Day in the Life
Today I got up late; playing Warcraft III till 2:00 a.m. didn't help things much. I knew I had to write that wretched developer's diary the first thing I get in the office, so maybe I was just trying to postpone the inevitable. However, when I arrived, the lead programmer told me about a subtle problem with alien AI: as you know, dear diary, we compose the city missions from blocks. These blocks have pre-computed values of "cover" for each square, i.e., how much a given square is covered from enemy sight (and fire). This calculation is pretty expensive and cannot be recalculated in run-time. Therefore, whenever a wall is knocked down, the aliens will gather there in droves, as no spot is better protected than the one inside a solid structure. Furthermore, squares just behind a wall or in a corner between two walls have high values of cover as well.
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February 27, 2003
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Developer's diary: Part IX: Degrees of Freedom
A hotly debated topic on our forums recently was the question of tactical options in the game and their number. This can be summed up as follows: in real life, just as in some games (e.g. Jagged Alliance), the soldiers can stand, crouch or lay prone and move in these respective positions, they can shoot a single shot or a burst and they can decide how much time they spend aiming to increase their chance to hit. The questions being asked are: will these options be available in UFO: Aftermath? Which, if not all? And if not all, is it still worthwhile to play the game?
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January 30, 2003
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Developer's diary: Part VIII: The Quest for a Publisher
The increased workload mentioned above is, of course, due to us having a new publisher, the existence of which I was happy to report in the previous instalment. As developer/publisher relationships and, if the e-mail I get and forums I read are anything to go by, the very process of selling the game are a source of both interest and speculation, I would like to tell you more about what has happened during most of the past year. I shall name no companies (beside those that were named already, i.e. Titus and Cenega) as I believe the names are not important, it is the process itself that we are trying to describe here...
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November 20, 2002
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Developer's diary VII: The squares of the city
The last installment of this diary dealt with the issue of the proper visualization of combat, i.e. how to display, in an unobtrusive and unambiguous manner, who is the attacker and who or what is the target. When dealing with this problem, we also come to question one of the axioms we set for ourselves when we began to work on this game, namely its squareness...
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October 20, 2002
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Developer's diary VI: Our last build
The tactical game is finally in a stage where we can start truly testing its features. The game finally uses the stats of the weapons the soldiers are actually equipped with, instead of some nearly-random values; the soldiers can choose their mode of fire and decided if they are going to walk or run...
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September 20, 2002
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Developer's diary V: Our first chat
There was a first public chat about UFO: Aftermath this past Thursday (Sep 19, 2002). For the details of the chat you can go the excellent Pete's page www.ufoaftermath.co.uk (which is well worth visiting in any case, if you haven't been there yet) or you can find the links in the Press section of our official page. You can find there both full and edited logs of the chat, so I won't quote it here excessively. However there are couple of things I would like to say about the chat as such, and then there were some questions I wish I had answered differently or more broadly and, contrary to usual situation, I can actually put forward this esprit de l'escalier...
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July 20, 2002
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Developer's diary IV: Things going sour
It was around Christmas last year when we could not help noticing a strange thing. The milestone payments from our publisher, Titus, grew even more delayed. Maybe I should explain some aspects of the developer-publisher relationship in general terms, even though many a reader has undoubtedly already heard about it. Still, I constantly receive letters from people confusing the two and therefore I'll try to explain briefly. If you already know what the cross-collateralised royalties are, please feel free to skip the next four paragraphs...
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May 20, 2002
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Developer's diary III: Run-up
When it become clear that we would not be able to use any of the materials created by Mythos, we had to decide what approach to take. One option we had was taking the original Design document and start from the scratch, bypassing the middleware Mythos was using ("bypassing" is such a lovely word; meaning anything to anybody; in this context it would mean developing them ab initio). This was obviously out of question, healthy self-confidence is one thing, cocksureness is quite another...
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April 5, 2002
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Developer's diary II: First shots
The past month was not clear sailing. It was not sailing at all. I hope I'll be able to write more about it one day, when it will be just one of those funny stories, such as, you know, when you lost your way in the mountains, and almost froze to death, and then, at the last moment, you met the St. Bernard… I surely hope a St. Bernard is just around the corner now...
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March 5, 2002
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Developer's diary I: Building a city
Last week we were to send a regular monthly milestone to our publisher. This one was very much anticipated as it should finally show how the game is really going to look like in the tactical mission (so far we used a only a flat, top-down, 2D view to simulate the tactical gameplay). And really, there came one of those rare moments when several hitherto unrelated pieces fall into place, when untold doubts and reassurances are squashed a verified. To understand what is it really about, I need to get little bit technical...
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