Developer Interview

General Questions

Where did you start in your game industry career, what was your first title, what do you like most about working in the game industry?

My first game was a shareware game called Game Derby, it was a video game about video games. It sold poorly so I had to get a real job and shipped Sega Soccer Slam. If you want to see what I looked like back then there is a secret code to replace the ball with my head. I never really had any career choice. My parents didn’t buy me a game console; they bought me a Commodore 64 and not a lot of games and told me if I wanted more games I had to make them myself. Unlike today where kids can make some amazing games with Unity mine were quite a lot worse than the commercial games of the day. Watching the industry change so much from then is what keeps me here; it is very difficult and constantly changing. There are always new enthusiastic people ready to make something great. You just don’t get that excitement in many other jobs, programming or otherwise.

How does an average day at Relic look as a Lead Programmer for CoH2? What are your major responsibilities and what skills do you must commonly use?

As Lead Programmer I spent more time at a making sure things were going in the right direction with the other discipline leads than contributing specific features. Although I did get to contribute a couple cool things, the credit really goes to the great team for this game. The quality of the group that built CoH2 is top-notch.

What was most challenging in working on CoH2?

The biggest challenge for CoH2 was to limit scope. When we started, everybody had grandiose dreams of all the things we could refactor and change. They ranged from technical implementations where the source code had accumulated cruft from all the different people touching it under deadline pressure to fundamental game mechanics. We had to keep in mind we’re making a sequel that needs to feel like Company of Heroes, not build a cool new unrelated game that happens to be called Company of Heroes 2.

What’s the process of doing research for a game like CoH2? Did you go on the trip to Russia or any other trip? What’s your best and funniest Russia or travel story?

I was fortunate enough to be part of the trip to Russia and Germany. Being on the Company of Heroes franchise for almost a decade I picked up a lot of respect and even a little interest in World War II, even though I started with none. I now record the WW2 shows around Remembrance Day, and when visiting France I was sure to check out Juno beach to witness the D-day sites and pay my respect.

For the eastern front, I knew nothing of how it differed. I had read A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman before going on the trip. This book was illuminating and a great start. But only a start.

In the first museum I went to in St. Petersburg they had a series of absolutely haunting photographs which start with a beautiful young woman at the start of the Siege of Leningrad. When blockade ended just a couple of years later she had aged decades and was unrecognizable. When people see movies or entertainment about the heroism of WW2, people lose sight of the human cost and impact on the civilians.

War is horrible. How do you make something people will choose to play for fun when it is about something horrible? The tragedy that WW2 was is the lowest point of mankind’s history anybody alive can remember. How [do you] do your duty of being respectful and not trivialize the atrocities and suffering, yet still make a game of it?

While in a German museum I realized what had to be done when we had hired an old Veteran as a guide. It was obvious he was not happy with us turning WW2 into a game, into entertainment. However by the end, once he found out how much our Lead Designer knew and understood, he really warmed up to what we were doing.

I realized we can’t fit all the stories of WW2 into a single video game. And it isn’t our job as a video game to teach people about the Holocaust or history. It is simply our job to be accurate and honest, and provide the best entertainment possible so people become interested in history. When somebody has a great time playing CoH2 and experiencing the taste of history we can show in a game they are more likely to pick up a book and learn more in a medium that can do a proper job of teaching. We succeed by making a great game that earns awards and fans because that keeps people aware and increases the odds they’ll choose to learn more on their own.

When you’re telling people stories about “that time you worked on CoH2” in a few years, what experiences or events will always stick in your mind?

A lot of my favourite stories involve the AI. In a 2 vs. 2 match on high difficulty it had managed to box in one of the AI programmers bad enough he had to rage quit.

Other times it was finding problems before the top players. One day a balance bug was introduced that basically had a mortar fire two shells instead of one. Then an AI bug was logged that the AI built too many mortars. It turns out there was no AI bug, our game was temporarily imbalanced such that mortars were extremely overpowered and the AI was just exploiting this before any human players on the team realized it.

How would you describe CoH2 to someone who is unfamiliar with it to convey how awesome it is?

I feel CoH2 is a must play game for 2013. No other game lets you control an army like this with the same detail. It has a fantastic depth, beyond a great single-player campaign it is has hours of entertainment playing with or against the AI or other players. This is where I find its real charm lives.

In your area, how much were you able to draw from the original CoH and its expansions in developing CoH2? What improvements did you specifically seek to make?

Being on the project for a long time let me see many people come and go and come again. I was able to see what some common pain points were for developers to target our improvements at them. Also as an active CoH1 player throughout development I was able to see places where our old technology wasn’t able to address the concerns moving forward and made sure we allocated appropriate resources to improving these systems.

I’m happy that I was able to fight for enough time for top guys to build the improvements we did for the AI and UI.

If you played the original Company of Heroes, which faction was your favorite

I love the way Wehrmacht veterancy worked. Even though I like victory point more than annihilate matches, their late game armour and veterancy combo was hard to compete against.

Which CoH2 faction do you prefer to play? What’s your favorite commander? What’s your favorite unit?

