Hi guys and gals! I hope you are all having fun playing Their Finest Hour. My goal with this dev diary is to tell you a bit about how we do expansion projects, the reception it has gotten and what we have been up to to make it even better since release.
From what I’ve read so far on forums, both here and in the deep reaches of the internet fans are really liking the expansion. This makes me and the dev team very happy and proud! The reason we are in this line of business is after all that we like to make gamers happy and make products both we and others like.
It also seems to me from reading around that many new people took advantage of the sales of the base game when TFH came out and tried it for the first time. This usually only happens for expansions when they turn out well and get recommended by word of mouth to friends. So thank you all for playing and enjoying the expansion!
How we make an expansion
I’ve gotten some questions from people who are interested in how we work, so I thought I'd outline how we developed TFH.
The first step is to come up with features. This is usually a combination of taking down notes we made from making the base game, or previous expansion. We usually have a long list of things we didn’t have time to get in at that time, or came up with too late.
The rest, or rather the big meat and potatoes part of the design is usually brainstormed at the pub. We do a lot of our rough base designs over a few beers. It is a relaxed and creative environment. The day after someone will summarize and pick out the best ideas and work out the details. Once it's time to start I will sit down and estimate how much time each feature will take, what priority it should have (e.g. how much fun it sounds) and slot everything into a big plan. Expansions vary a lot, but most are around 4 months development time with 3 people in the main team. Then we have shared "resources" like QA testers and artists, and the occasional work done by a programmer from another team if they have special skills we need. So as game development goes we run very small efficient teams and we like it that way.
When the project starts we run in "sprints", which basically means every week, or 2 weeks a new feature is done. Once we have enough features implemented to be fun the alpha testers get to start trying it out. These are usually people who have done great jobs on previous expansions and whom we trust not to get bored playing a game full of half finished stuff and balance issues for weeks (I love you guys, but you are all crazy!
). These guys also help out a lot with things like historical research. Once all features are more or less implemented we open up for beta testers from the rest of the forum and that’s when we start working off important bug reports and issues people have. At this stage betas usually have a lot of input on how we should solve design issues as well. Its a very open environment where we discuss stuff. They are not just little testing automatons! In TFH we also added a small group of testers who won a competition during the last few weeks. This was great because we got fresh eyes, and they found bugs and helped us polish even more. I think this is something we'll do more of in the future. Betas stay on after release and help out with filtering forum feedback, and testing patches (we usually start working on the first patch the moment we have made the gold master and locked down that version of the code).
So what have we been up to since release?
Other than supporting, helping out and answering questions on the forum we have been hard at work on the 4.02 patch. Since TFH turned out to be our most stable and bug free hearts of iron expansion so far this put us in a great situation on being able to work on pretty much what we wanted instead of fire fighting. Most of the work has been put into AI improvements. The pacific theater is a very lively place now as this was one of the issues the forum felt strongest about and I hope you will like it when you get to try it.
We have managed to put in a few great feature improvements as well. In the division designer you will now be able to view terrain bonuses directly of your unit:
Another feature we have added is an indicator to show you if the mission time is being set for the target province's local day or night time. Now you can order a dawn attack without having to worry about calculating time zones.
Then we have also done some gameplay streamlining. Attack delay now scales depending on the length of combat, with a cut-off at 12 hours where it returns to the old values. This means that you can no longer exploit by throwing HQs at the enemy to slow them down. It also means that a well oiled German panzer force can roll over weak infantry quicker. Another change is that divisions who cant fight, like pure HQs no longer adds to stacking penalty. This is a little buff to the AI and removes some micro management in multi player.
I know I will get questions, but I can't really list all the bugs we have fixed - the actual full changelog is pretty long and will be included with the patch. We are currently testing it and hopefully it will be done for public consumption next week (no public beta. it goes straight to official). No promises though, in these times of autumn colds anything can happen to a time table.
Lastly I'd like to thank all our awesome beta testers again. We really couldn’t do a project like this without you and many have pulled as many hours of work as we have to help out!
