Dragon Commander - Land Ahoy

Swen 'Lar' Vincke writes a new blog entry titled Land Ahoy that discusses their struggle to get the design of Dragon Commander right - and the eventual solution:

And as we looked at the original concept, it dawned on us that there was nothing wrong with it. We had just refused to do one thing because it made our jobs harder, and we didn’t want to take more production risks than we were already taking.
Our mistake was that the entire game was taking place in the air.
Now, it’s not as if we didn’t want to include ground combat from the very beginning, but because of all the AI misery that’d cause, we’d decided to steer away from it early on. Thinking back, that decision had actually been taken really lightly, without even checking exactly how much AI misery it was going to cause. We’d just assumed it to be a bad idea, based on our previous experiences with the flight/ground AI in Divinity II, and we also didn’t really realize at the time what a negative impact it’d have on the gameplay.
Design wise, the moment we envisioned introducing land (and sea) units again, our problems started to disappear rapidly. And as they disappeared, out of the blue solutions appeared for the other problems we still had. Put differently: by introducing land units, suddenly we could get the entire thing working as planned.

More information.

An interesting read, as always. I am really looking forward to this game.

Our mistake was that the entire game was taking place in the air.

For some reason this made me laugh. It can see Swan facepalming when they made the realization.


and YEAH for land and sea units.

Oh great, can they pwwwweeaase go back to Ego Draconis and introduce ground/air interaction? Would have been nice. That part felt rather strange.