Trawling through our old team IM software (before slack) with some reallllly early development Battalion stuff. May post on here periodically.. I'm looking for old blockout stuff for #Blocktober but I'm also just going to post some funny stuff from the project on this thread.

We wanted to make it easy to tell who had what weapon (like red hat guy in COD4). So at range you could tell if a player had a shotgun because he had a gas mask on. We cut this feature eventually due to time constraints (as with most cool details) but that was the idea..

Notice the swastika on his chest. The game didn't start its life as a comp targeted game until we found out (very early) about COD:WW2 and chose to pivot. Sponsors/streams/tournaments wouldn't want their brand next to a swastika, so we had to remove the swastikas.

Battalion had a huge emphasis on an old school feel. We discovered early on, that feel could be lost if you make the game look 'too good'.. SO much of old games is tied to their simplistic art style. We tried to keep it simple, but ended up just looking like bad art.

It was a really tough project for our talented artists, but also design steamrolled nearly anything pretty they made, when we were so focused on making good competitive maps. Ultimately, we were let down by not being able to test the game mode until way to close to release.

This is still a huge part of our culture, office memes. Obviously that's nothing unique, but they were funny. It's not like we didn't see what ended up happening a mile off.

That ego still exists today.

Here is the context.. Our awesomely talented lead artist held up a bit of white paper.. Had to be done.

We wanted each weapon to have a unique character attached to them, radio man = sniper etc.. We also wanted to have randomized ethnicity, it was disappointing to cut that feature as its something we should be doing. But again, we didn't have enough time to do a lot of things.

We had a Hispanic soldier, an African American soldier, and a white soldier. It was hard to decide how we did The Axis. Ultimately the decision was made for us anyway, we bit off more than we could chew here.

This is how it looked at the start, this is how it looks now. Our games will be better, there is more talent and experience in the studio now, and Battalion players helped build this.

Also worth noting Battalion's budget is like a month for us now.. Money talks in development. Sadly. Passion will only get you so far, you need both.