Bringing WWII battles to life

Lightning War is our game of World War II combat. Man, what a huge task it has been!

I made the decision early on that I wanted units to be company sized. Companies are where the difference in unit types show up. A battalion is not actually a homogeneous unit, an Infantry battalion, for example, may contain a heavy weapons company, an anti-tank company and even an attached engineer company.

On the other hand weapon ranges are quite long. A typical WWII rifle can shoot 500m with accuracy and can deliver fire up to about 3km. Artillery ranges for howitzers are measured in kilometres and naval gun fire can be delivered on target at ranges of 30km or more! A division can have a 15 to 20km frontage. With a scale of 500m to the hex most battles will cover a lot of screen.


Board games of this period did not offer much in the way of mechanics ideas so I looked at miniatures. After a fair bit of study I realised that I would need to separate out fire combat from close combat. This worked out well once I included the air power operations for attacking ground targets and interdicting movement and supply.

Also the line of sight thing has been interesting. With 50m contours on the ground and various obstructing terrain and weather conditions it becomes an important factor. Where did those Panzers go in the fog? Can my forward observers call down an artillery barrage?

Then there was chain of command, dealing with radios, laid cable, runners, and the need for good communications in order to get supply. The more this part of the system began to be developed the more important road networks became. At that point I realised I needed to add in cratering effects from bombing and artillery. So now it is possible to lay down a barrage on a key crossroad just to reduce its usefulness for communication and supply. The same goes for bridges, with engineers blowing and building bridges for reasons other than simple troop movement.

Needless to say this is all quite complex for the player so there is a lot more work to do on giving players adequate feedback on what's happening. Also easier methods of giving general commands to battalions and regiments.

On top of all this, there is the scenario editor. Probably a bigger project than the game itself we want to allow our players to research and develop scenarios themselves. Our rough and tumble internal editor, which relied on us knowing how to tweak XML, will not do!

That's all for now. I'll keep you up to date as things progress.

Goo goo ga ga Google

My gosh Google is an ornery old search engine.

For some time now Google didn't seem to want to index our web site at www.towergames.com or give it any significant ranking. We tried beefing up our content and wiggling for the shark but it didn't seem to make any difference. Then in April I discovered Google Web Tools. These told me something was wrong, only our home page was properly indexed! Next step was the Google Webmasters Forum, which you get to from your account page in Google Web Tools.

Lots of people tearing their hair out, a few without a clue pretending like they know whats going on and putting others down for their ignorance. I got lucky. I posted that I was having this trouble and one of the other members actually checked the site out and came back to tell me precicely what was wrong!

The answer? Well Google Web Bot is very pernickety about following the HTML rules, more so than the web browser you are reading this with. I had to run my pages through the W3C QA Tools to identify the bugs and fix them. It took a while.

After putting the changes online I had to wait for Google Bot to scan my pages again. Then in May it tookoff. All those pages about the Tower Games scenarios could be found easily and people started dropping in at long last.

For your interest here are the scenario pages:

Pickett’s Charge

Antietam

Brice’s Crossroads

First Bull Run

Cedar Mountain

Champion Hill

Corinth

Gaines’s Mill

Gettysburg Day 1

Pea Ridge

Shiloh

Blog the First

I guess it was inevitable that I would start a blog of my own one day. Its such a tempting thing to find a podium to stump up to and start chatting into the void.

I'm keeping it safe and non-philosophical for the moment by running a blog about my internet game company www.towergames.com. Its something I started a few years ago with my friend Chris as a way of getting the kind of games we actually like to play on the web. I also wanted the chance to play with my Java skills and Chris wanted to play with marketing and web site creation.

Its been bumpy at times but a great deal of fun. My aim was to create a game outlet for other indie game writers but of course they haven't been attracted much because we don't have a zillion customers yet who would give them royalties. Our two games so far, Line of Muskets and Lightning War, were written by Eric (who is a 3rd party outside of Tower Games) and myself respectively. We have had a number of bites but because we can't afford to stump money up front just yet they tend to fail to complete. Ah well.

We have had a lot to learn. Making the games play as java applets has been both good and bad. It means I have had to set up a cross platform lab out of my own pocket to ensure everything works on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Chris and I have both had ongoing tussles trying to work out how to get Google to rank our web site properly. Trying to attract players who like more thoughtful and turn based games is, well, fascinating. We have more ideas on the board than we have time to implement so its a slow process.

For example I'm building an online scenario editor for Lightning War which is fine, but that has to come with a whole "plug-in-to-Tower-Games" system to allow 3rd Parties to create online editors for their games and manage the process of scenario authors keeping work files and having their scenarios tested, automatically gathering and evaluating playtester feedback, releasing new scenarios for play, automatic payment of royalties and on and on.

I think its fair to say I like a challenge!