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It's been over two years since I wrote my first Designer Diary for GameSpot. Very few people had heard of Dark Reign at the time. No one had heard of Total Annihilation. And everyone was looking forward to playing Dominion. It's amazing what can happen in two years. When I wrote my first diary I was the producer on the original Dark Reign, and we were just leaving the development stage of the game and moving into full production. Here we are... two years later, and we have recently left the development stage of the sequel, Dark Reign 2, and are now in full production. And although it may sound like we are back doing it all over again, the number of things that have changed since then are astounding. In the coming months I hope to be able to give everyone a sense of how we plan to revolutionize the RTS genre with this game. I'll talk to you about the ideas we have that work and the ideas that fail miserably. The development of a game is an amazing process, and I hope to be able to show everyone who is interested the joys and the pains that every developer goes through.

But first, let me give you a brief history post-Dark Reign so I can bring everyone up to speed. When we finished the game we split into two teams. One team went on to do the expansion pack, and I formed a second team that went on to work on the sequel. My team was made up of a lot of the core people from the original Dark Reign team, especially the programming team. Early on we talked about what we wanted to do with the sequel, and it was unanimous that the move to a fully 3D world would be our first task. Why 3D? Well... we believed that a real-time strategy game in a fully 3D world would enhance the whole experience. Dark Reign in many ways was a 3D game set in a 2D engine. We had put features in, like real line of sight and canopies to hide units under. And yet in a 2D world it was not only hard to see these advances, it was difficult to take advantage of them. So with a move to a fully 3D environment, we could make the battlefield as important strategically as the units and their weapons. And we knew there would be a host of other benefits that would come along with this move to 3D, so we couldn't resist.