Happy New Year
Posted: 2012-01-02 13:52:15
Work continues briskly on the new Dark Tides campaign and the 1.04 patch of Gambit Royale. I originally planned to release the patch last week, but then I started adding a few more things, such as optional ACE2 equipment. The good news is that Gambit runs fine with ACE2, and for those running the mod, extra gear and weapons will be available in missions 2 through 5. There really isn't any bad news, only that I feel the need to test it more rigorously. Dark Tides will be the sequel to Gambit Royale, although it picks up with a different cast of characters, and is a sequel in the sense that it continues the Chernarus plot started in missions 1 & 2 of Gambit.
For anyone interested, here is a slightly unfinished cut scene that will replace the 2nd one from Gambit Royale. I am attempting to explain the plot better than I had previously. I wrote quite a back story early on, and most of the plot is explained in the mission briefings. In fact, this very scene was always referenced in the briefing to mission 2:
"We just received word of a Russian missile strike on a farm near Gvozdno about 3 hours ago. We believe this is a ChDKZ controlled area, and have yet to verify the reason for the strike, although MI-6 advised us that at least one top ChDKZ officer was there at the time of the strike."
The scene did not exist until yesterday though!
More information on Dark Tides will be posted later this month. I am creating the first 3 or 4 cut scenes and missions simultaneously because of a numerous ideas that I want solidified as quickly as possible.
December Update
Posted: 2011-12-27 23:28:13
I am preparing to release version 1.04 of Gambit Royale. The biggest change by far is the reduction of required add-ons from 3 to 1, replacing one of them with SchnapsdroSel SpecOps & Mercs for OA. I decided to remove the Russian Desert Camo mod because it plays a limited role in the campaign, and to remove the dependency on the Ak mod. I have switched from Massi's Delta Force to SchnapsdroSel SpecOps primarily because the latter mod provides some unique OpFor units.
I had planned to release v1.04 by today (Friday Dec 30th), but decided to make a few more modifications. One was the limited inclusion of ACE2 army guns and launcher, plus some miscellaneous gear. ACE2 is an optional mod, meaning if you run it, the equipment boxes will appear. I dynamically check for running mods in my missions, so if ACE2 is not present, you won't see any errors. ACE2 has a considerable amount of equipment, and I don't feel it is necessary or even realistic to make it all available. On a side note, the mortar attack in the mission Turbulence sounds really good with ACE2 running.
Other changes are listed below:
- added extra intro to opening movie
- moved 1st mission to 4th in sequence
- fixed extra loud voices apparently caused by the 1.60 patch
- fixed last mission being super sluggish after 1.60 patch, possibly First Aid related
- changed GPS from Motorola Droid to Garmin
- changed method of displaying current mission at start
- changed player from suit-wearing civ to black ops in opening mission
- removed civ Ian from Scirocco mission
- changed Natalia's avatar to something more suitable that wasn't available when missions first developed
- removed opening music from Conspiracy mission
- a few minor scenematic alterations to various movies
The new campaign under development is tentatively titled Dark Tides, and it will be rather long. The reason for the length is that the player will take on three different roles: USN SEAL, AFMC soldier, and a CSLA officer. This provides the campaign with three perspectives on events, with the SEAL for the high-tech special ops, the AFMC for the infantry missions, and the CSLA role to help make the campaign more in-depth. Dark Tides will have the same level of story-telling as Gambit Royale, and a large number of cut-scene movies. Gambit has over 22 minutes of in-game movies, and I would expect Dark Tides to have in excess of 30 minutes of movies. As for the campaign name (which could change), it's a reference to the Navy SEALs infiltration on beaches under the cover of darkness, and also a reference to the darkness of future events that will unfold. Like Gambit Royale, Dark Tides will involve a plot pertaining to WMD's. In this case, the use of chemical warfare by the CSLA in its desperation to win the war against the AFMC. Dark Tides will require the wonderful CSLA mod (obviously) and TF86 SEALs. The campaign will occur on Chernarus (mostly) as an extension to one of the plot threads from the first two missions of Gambit Royale.
