Well folks, we're about to hit release. Ubisoft has officially pushed our submission date to tomorrow, so if all goes well Blazing Angels 2 will be on the store shelves at the end of the month.
To all the played the first game, I was designer for this one and did my damndest to fix and enhance nearly every detail before I was assigned to the PC port team. Most of the good ideas were rejected at first, but it looks like they made it into the final version of the Xbox version while I was away.
As for the PC version, we absolutely kicked ass here in Kharkiv, my little team of programmers are making sure that you have a smooth experience right out of the box with probably a minimal patch on release. Controllers (unlike BA1) work awesome, I made sure of that. Vitalii, our online programmer took a crack at the mouse controls and did some really cool stuff to make the game completely playable by mouse - takes 10 minutes to get used to it but after you get the feeling for it you'll wonder how you ever did without it.
Gameplay stuff I had fun making for you -
Bosses! Cool ones. The art team did a good job bringing my frankenstein super aircraft to life.
Upgrade system. Not my work, but still done decently in the end. Good job Bogdan.
Missions. They put me to make 13 out of the 18 included, I tried my darndest to make them each a unique experience. San Francisco was my favorite, and Eagle's nest took the most effort to get right. The level designers did a pretty good job with the realization and I see a lot of edits were done in my absence. I have the dual job now of setting up a new studio from scratch (administrative and recruiting) as well as keeping the whip cracking on my programming team, so not much time now to see what the Xbox team actually did to my parts of the project from a designer point of view.
For all wanting in to this field, design is FAR more fun than management.
Unfortunately, most American aircraft companies wouldn't give us license to include their aircraft in the game. We had to get around this in several neat ways though. We dug up every experimental weapon and aircraft we could find to implement and used British aircraft liberally, as well as come up with a good excuse to use Luftwaffe, Japanese, and Russian aircraft in the main campaign.
1st Person was implemented and works great based on player feedback (you guys bitched loud enough on the forums, congrats, keep up the pressure).
Special thanks to Stefan Net, fellow designer in Bucharest who put the numbers behind all of my schemes and made them work.
More thanks to Sergii, Vitalii, and Taras, my wild young Ukrainian programming team here doing the PC port. These guys work their asses off for no reward other than love of making games.
So, I'll entertain any inside questions you may have about game production in general or design or BA2 (that I can answer).
Keep in mind that I'm not doing this in any official capacity on behalf of my employer, so some things I won't be able to talk about, and my views or comments in other forums have no bearing on this discussion or representation of my company.
Thanks all,
William Taylor
Production Coordinator
Ubisoft Ukraine
PS We'll be showcasing in Leipzig, for anyone attending the game convention there on 23 August. They don't have any plans for letting us go from the team here, but Thermaltake will be showcasing an entire LAN setup with our game with at least 8 seats for a hands-on. If you're in Germany, very good conference to get to.
To all the played the first game, I was designer for this one and did my damndest to fix and enhance nearly every detail before I was assigned to the PC port team. Most of the good ideas were rejected at first, but it looks like they made it into the final version of the Xbox version while I was away.
As for the PC version, we absolutely kicked ass here in Kharkiv, my little team of programmers are making sure that you have a smooth experience right out of the box with probably a minimal patch on release. Controllers (unlike BA1) work awesome, I made sure of that. Vitalii, our online programmer took a crack at the mouse controls and did some really cool stuff to make the game completely playable by mouse - takes 10 minutes to get used to it but after you get the feeling for it you'll wonder how you ever did without it.
Gameplay stuff I had fun making for you -
Bosses! Cool ones. The art team did a good job bringing my frankenstein super aircraft to life.
Upgrade system. Not my work, but still done decently in the end. Good job Bogdan.
Missions. They put me to make 13 out of the 18 included, I tried my darndest to make them each a unique experience. San Francisco was my favorite, and Eagle's nest took the most effort to get right. The level designers did a pretty good job with the realization and I see a lot of edits were done in my absence. I have the dual job now of setting up a new studio from scratch (administrative and recruiting) as well as keeping the whip cracking on my programming team, so not much time now to see what the Xbox team actually did to my parts of the project from a designer point of view.
For all wanting in to this field, design is FAR more fun than management.
Unfortunately, most American aircraft companies wouldn't give us license to include their aircraft in the game. We had to get around this in several neat ways though. We dug up every experimental weapon and aircraft we could find to implement and used British aircraft liberally, as well as come up with a good excuse to use Luftwaffe, Japanese, and Russian aircraft in the main campaign.
1st Person was implemented and works great based on player feedback (you guys bitched loud enough on the forums, congrats, keep up the pressure).
Special thanks to Stefan Net, fellow designer in Bucharest who put the numbers behind all of my schemes and made them work.
More thanks to Sergii, Vitalii, and Taras, my wild young Ukrainian programming team here doing the PC port. These guys work their asses off for no reward other than love of making games.
So, I'll entertain any inside questions you may have about game production in general or design or BA2 (that I can answer).
Keep in mind that I'm not doing this in any official capacity on behalf of my employer, so some things I won't be able to talk about, and my views or comments in other forums have no bearing on this discussion or representation of my company.
Thanks all,
William Taylor
Production Coordinator
Ubisoft Ukraine
PS We'll be showcasing in Leipzig, for anyone attending the game convention there on 23 August. They don't have any plans for letting us go from the team here, but Thermaltake will be showcasing an entire LAN setup with our game with at least 8 seats for a hands-on. If you're in Germany, very good conference to get to.
Last edited by GorillaTicTacs (2007-08-09 07:10:58)