Earlier this month I had the pleasure of meeting with Alan Grady (Project Manager) and Tim Brooks (President) of Interactive Simulations (ISI), designers of the dramatic (and highly enjoyable) 101: The Airborne Invasion of Normandy. We spoke at length about their views on wargaming, their perspective on good game design, and about what we can expect next out of this great new company.

   ISI is headquartered in Apex, North Carolina and is the brainchild of Tim Brooks, a veteran designer and self-proclaimed “realism freak.” His credits include most of the conceptual work of SSI’s Soldiers at War and much of the final product found in New World Computing Wages of War, a hip game about mercenary operations, considered by many to be a cult classic. Although Tim Brooks has no qualms about being less than thrilled with the final product that Soldiers of War became, he is proud of the initial design he provided to SSI for this project as well as some of the weapons modeling. He is a bit more enthusiastic about his involvement with Wages of War: “I feel good about the work I did on Wages of War and many people really seemed to like the game. But, to be honest, it could have benefited from an additional two months of work.” Frustrated by the eternal tradeoffs and compromises that result from not fully owning a gaming project, Tim Brooks decided to found ISI and do things his way from initial game design to final production. Judging from the response audiences and critics have given to ISI’s first title, 101: The Airborne Invasion of Normandy, Tim Brooks is most certainly on the right track.

   “With 101, we really wanted to design a game that would appeal to all people. The tricky part in game design is to allow those that want all the realism to have access to every level of detail. At the same time, others should be able to play the game without ever worrying about those parts, not getting frustrated by too many options, and perhaps discovering them as they spend time with the game,” remarked Alan Grady. “When we look at some of the other games on the market, it seems [an industry trend] to focus on the surface and cosmetic stuff without worrying about true game play. It’s really sad. I’m personally tired of beautiful games that suck,” laughed Alan.

   “I grew up on wargaming in the 80’s, where the only real game choices were good war games or adventure / role-playing titles,” agreed Tim Brooks, explaining his high emphasis on solid game play first, then using eye and ear candy to buttress an otherwise solid gaming experience. “We really feel that in 101, we paid attention to all the truly important things while succeeding in making the game look, feel, and sound great as well. 101 includes many nuances and levels of detail but we’ve worked hard not to require gamers to control or even be aware of them all.”

   ISI spent much time on historical research, to include talking to many of the old timers that actually participated in the Normandy airdrops. “These guys were really great and provided much feedback and constructive criticism,” remarked Tim and Alan. They knew they were onto something good when World War II members of the 101st told them they had gotten things right in the game. “Of course, we couldn’t model everything,” noted Tim. “For example, we know you don’t really land on both feet, standing up [as depicted in the jump scene cinematics]. But when we packed most of the game’s essential code, graphics, and sound on the CD, we only had 20 MB of space left. We just couldn’t fit the additional animation on there. We just couldn’t do it.”

   The guys at ISI explained that they never quite knew whether people that would play the game when it was finished would really “get” all the complexities and nuances of combat modeling built into the game. “There are some simply amazing people out there that know so much about military history and combat, it’s mind numbing,” admitted Alan. “But, they’re also great people to rely on to keep us straight in our design work. We’ve had some great exchanges over email [with players of our games] that would ask us why we did this or the other. When we explained our reasoning, they really got it, appreciating our thoughts and the development process. That’s the greatest reward for us as game designers.”

   When I asked ISI about possible plans for future scenarios or scenario design capabilities built into the game, Tim Brooks quickly responded. “There are really two reasons I don’t see this happening. Chis Port, our AI programmer, programmed an awesome AI. Much of our AI modeling is situational and a large portion of the AI logic is hard-coded with each situational map area. It would be very difficult to keep the same level of AI competence while allowing users to basically design free-form scenarios, particularly if our AI logic was not clearly understood by would-be scenario designers.” 101 also uses a unique map and unit placement system to ensure that you will almost never play the same scenario twice. “Since add-on scenarios are usually aimed at retaining replay value in wargames, we didn’t really see a need for a scenario editor in 101 [in light of the random maps and very complex AI].”

