Development Magic

When I talk about Mercenaries, I always talk about how great the production was - how everyone worked so well together, how smoothly communication flowed, and how the development energy was something like an entire team being in a flow state. And always in the same breath, I mention how lucky I am to have experienced that, because in games (and presumably, in any large team endeavor), achieving that type of team cohesion is rather uncommon. Most game productions just aren’t like that.

To my great fortune, I’d say that so far in my games career (of 22 years, as of this writing), I’ve experienced this three times. Mercenaries was the first. Hate was the second. And Archangel Hellfire (henceforth, just “Hellfire”) was the the third.

Archangel is not Hellfire

Hellfire is a competetive multiplayer VR game set in the same universe as Archangel. It is commonly mistaken as a sequel or add-on to Archangel. Even more common (and worse) is the belief that Archangel and Archangel Hellfire are one and the same. But really, aside from the fact that they are both mech games, and they both exist in the same IP universe, they couldn’t be more different. Archangel is an on-rails single player shooter. Hellfire is a multiplayer game, with free movement.

In fact, because Archangel was made with only single player in mind, very little of it could be used directly for Hellfire, and so faced with the decision of either painstakingly retro-fitting network synchronization into the old systems, or re-writing them from scratch, we opted for the latter. That’s right, Hellfire is a ground up re-write.

The Challenge

So our mandate was to design a whole new VR game, re-write and implement it from scratch, solve all new VR problems (free movement in VR was still an unsolved problem), do so with a team less than half the size of the original Archangel team, and complete it all in less than 1 year.

As I noted above, the Hellfire team had that elusive development magic, where everyone and everything was just clicking along. And thank goodness for that, because had that not been the case, I just don’t think we could have succeeded under these constraints.

Now I say, “development magic”, but I don’t mean to trivialize - that magic sure seems to include a lot of hard work and talent when put under the microscope. For my part, I was the Project Lead again, but also I was the Creative Director. Our tight schedule, and my responsibility for it, meant that most of my days were very long, and my weekends spoken for. We also had a programmer who aside from being an amazing engineer, was also very passionate about games networking. What better person to have when creating a networked shooter? We also had this incredible mini-strike team duo, one a concept artist, the other a 3d modeler, who were turning out amazing assets at break-neck speed.

I could go on and on. The entire team was incredible and worked beautifully together. My only regret was that the production cycle was so short.

The Results

Hellfire, like Archangel before it, didn’t exactly blow up the charts. But nevertheless, also like Archangel, it is an extremely solid, well made game. For a while players were organizing independent tournaments. The footage from these is quite fun, and I still go back and watch it sometimes. And every time I do, I re-appreciate all the subtle bits of dynamism, all the tone and mood building details, and the sheer professionalism of the work. I think of how we did all of it in under a year, and I think about the team that made it. Making Hellfire remains a highlight of my games career.