Dragon Commander Development Update

Larian Studios’ Swen Vincke has penned another blog post, this time dedicated to what’s going on with the development of Dragon Commander. As it turns out, there’s quite a lot going on, including several hires related to Larian’s intentions to self-publish the title and an engine change. Here’s a snip:

At this point, we’re pretty much done with how the RPG part will work, are in the middle of dealing with the strategy part & have changed the combat gameplay drastically so that it has much more depth.

The big problem we had with the combat was how to ensure that controlling both your dragon and your fleet at the same time was fun. It took a lot of iterations and try outs to get that balance right, but I think we finally cracked it.

I played the latest version of the combat phase last night, and as I was playing my phone rang. I glance at the number, realized I had to pick up the phone, but felt angry that I couldn’t pause nor save the game yet, meaning that I was going to be slaughtered by the AI. I took that to be a good sign.

Mind you, its’s not finished yet and I needed to imagine several other things that needed to be in place to make it really fun experience, but I found that at this point it was easy to see what was missing, meaning that I think we’re well on our way to make something cool. But if it turns out it’s not, I guess we’ll probably backtrack again, and try something different. As I said, the best piece of advice we received was that we need to make sure it’s done well, and it’s our intention to live up to that.

We’ve also switched game engines. Were the previous build of DC that we’ve shown to you at Gamescom was still running on the DKS engine, we were so happy about the engine tech used in project E, that we decided to switch Dragon Commander to project E’s engine. That took some time, but it’s now concluded, and I’m quite happy with the results of that move, considering it one of the best decisions taken on the dev side in the last year.