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Squad Leader Producer Andy Mazurek
by Jim CobbCobb: What kind of missions will there be? Will there be a campaign game where soldiers can improve or die and be replaced?
Mazurek: Currently we have several different types of missions.
A short list is Ambush, Assault, Fighting Withdrawal, Pursuits and Convoy.
We do have campaign games. There is an American, a British and a German campaign.
Soldiers can improve during campaigns when they survive encounters with the enemy; they will gain experience for what they did in combat. Soldiers will gain some experience from just entering combat. They will also receive points for killing and wounding enemies, destroying tanks and vehicles as well as healing incapacitated soldiers.
Soldiers can and will die from combat with the enemy. We have 100 biographies for each nationality but the player can only have 50 platoon members at any one time. This gives the player 50 replacement soldiers. In a campaign game, when a soldier dies he is removed from the game. If replacements do not arrive between missions, the player will see an empty or black area where the soldier's portrait once was. When replacements arrive new soldiers will fill in the empty areas.
Cobb: How graphic will wounds be?
Mazurek: Not very. It is Hasbro Policy not to show blood in any of its games. But we do have soldiers falling to the ground when shot and we do have soldiers catching on fire.
Cobb: Please describe the interface.
Mazurek: The interface was a real challenge. I wanted the player to have any and all of the game information accessible by no more then a mouse click of two. It has been my experience that if you bury important information behind screen after screen, the player will quickly get annoyed. Random Games has done an incredible job with the interface. They have divided the screen up into thirds. They made the interface fairly simple to follow once learned.
Starting from the left side of the screen, the player sees a graphic of the selected soldier and his stats. The middle of the interface contains the game utility icons like zoom and unzoom the map, show mini map, the various game options as well as enemy selection and weapon selection. The right side of the screen displays the icons for character movement, character stance, weapon fire type…
We made sure that the player can easily cycle through the seen enemies and can quickly select the next soldier via the next ally button. We also have quick select graphic bars so the player can quickly select the sniper of the medic without having to cycle through all of the soldiers to find him.
All of our icons also have hypertext linked to them. If you are not sure what an icon does, you can roll the mouse onto the icon and a text message appears telling you what the icon does.
Yes, we do have a mini map. The mini map will show the player an overview of the map with dots representing the player's soldiers/vehicles and different colored dots representing any seen enemy soldiers/vehicles.
We also have the two levels of 'map zoom out' so the player can see more of the map and the surrounding areas. There is a zoomed in view (players will play most of the time from here), a zoomed out map where the player can still see his troops and much of the surrounding (the players can play from here but the soldiers are small) and a max zoomed out view (the player can see all of the map but the soldiers are very small).
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