Gen’l,
For some time now, an eerie silence has surrounded the Grand Engineer Corps camp. The troops are wondering, what is happening inside the fog of war? What does this mean to the Grand Tacticians, present and future? Major changes have taken place in the background, with the Engineer Corps going through a reorganization. As the pieces are falling in place, it’s a good time to share some Engineering intel from behind the scenes.
The Greenhorn Volunteers.
Grand Tactician’s story began in 2016, with Oliver (a finance banker turned coder from Austria) and Ilja (a wargame enthusiast in the Finnish Army) deciding to develop a strategy game independently. The idea was to create something unique in the genre, the game taking place in the American Civil War – a conflict of great interest to us. Soon after Peter (a chemical industry worker and mod artist from Germany) joined the team as an artist, and since then our team of three worked hard to make our dream a reality. We started from zero, new game engine, new coding language, and a lot to learn…
The Civil War (1861-1865) has been a true independent “garage project”, being developed outside the working hours as a second job. It started as a very interesting (yet ambitious) hobby project, with no commercial expectations. The development didn’t have a fixed schedule, we worked as much on the game as we could, learning as we went. We have been blessed with many helpful and talented people with enthusiasm toward our project and the will to help, and this helped shape the game into what it is today – not perfect by any means, but something we’re proud of. We managed to create a unique game among its peers. 2000 reviews with > 70% score is high praise!
What we never expected was that so many players would find the game and enjoy it, providing us ideas and constructive criticism from the Early Access of late 2020 continuing all the way to this day. This of course caused immense pressure to deliver. The post-release development has been even more hectic than the time before. At times, there was exhaustion among the ranks, as all the work was still done after returning home from a day (or night) job, work trip or even military exercise. The COVID years and increased tempo at work for some left a mark in the development as well. This was especially true during development of the Whiskey & Lemons DLC. In these circumstances, while frustrating at times, it has been very flattering that our humble game has been compared to titles created by much larger developers with much larger resources at hand.
At the same time we knew we could not continue like this in the future. Demands at work, with family and with the game were taking an increasing toll. We’re not young guys anymore.
The Long Road Ahead.
We always wanted to make Grand Tactician a game series to portray multiple wars of the gunpowder and linear warfare era (17th to 19th Centuries). If for now we disregard the personal issues we had with resources to invest in game development, we also had reached a point in the Grand Tactician -engine where small fixing here and there no longer was achieving sufficient results. Like said, we know the game is far from perfect, and there are the shortfalls here and there we want to improve. These are mostly the ones the community knows very well and have been providing us feedback about (there are also some technical ones, that are not apparent to players). “Clunkiness”, performance, AI, battle balance, player onboarding, information…
Military minded people remember the approach to putting new wine into old bottles… In order to really improve the battle AI, as an example, working on the AI itself alone no longer helps – work is required in other areas as well, like the whole unit system, pathfinding, order of battle, parts of the combat systems. Tinkering with all these systems individually to help the battle AI a bit will cause issues in other areas, that in turn need to be reworked, and the butterfly effect continues. And still we would have the old unit system, pathfinding, etc. that we want to improve anyways, and that are affecting other areas (clunkiness, performance…) So, in some cases we need a new bottle for the new wine.
During the eight years we of course learned a lot, but also the tools available have constantly developed. Especially the battle layer we developed first during 2017 is showing age and no longer facilitates much improvement without a rehaul. So, we decided that in order to move forward we need to rewrite big blocks of the game engine. This of course takes a lot of time – it’s “revolution vs. evolution”, like game developers like to call it. At the same time it allows further changes like increasing modding opportunities and adding localization.
But, back to reality and the resources… If the volunteers are worn out from years of battle, to rally the Corps, veteran regulars are needed.
The Regulars.
Recently, the Grand Engineer Corps has gone through a major reorganization. As things were still in motion and results were foggy, we kept quiet about this, while already re-working hard the first elements of the game engine. At the same time we released multiple patches to fix the remaining major issues reported by players.
Now we’re very happy to be able to say that things have turned around for us in a major way. We have teamed up with a like minded publisher, the right one for us and for our project – a Grand Tactician -series. With this move we have been able to transform from exhausted garage-developers into professionals – volunteers into regulars – resigning our earlier jobs and now working as full-time game developers! To put it mildly, life is now very different and so are our development opportunities.
What exactly we are working on will be disclosed at a much, much later date. What can be said this early on, is that we’re working on taking Grand Tactician forward in a way that earlier was not possible for us. While not much more can be said at this point, we’re planning on sharing a developer log regularly, approximately every 2-3 months, to give you a small glimpse into our upcoming game. While our vision for the next game is already set – and this takes into account the feedback we’ve received –, we do want to give you an opportunity to provide feedback, during development, at a more detailed level. We’ll start with some more technical matters, and – in full transparency – intend to hold back the major details, until there is a better opportunity to share them. We hope you share our ambition of making Grand Tactician into something greater, and that to do that we need to let the marketing machine have something to run on, when the time is right!
While our work continues, players of The Civil War 1861-1865 will be supported by the development team like before. The best way is to drop an e-mail to our message box info(at)grandtactician(dot)com, as we are deep “in the matrix” – there are only so many pairs of hands. We’ll do our best to help you with issues and questions you have. What is also fair to say at this point is that no new features or downloadable content are to be expected for The Civil War. We hope this is understandable, as large parts of the game’s engine are already cut open on our field surgeon’s table.
Having shared this piece of intel, we continue our long march toward what we hope and believe will be a bright future for Grand Tactician. Touch the elbow!
Very respectfully, your obedient servants
Oliver, Ilja, Peter
The Grand Engineer Corps.