Thread time: OK,it's been a while.. We've been pretty quiet for a myriad of reasons. Straight off the bat it's important that you acknowledge that I can basically only discuss 20% of what we're doing.. The rest is subject to other companies NDA's and on-going discussions.
Our team have been prototyping PROMOD (amongst other things) for the best part of 18 months. We're all a little fatigued at this point and want to get on with releasing something! Jumper & Killrun were huge for our team morale.
It's been exciting working on a game we're really passionate about. We're at the point where we're messing about with different levels AND... different game modes. Don't worry- it's all part of our process, as we've said before everything is on the table. We are prototyping..
Fixing legacy issues that have been around since Battalion takes time. This may look like something simple but remember CS only fixed it 2 years ago. This kinda stuff is slow and boring.. It's hardly got the sex appeal of a new weapon.. But if you know you know- this is cool!
We challenged ourselves to respectfully ignore the hardcore PROMOD community- (including ourselves).. Let's figure out how we could evolve PROMOD and improve COD4 Promod. We've probably gone further than we imaged, but it's lead us to some great conclusions. Let me share.
We forced ourselves to play BO:Cold War League Play. Obviously is has a large console audience. We actually ended up enjoying it a lot, it was faster and still gave some of those Promod vibes. But it's still very 'slot machine shooter'.. But we were interested in multiple modes
We quite liked that modes were determined by the map, similar to Overwatch. Designing maps specifically for ONE mode function. We noticed more people in the studio were enjoying the playtests (naturally) as we introduced respawn modes. This was interesting...
Reaching a wider audience has to be a goal for us. Take a look at this clip, I'll get in trubz for this... Yeh.. we're fucking about with trophy systems. Grenades make Promod good, but people also HATE dying to sky nukes.. So we made a slow build solution to it. We're prototyping
*EAR WARNING*..
For us competitive games are about hubris, it's great to have this attitude back in the playtest room. It's loud, its active, it's rough, and it's 'fucking sick' to quote @HowardPhilpott.. We're on to something, but it's still a prototype.
The message is we're still trying stuff. Don't be afraid. I'd completely understand what you might think when you see "HARDPOINT".. What you don't see is.. we might really hate it. We might think ideas are complete trash. It's a prototype, most ideas start as a bad idea and morph
Fireups (Ultimates).. We wanted to juice up PROMOD. Make everything feel awesome so we committed to a "no balancing" design rule. Every fireup we made, we made overpowered. Let me post a few below for you to panic at. We've had A LOT of fun with them, but would never release them
This is called 'blink'. It was made in about 30 minutes? We just threw it together.. it's still in, it's still fun, but it doesn't feel like PROMOD. But we're still trying to find the fun and challenge ourselves in this prototype. Credit to @AshDavDev
Obviously it's not a hero shooter, communicating what happens to you is a big challenge. One we haven't solved. But here's how our dash & blink look in third person.
Combing this with strafe, bounce jump, and slide.. Feels better than COD4 and Warzone.
Like I said, we're just trying things.. This is probably further than we wanted to go for PROMOD. But instead of assuming things we tested. We proved ourselves right and wrong and changed opinions. We argue, debate, discuss and have healthy conflict. PROMOD will be better for it
We want to make a great game. Our team morale has been better than ever, we're a tight knit group that wants to make an impact. Every Friday... we hit this hard drive containing these games with a sledgehammer.. Dev of the week.
Keep following our progress, we may start some private closed door testing soon. No idea what the format of that will be, just keep involved, join discord, and hit up @rekabnoraa with your Q's. Thanks for your support.
Disclaimer, this was a long one- a few videos might not have uploaded and I need to go do work, if there are gaps.. I apologize, you've got enough spice from me today.
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So this is a story all about how our game got flipped turned upside down, I'd like to take a minute- just read this thread I'll tell you how we made @PlayPromod and why it ain't dead.
We're in complete content lock now. I'm not going to say we're 100% happy with everything because we aren't. But prototyping has to end somewhere and you have to think we've spent over £1m to get to this point.. More than the Battalion budget!
We prototyped A LOT. Hardpoint, a new mode called hot potato (Blitz), and a payload mode (Cargo). But our focus has been on quality and despite those modes being really fun, we wanted to hone in on bugs and the most fun part of the game- so Wartide (S&D) is what you'll be playing
Morning, Happy Sunday
Over the next 4 weeks we are squashing bugs in @PlayPromod before a public release. The team have done some amazing work and taken the game to where it is now. We’ve had points of really hard work, open development is tough.. and we’ve had some great socials
We started @PlayPromod as a passion project in our evenings. The managers/original Battalion people myself included weren’t happy just doing management of a 100 person studio. We wanted to make games so we did.
We changed the ethos of how we make shooters and made sure we didn’t slip back into over-management.. our devs get a lot of trust and we don’t have many producers or managers.