(p.s notice how I managed to write the whole thing without a This was Their Finest Hour PR pun)
From what I’ve read so far on forums, both here and in the deep reaches of the internet fans are really liking the expansion. This makes me and the dev team very happy and proud! The reason we are in this line of business is after all that we like to make gamers happy and make products both we and others like.
It also seems to me from reading around that many new people took advantage of the sales of the base game when TFH came out and tried it for the first time. This usually only happens for expansions when they turn out well and get recommended by word of mouth to friends. So thank you all for playing and enjoying the expansion!
How we make an expansion
I’ve gotten some questions from people who are interested in how we work, so I thought I'd outline how we developed TFH.
The first step is to come up with features. This is usually a combination of taking down notes we made from making the base game, or previous expansion. We usually have a long list of things we didn’t have time to get in at that time, or came up with too late.
The rest, or rather the big meat and potatoes part of the design is usually brainstormed at the pub. We do a lot of our rough base designs over a few beers. It is a relaxed and creative environment. The day after someone will summarize and pick out the best ideas and work out the details. Once it's time to start I will sit down and estimate how much time each feature will take, what priority it should have (e.g. how much fun it sounds) and slot everything into a big plan. Expansions vary a lot, but most are around 4 months development time with 3 people in the main team. Then we have shared "resources" like QA testers and artists, and the occasional work done by a programmer from another team if they have special skills we need. So as game development goes we run very small efficient teams and we like it that way.
When the project starts we run in "sprints", which basically means every week, or 2 weeks a new feature is done. Once we have enough features implemented to be fun the alpha testers get to start trying it out. These are usually people who have done great jobs on previous expansions and whom we trust not to get bored playing a game full of half finished stuff and balance issues for weeks (I love you guys, but you are all crazy!
). These guys also help out a lot with things like historical research. Once all features are more or less implemented we open up for beta testers from the rest of the forum and that’s when we start working off important bug reports and issues people have. At this stage betas usually have a lot of input on how we should solve design issues as well. Its a very open environment where we discuss stuff. They are not just little testing automatons! In TFH we also added a small group of testers who won a competition during the last few weeks. This was great because we got fresh eyes, and they found bugs and helped us polish even more. I think this is something we'll do more of in the future. Betas stay on after release and help out with filtering forum feedback, and testing patches (we usually start working on the first patch the moment we have made the gold master and locked down that version of the code).So what have we been up to since release?
Other than supporting, helping out and answering questions on the forum we have been hard at work on the 4.02 patch. Since TFH turned out to be our most stable and bug free hearts of iron expansion so far this put us in a great situation on being able to work on pretty much what we wanted instead of fire fighting. Most of the work has been put into AI improvements. The pacific theater is a very lively place now as this was one of the issues the forum felt strongest about and I hope you will like it when you get to try it.
We have managed to put in a few great feature improvements as well. In the division designer you will now be able to view terrain bonuses directly of your unit:
Another feature we have added is an indicator to show you if the mission time is being set for the target province's local day or night time. Now you can order a dawn attack without having to worry about calculating time zones.
Then we have also done some gameplay streamlining. Attack delay now scales depending on the length of combat, with a cut-off at 12 hours where it returns to the old values. This means that you can no longer exploit by throwing HQs at the enemy to slow them down. It also means that a well oiled German panzer force can roll over weak infantry quicker. Another change is that divisions who cant fight, like pure HQs no longer adds to stacking penalty. This is a little buff to the AI and removes some micro management in multi player.
I know I will get questions, but I can't really list all the bugs we have fixed - the actual full changelog is pretty long and will be included with the patch. We are currently testing it and hopefully it will be done for public consumption next week (no public beta. it goes straight to official). No promises though, in these times of autumn colds anything can happen to a time table.
Lastly I'd like to thank all our awesome beta testers again. We really couldn’t do a project like this without you and many have pulled as many hours of work as we have to help out!
(p.s notice how I managed to write the whole thing without a This was Their Finest Hour PR pun
)
