Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

On the screen before me is an idyllic, impressively nuanced Pennsylvania farmscape, mottled by text describing features like “Little Round Top” and “Seminary Ridge”, along with tattered waving star-deficient US flags representing blue-uniformed Union troops. “The environment is procedurally generated,” says Danny Green, whose card states he’s the President, Lead Programmer, and sole Artist of Radioactive Games.

Then, Danny blows my mind: “I built the rendering engine in just over a day.” He calls it the Impostor rendering system – named as such because the game switches between 2D and 3D  just before the average eye could appreciate the distinction. Notwithstanding some assistance from the Havok physics engine… a day?

Danny, deadpan yet almost vibrating with nervous intensity, dropped these little gems throughout the interview.  I’ve been in the presence of genius several times – people who have the knowledge, energy, and drive to do things that 20 everyday people, given the same training – would struggle to do. It’s always a little like this, and I get the feeling Danny works best when he’s working alone, given loose rein by a publisher that earnestly appreciates the value of an independent developer (such as his current arrangement) .

This is confirmed when I ask about his history in games programming. Danny began programming in C++ at an age when most of us were still thought that it didn’t get much better than Matchbox cars and Barbie dolls. Then, in his early twenties, while most of the more computer literate of us were taking introductory computer programming classes, Danny had invested a quarter million dollars of his own money into Urban Empires, an 3D online gangster warfare RTS that (you guessed it) he alone had built. With that game, Danny had made the mistake of selling the rights to Strategy First and had no shortage of expletives to describe how that company, now in bankruptcy, had ill-treated his freshman commercial project.

With Danny’s Gettysburg: Armored Warfare, he ‘s confident that things will go much better. This stands to reason: Paradox Interactive is a publisher well acquainted with smaller, more innovative studios making games for nichey audiences (especially the grand strategy / high-realism wargaming crowd).

Setting aside the astonishment factor occasioned by Danny’s one-man show, G:AW is a monumentally unapologetic genre-fuser. Consider the backstory: a mad genius travels back through time from 2060, bringing futuristic weaponry to the Confederate side at the American Civil War’s turning-point: Gettysburg.  A future government responds to this weird-ass plan by diametrically arming the Union side, and the stage is set for players to take on the form of generals on both sides.  The highest ranking generals get the best arms and armament from their time-forward benefactors, but nothing too high powered. Think steampunk armor and airships, not fusion weaponry and stealth bombers.

Check out that sweet steampunk goodness!

These player generals, rather than a campaign mode or territorial control system, are the persistent side of the game; they not only level up and gain new abilities, but through the item store feature of Paradox Connect can build and equip their armies (using an army point-buy basis,typical of miniature gaming). Paradox Connect will also do things like achievements and stat tracking.

Danny explained that the Gettyburg: Armored Warfare will be a true action RTS, meaning that players could command units around the 9 km x 9 km battlefield as a general or jump directly into the hobnailed boots of into any of the 500+ unites per side (just over 1,000 total can be on the map at any given time). Up to 64 players can compete in any given map.  But rather than 64 players doing 64 different things, Danny plans to implement a chain of command just like a real army, with different sized armies (and, of course, different general abilities) for different ranks.

Despite the name of the game, a variety of different Civil War battles will be included in the game, so water units will be seen (as well as the slightly advanced air and ground units featured in the concept art).

If developing the game solo isn’t tough enough, Danny has put himself on a blistering 8-month development cycle, so launch is expected in summer 2011 with beta in the next few months. Until then, we’ll watch Civil War documentaries while reading Paul Di Filippo steampunk novels and wonder… what if?