December News
Posted: 2011-12-03 18:06:27
While developing the sequel to Gambit Royale, including new effects and features, I decided to do some maintenance on the first campaign which is now around nine months old. In doing so, I realized that I was not happy with a few things, and that I had released a campaign with some significant differences than what I had originally planned. Keep in mind that I wrote the story to Gambit Royale before Operation Arrowhead was released, and wanted to use the new setting without totally destroying the campaign, which is why it has a ChDKZ plot on Chernarus in 2012 and then you're in Takistan and the ChDKZ plot is forgotten. The updated version will restore the start date to occur during Harvest Red (Oct 2009) and include more information on the events leading up to the opening scene with Denmark on Chernarus.
I had strongly considered making this a 3-part campaign, with the first part on Thirsk, but I think the development cycle will take too long, and in the end I didn't want a radical departure from the campaign released last March. The most important point for me, after starting on the sequel campaign, is that the two campaigns should fit together well.
November News
Posted: 2011-10-29 20:52:33
There have been numerous changes to Gambit Royale II since I first announced it in September. I kept going back and forth on various ideas, and had to contend with "add-on creep." It is kind of like "scope creep" in a software project, but with add-ons :) I know there is a segment of gamers that like vanilla style play, and another group like me which tends to favor mods. I will play either way, of course, if the mission is good. However when building my own missions, I like to add some unique flavor as part of the over all experience.
After thinking long and hard, and after some experiments, I realized that the enemy was the most important component in the sequel to Gambit Royale. As I am avoiding the desert this time around, Takistani units are out of the question. I don't want to use Chedaki all the time, and I don't want a depict a war with the Russians, so I experimented with various other addons and realized that there are not very many OPFOR armies available! I was absolutely impressed with the uniform textures for HSO's SLA troops, and considered setting the campaign on Sahrani since I really like that map, but I'm not sure how many players have that map, and it's not an easy one to install and setup.
So I looked at other army addons for OPFOR. I would say 90% are Russian, but the one that has impressed me since its release earlier this year has been the CSLA mod. The initial problem is that it did not fit my idea of a Gambit Royale campaign. After playing around with it for several days, it suddenly struck me, and the CSLA suddenly made sense. Granted, I am taking some artistic license in my interpretation of the CSLA, but then every mission maker interprets the official campaigns in their own way, so why not?
Background information can be found on the Gambit Royale II page.
October News
Posted: 2011-10-10 21:58:59
Two full missions of Gambit Royale II have been completed, with at least six more expected before release. More details can be found here.
I still hope to work on Dark Arrival again. For now I have lost interested in the project, although I see potential in it. I do not care much for missions that are horribly difficult in the first half, and Dark Arrival is just that. Then the second half, which I personally can only play by cheating, feels like something is missing.
September News
Posted: 2011-09-11 20:36:46
Dark Arrival has turned out to be too difficult under the current design. As it is, revisiting the mission concept is necessary to iron out the problems. It is not simply a matter of reducing enemy strengths. Basically you need to get from point A to B to C, but point B is a choke point. It makes perfect sense to set it up the way it is within the mission context, but I think players, including myself, will find it too frustrating. One of the themes of the mission is that you fight a superior force in the end using your inferior technology, so things such as air support, artillery, and reinforcements are out of the question.
Gambit Royale II is now in the pre-production stage. When I started the first one around April 2010, I had originally planned that part of it take place on Thirsk during the Winter. This was before Operation Arrowhead came out, and I needed another map away from Chernarus. I had built a cutscene (similar to the 3rd cutscene now that goes to Zargabad) and built 90% of a mission on it using the Bundeswehr Mod. I had never done mission building prior to Gambit Royale, and after awhile it occured to me that I had too many mod requirements, some of them quite large. So I painfully cut Thirsk from the campaign, and Bundeswehr Mod, and went with Takistan in the Summer. For the sequel I revisited the idea of using Thirsk, but have decided not to. It's roughly a 300MB download, and to make it look good some Winter Camo would be required, of which there are at least two options, but I am already set on using OA Mercs by SchnapsdroSel which is another 100MB download. Sure I could require it all, but I want the mod downloads to be light as possible. So unless my plans change, GR II will require the OA Mercs and the island of Quesh-Kibrul which is a reasonably small download.