   Alan thought for a moment and laughed as he told me about a scenario he had played during early beta testing where he was ambushed by German troops hidden behind some hedgerows. “The next time I played the same scenario, I snuck toward the position from behind and was ready to pulverize those Germans.” Instead, Alan found the hedgerow empty but was soon killed again by enemies that had hidden with a nice line of fire toward the hedgerows, but in a totally different location than they had in the previous session. "One guy sent us an email, saying he had played the first campaign in 101 twelve times, not wanting to go on to the others until he saw the scenarios repeat themselves. I hated to break the news to him --- it’s just not going to happen,” added Tim Brooks. “It annoys me personally when I play a game more than once and I get the same experience over and over. Good games need something that makes each game play different. That’s what we’ve tried to do in 101.”

   The downside of such random scenario generation is that it becomes very difficult to test at times. “We had a hard time testing our artillery and character morale modeling and accurately measuring our desired effectiveness and impact of both on the game,” explained Alan. Both Tim and Alan credit much of the game’s success to their excellent beta testers, who were able to notice and capture every nuance of each scenario as it progressed, measuring how the various characters’ attributes changed throughout game play. The end result is what appears to be a very solid and realistic model of real combat. Inexperienced soldiers under fire can miss at nearly point-blank range while they cower and can hardly keep their weapon aimed straight, while others can succeed with crack-shot ability at times, drawing on the steel nerves and marksmanship skills normally only seen in movies.

   I asked Tim Brooks and Alan about their experience with marketing 101 internationally and found out some interesting facts. Since 101 only allows true campaign play from the American perspective (adding a German campaign game would have essentially doubled the size, expense, and production cost of the game - or required them to halve the scenarios and content provided), it was quite interesting to come up with a workable way to localize the current game into German and French. “In the American version, the Germans speak German and the French speak French. When an American soldier comes up to a French farmer and doesn’t have a French language skill, for example, he can’t understand what the farmer is saying,” explained Alan. “In the American version, that was pretty easy to model by just having the farmer speak French. What became interesting was trying to figure out how to do this in the French version, as obviously having the farmer speak French wouldn’t work there.” It suffices to say, the guys at ISI had to get pretty creative in their efforts to port the game to international versions.

   “We also made some design decisions to make our game acceptable to the international market,” responded Tim Brooks when I asked him about his feelings on the trend of politically correcting games to appeal to foreign markets, for example, by omitting the Waffen SS in World War II wargames. “Germany is our second-largest market for wargames. The answer is either to make two separate versions of the game at a much higher cost, make some of the game’s graphics modular for separate markets, or to omit non-essential graphical elements that would make it impossible to sell the game in Germany. We chose the latter. Besides, at the scale we used in 101, we can still get some very authentic-looking uniforms, change a few shades of color, blur some of the uniform detail, and get almost exactly the same effect as using actual [SS] uniforms if needed, without offending anyone.”

   What’s next for ISI? Don’t worry about these guys resting on their laurels. Aside from taking a very personal interest in ensuring customers that bought 101 are satisfied, they’re already hard at work on their next project, with a working title of Blood and Guts. Like 101, Blood and Guts will be an infantry-centric title, focused on the Battle of the Bulge. “Game play and look and feel will be very similar to 101,” promised Tim Brooks. “We’re working on a game that will allow toggling between real-time and turn-based modes. We’ll take a good look at including play by email [if it integrates into the game engine well] and will definitely include multi-player support.” Blood and Guts will still be based on a squad-level perspective but will add the ability to create your own characters as well as select from a roster of carefully pre-made ones. Expect eight to ten campaigns that can be played with a core group of soldiers, moving from one campaign to the next, as desired. For really ambitious commanders, ISI will include a grand campaign that will connect all campaigns into one giant linked romp across World War II’s Ardennes Forrest. “There will probably be no airborne drops in Blood and Guts but we’ll include airborne units such as the 101st’s defense of Bastogne,” explains Tim Brooks. More vehicles will be included in 101st’s successor, but tanks and the like will still retain very much a secondary and support role to the game’s primary focus on infantry combat. We’ll keep you posted and will provide screen shots and a downloadable demo as soon as they are available. We can hardly wait.

Working cover for ISI's upcoming Blood and Guts

   My thanks to the guys at ISI for their time spent with me and for allowing me a glimpse at the inner workings at their great new company and their support of this hobby and The Wargamer. If you haven’t read our review of 101: The Airborne Invasion of Normandy, be sure to do so for a detailed look from our very own Jim Bello. Soon you will also be able to win a freshly-wrapped copy of 101 by entering our newest contest, sponsored exclusively by The Wargamer and ISI.