UFO: AM > devdiaries

Developer's diary: Part VI

(October 20, 2002)

Welcome, dear reader, to the sixth part of our developer's diary; here I try to describe what we have to go through in order to bring you UFO: Aftermath. As is the custom here, I would first like to thank everybody for his support of our game, especially to the people who take part in our message forum for the steady stream of fresh ideas they pour to us.

In this diary I would like to tell you a little bit more about the current state of development and about the direction we are taking the game into.

Diary: Our last build

In case you are wondering if I am going to reveal the name of our publisher today, I am sorry to say I am going to disappoint you once more. The lack of the publisher does not stop us (yet) from working on the game and so we duly produced a new build of the tactical game so that we could appraise its qualities and decide how it measures up to our expectations.

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.

All this adds immensely to the atmosphere of the game, but still, there are various issues that do not work quite as we imagined. Take the actual shooting for instance. We all know that bullets move at supersonic speeds and so there is no chance of you actually seeing it (or hearing it, for that matter, if it is going to hit you). You can see the muzzle flash and you can see the impact, but not the actual trajectory of the bullet, if you are not using tracer rounds.

However, most of the tactical games show the trajectory, as do many movies - just think the slow flying laser beams in Star Wars. The games I speaking here about are mostly turn-based games and it does not really matter that much there if a single shot takes about that much time as walking three feet. It adds wonderfully to the tension and thrill of the game: you can see the bullet slowly flying toward its target and pray that it does hit. Let's face it: shooting is raison d'Être of playing tactical games and it is only fair if the player spends more time on this then he would in reality do.

This however has repercussions for our system. In simultaneous action game every action must take a "reasonable" amount of time and it would be ridiculous if an alien could make couple of steps before a bullet, fired from the distance of fifteen yards, hits him. An alternative is to slow down time (this is the approach a Russian game E5, now in development and with wonderfully similar command system to UFO: Aftermath, uses).

However, with seven men at your mission, it may well happen that the game will slow down because of a soldier you are not paying an attention to. And then there are also shots the aliens fire at you. Should the game slow down because of them as well?

Obviously, the easiest and in many ways best solution is just to break free from the tradition and do not display the trajectories at all, just as in real life. However, when we tried this, the result was strangely unsatisfying. I'd venture to say that most of you, my kind readers, are just like as far as fire fights are concerned - your experiences and expectations come from computer screen, not from an actual combat mission (and certainly not from a combat mission against aliens and mutants) and we just came to expect there will be something visible when we fire at somebody, even if we know that it is nonsense.

Besides, if there is some kind of a connection between the attacker and his target, it makes the overall situation clearer and easier to understand. We tried drawing a solid line from the muzzle to the hit spot and while, at least in my opinion, it worked fine, our artists complained it spoils their carefully crafted artistic look of our cities.

At present the question is not yet settled, but I expect us to arrive at some sort of compromise.

Martin Klima, ALTAR interactive

In UFO: Aftermath you assume the role of the Earth's last hope, the commander of the last, scattered humans left on the planet. It is up to you guide your forces through the planet's time of crisis, and overcome the alien threat.

Gameplay highlights include:

•	Simultaneous turn-based combat: combines the best of the real-time and turn-based combat systems;
•	Randomly generated tactical missions: Each playing field is unique, no two games are the same;
•	Strong RPG elements: your soldiers will improve as they gain more experience, allowing you to make specialists like snipers, medics, and many more;
•	Intricate, rich, and frighteningly alien setting displayed in full 3D.

Buy UFO: Aftermath online!