Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog Q&A

This week’s developer blog for TaleWorlds Entertainment’s upcoming sandbox RPG Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord brings us an in-house Q&A with Bahar Şevket, a gameplay programmer who’s currently busy implementing Bannerlord’s siege engines. If you’re interested in that particular aspect of Bannerlord, you should check it out. A few sample questions:

WHAT DO YOU NORMALLY DO DURING YOUR DAY?

“My day starts with a stand-up meeting of the team in the morning. Every member of the team gets the rest of us up to speed on their current tasks; what they are doing, their progress on their current issues, etc. We work closely with designers and some other teams, such as UI and QA, so it is not uncommon to have people from those teams in the morning meetings. After that, I continue working on the tasks I have at hand. I have worked on various single player features throughout my time at TaleWorlds: conversations, game menus, alley missions, siege engines, quests (my favourite!) and many more moddable campaign behaviours. I also want to mention that we focused on making the town/village life more realistic and rich. We added different kinds of NPCs with different kinds of behaviours, animations and quests. I think that Calradia is a much more vibrant world now!”

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WHAT’S THE MOST DIFFICULT THING THAT YOU SOLVED SO FAR, DURING THE PRODUCTION OF BANNERLORD?

“Well, my response to this one is not a one-off task that I solved once and was done with. What I find most challenging is the effort of making the game easily moddable, which requires continuous and constant caution. I am working mostly on the single-player campaign portion of the game, and we are well aware of how much our community enjoys creating awesome and varied mods for the campaign. That’s why we put a lot of effort into making Bannerlord better in terms of moddablity. We are using C# as the scripting language in Bannerlord. And I hope that this choice will benefit our modding community because it is highly user-friendly and is an object-oriented language. I don’t think going too deep into the technical details right now is a good idea, but simply put, after adding a new feature, we always analyse if it should be something that is moddable. If it is deemed to be a moddable feature, we add corresponding interfaces and maintain our default implementation in order to create room for moddable behaviour.”

WHAT DO YOU CURRENTLY WORK ON?

“Right now, I’m working on siege preparation on the campaign map. As you may have noticed, we introduced a variety of siege weapons that can be utilised during siege battles. Both the player and AI armies can build these engines before their assault.

I should mention that we recently made some changes to our siege preparation. Previously, a player who besieged a castle had to select what they wanted to build from a number of engines, one by one. Recently, however, we introduced a new tactics feature. Now, the player will select one of the siege tactics available and will get a preloaded waiting list for siege engines that are useful to the selected tactic. The player will be able to start the bombardment as soon as any machine is finished and will be able to start damaging the defences of the town/castle even before starting the siege mission (battle). The tactic can be changed at any point during the waiting time, based on the defender’s tactic, or any other events occurring in the world at that moment.”