Star Wars Republic Commando Designer Diary #1 - Building the Squad

By Staff, GameSpotPosted Nov 3, 2004 6:22 pm PT

Director Tim Longo fills us in on the upcoming shooter's unique use of the Star Wars military.

Currently scheduled for release in February next year, Star Wars Republic Commando is a first-person shooter that will see you assuming the role of an elite clone trooper in command of a crack squad tasked with carrying out special missions for the Galactic Republic. Locales in the game will include the Episode II planet Geonosis, a large Republic ship, and the wookiee home planet of Kashyyyk, and as you progress through the game you can expect to encounter a number of characters that will feature prominently in the upcoming Episode III movie. The focus of Republic Commando, though--as explained by the game's director Tim Longo in today's designer diary--is on the military forces that so often only have supporting roles in the Star Wars movies and games.

One Touch Squad

Tim Longo
Director

The military aspects of Star Wars have always been a major part of the mythos. Though the stories often revolve around the melodrama of the heroic journey, a military force is always in the background fueling the fire of conflict. However, the interesting thing is that the military characters are very rarely brought to the forefront (with the exception of the classic X-Wing and TIE Fighter games) neither in the movies nor in the games. Well with Star Wars Republic Commando we made a conscious choice to change that and explore an entirely new perspective of the most famous science fiction conflict of all time.

In Republic Commando you'll assume the role of squad leader RC 01/138.

Luckily, a military entity was also created around the time we were first forming our initial ideas about three years ago. The Clone Army was revealed to the world by George Lucas and the literal birth of the most powerful army in science fiction history is matched with its biggest conflict. It seemed like the perfect time to get the ball rolling.

There is just something compelling about that white armor. The protagonist of the game actually started out as a standard Clone Trooper. He was just your regular grunt on the ground meeting the droids head-on on the battlefield, as seen in the movies. But another one of our major influences at the time was the rising number of squad-based military games coming out. Games where you played the "Special Forces" version of the military and went behind enemy lines to accomplish the impossible. Some things started to gel. We had one of the greatest fictional settings ever. We had the perfect event fresh in the public's mind. We had the gap in the Star Wars mythos. And we had a kernel of an idea to make a squad-based game set within all of those parameters, and we ran with it. There was only one remaining big question.

How were we going to bring this unique Star Wars experience to our audience? Though we all played and loved the squad games out there, there was a fundamental flaw that kept bugging us. Too much work. Squad games had a lot of micromanagement and babysitting. So we sought to solve those problems in three ways.

We introduced a new mechanic to the genre that we had not seen before or since and pushed it as far as we could. The marketing folks called it our "One Touch Squad" about a year ago and that was just about the same goal for the design itself. We call them squad maneuvers and they allow the players to control their squads using contextual world objects with a click of the "use" button. The magic green "A" button ("F" on PC) is used for everything in our game. It's clean, simple, and fast. The way a squad really acts back here on Earth. Sniping, hacking (or as we like to say on Tatooine--"slicing"), demolitions, anti-armor, door breaching, and so on. And all with one button. Less "work" and more play.

This no-nonsense soldier nicknamed Fixer will be your right-hand man.

The second mechanic we call Squad Commands. We needed a way to put the squad in different "stances" while in combat so they would generally behave as the player would want. This is separate from the "maneuvers" and both can be used at the same time. So by holding down the "A" button and using the D pad on the Xbox (Function keys on the PC) you can quickly ask your team to form-up, secure area, search and destroy, and cancel all maneuvers.

So with these two systems in place, we quickly saw that we were able to keep the fast pace of a standard FPS, but we were also able to order our squad along the way. The best of both worlds. The last aspect that was needed was a very advanced squad AI. You'll hear from our squad AI engineer in a later diary, but our advancement in this area has ensured that while you are fighting, so are your commandos. They aren't waiting for the next waypoint to be placed or the next elaborate button combo to be pressed, or god forbid, the game to be paused. They are right there with you, reacting to the states of the world and covering your ass, just like in real combat. Our own armed forces probably wish that they could pause the battle or control soldiers with waypoints and button combos, but guess what, they can't. So neither can we.

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jakeboudville
Posted Sep 3, 2006 9:03 pm PT

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