This is pretty big news for Comrade In Arms…basically we have decided to go over the designs and restructure gameplay.

Why? Basically because we want to be able to FINISH the game. Find out what big changes we have planning for Comrade In Arms after the jump!

Our original idea for Comrade In Arms had a smaller, tighter vision. It was a 2 player co-op, mission based game that was not unlike contra, except that the two characters would have different powers. One would be the big, tough dude with higher HP and more powerful weapons and the other would be quick and agile but with less firepower.

Pay respect to our ancestors!

When we got started on the game though, I made a mistake many designers tend to do…not trusting that their idea works and trying to compensate by adding MORE STUFF. Don’t think that your game will be fun? Oh lets just add more guns, or characters or more levels and enemies. Oh, how about more gameplay mechanics, perhaps just a smattering of features to spice things up. I know…we add some RPG elements to really bring the thing together!

Sooner or later you end up like this:

Lara "Don't call me an archeologist!" Croft

Comrade In Arms ended up having 4 unique characters, each with their own special skill and a gameplay mechanic called “Authorization“. Now, I don’t think that the Comrade In Arms that evolved out of the original is a bad game idea…not at all. I still believe it could be a really fun game, and many people are really intrigued by the Authorization feature of Comrade In Arms(It might or might not make it to our final set of features).

Unfortunately, we had to have a reality check regarding our current situation. We have been actively developing Comrade In Arms for about 1 year now, with pretty much a three man team(1 programmer, 1 3d Artist and 1 2d designer). With our designer mainly working on the website, in game menus and our trailers the actually development on the game was done by two people. With the programmer(me…unfortunately) creating his first 3D game AND first multiplayer game. The odds were not in our favor.

Nevertheless we believed we could do it and strived for 12 months and released the Comrade In Arms Training Room for the Kongregate contest. It was a mad rush to get anything out for that contest because it was not planned and we didn’t even have any enemies.

Only played 1700+ times in Kongregate

After the contest and the sobering results, we have decided to re-evaluate Comrade In Arms. While the number of plays and ratings on Kongregate were pretty bad, we took what we could from that. Players seemed interested in the game and our characters and generally looked promising. It just wasn’t DONE.

We would need Enemies, AI, level design, networking, in-game transactions, a payment portal just to name a few things…

It would take at least a year with a dedicated full-time team of 4-5 people to make it happen…

So we decided to prune Comrade In Arms. Instead of a 4-man team it will now be back to the 2-man team. Instead of 4 classes now we’ll only have 2. The classes which we’ll keep are the Saboteur & Traceur.

They’ll keep their powers which are the Guided Rocket and Force Shield and have new abilities which enable them to work together as a team better.

This cuts down our asset list by half and we can more finely tune the way these 2 characters will be able to work with each other. Although we only have 2 classes, players can customize their character through purchasing items, weapons and upgrades as well leveling up their character through online play.

We did not take this decision lightly and we truly believe this will allow us to deliver a more finely tuned game within a shorter time period AND with our limited resources. There is one good piece of news though, Terence of Big Bad Robots has agreed to help us with our multiplayer code and with his experience, we believe that that portion of Comrade In Arms is in good hands.

So there you have it, a big change but one for the better(we think). We plan to have a playable vertical slice up within the next 3 months with which to approach publishers so be on the lookout for that!