Definitely German. The German army lets me save up my munitions for a few passive upgrades to make them stronger. The Soviet army requires much more brain power to constantly spend the munitions on temporary abilities for a larger army. While in the hands of an expert player this is devastating, I am usually able to hold my opponent at bay until I can roll out the wicked German armour, my favourite of which is the medium Panzer IV.

Describe your style of play in CoH2: Do you build your army around certain units? How aggressive or conservative are you? What would you name your style?

I like to play larger battles and play the role of forcing the battle from mid to late game. I usually build three to five Tier 1 units to stalemate around the centre of the map and then build some fuel depots to go straight for Tier 3 tanks. Often opponents will enter mid game only to find I’ve basically skipped it. I can usually claim enough of the map with my early tanks that my allies can roll out Tier 4 units and we’ll clean the map. It’s a very different strategy than you’d use in a 1 vs. 1!

What’s your favorite way to play CoH2? (e.g., 1 vs. 1 automatch, 4 vs. 4 annihilation custom matches with friends/family, 2 vs. 2 leagues in the office)?

I’m a traditional comp stomper. When I started playing CoH1 online right after it shipped I got discouraged that I, as a developer, wasn’t competitive online in PvP. I found I knew enough to be a very useful teammate when fighting against the AI. I had a great time getting started doing 4 vs. 4 matches against the AI and will always have a soft spot in my heart for 4 vs. 4 AI battles. It’s a great way to close out a night of intense PvP battles.

These days I like playing 4 vs. 4 with friends on Ventrilo against real players. Having that out of band communication really helps. I like 4 vs. 4 much more than 1 vs. 1 because you’ve got support if you make a mistake or get an unlucky hit that would be a game ender in a 1 vs. 1.

Do you have any weird CoH2 habits or beliefs about things that always seem to happen to you in games?

In CoH2 you get an alert when a squad is under attack. You’re supposed to hit the space bar to go to that event as soon as it happens so you can make sure your unit is in cover or retreat. I swear I sometimes don’t get those audio alerts and end up losing a squad. As much as I swear it isn’t my lack of skill for losing a squad nobody can reproduce this “bug”!

How difficult is it to become good at CoH2? Do you need to be good to enjoy it?

CoH2 is a game for gamers. We assume our players have a certain minimum amount of skill. This is a good thing; we’re not targeting the same audience as Bejeweled.

To become a good player doesn’t take that much effort, but it definitely takes a few matches. The Soviet and German armies had a lot of specialized units, it will take a few matches to become familiar with the them, even if you played CoH1. Obviously even if you’ve played through the single-player campaign and know what the units do you can’t expect to go online and win your first game against people that have done the same, but already played 10 matches online. However you’ve got a good chance to beat the easy AI and become a good online player.

It doesn’t take that many matches to be able to go from beating easy AI to beating hard AI. If you can beat just normal or hard AI you’re already a very good player. If you can beat Expert you’re definitely in the top few percent overall.

The journey from being a completely new player who has never played anything like this through the campaign, Theatre of War, easy, normal, hard AI, and into multiplayer is the experience that is Company of Heroes. You don’t have to be good to enjoy it because as you enjoy it you will become good.

What would you tell a player who wants to know how to have the most fun with CoH2’s Theater of War and multiplayer modes?

Get friends. If you have a match either with or against a skilled player, invite them to be a Steam friend. Get a headset with a microphone and chat with them. Don’t play in isolation, you’re missing out on too much.

Questions about Programming/AI

What have you done differently for Company of Heroes 2 to improve it from the first Company of Heroes? How different is the engine? Etc.

The work was in doing more on a big scale. CoH1 ran great for 1 vs. 1 matches, but for large 4 vs. 4 matches with all the weather effects active your needed a hefty CPU. The Soviet army won due to sheer numbers and the coldest winter on record. We needed to be able to run well in these settings. CoH2, with all the fancy new features, out performs CoH1 when both are running similarly heavy settings!

On top of that you’ve got new Fog of War that opens up all kinds of new gameplay. In old games the main character would have footprints stick around for a few seconds, but now we’ve got the memory to have hundreds of soldiers and vehicles moving around, leaving 3-D footprints in the snow for the entire duration of the match, which are properly occluded by the FoW.

How did you go about deciding what game engine to use for CoH2? What were your goals with the Essence 3 engine?

The aim was to make a great game like Company of Heroes. To have the scale we needed and be able to have new features like ice that would crack and weaken as you drive tanks over it there was nothing we could buy to do this. We had to build it in house.

What about the technology powering CoH2 would surprise a player the most?

I think the audio. Right off the bat when you listen to the orchestral music in the front end everybody can recognize you need to turn up the volume when you play this game. When you get into a match you’ll agree we’ve taken a step forward with audio.

Gamers won’t ever experience the big changes moving from Doom in the early 90s to a 3-D polygon game like Quake. When you upgrade from older games and watch a tank leave depressions in the snow and then hold alt to tilt the camera as you watch the tank slide on the ice you may or may not notice the way the sunlight correctly reflects differently on the ice that was just cracked by the tank. It just feels like this is the way it should be. Unless you’re a connoisseur of this kind of thing you probably won’t appreciate you’re playing with the #1 technology in these areas.