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Radio War Nerd EP #248 — War Game Development (Patreon)

Published:
2020-09-30 22:48:10
Edited:
2020-09-30 22:58:47
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

Guest: Maurice Grela, game developer

Recorded: September 29, 2020

Following up on our RWN episode surveying war-themed video games with Gunnar Hrafn Jónsson (EP #217), we're joined by game developer Maurice Grela to talk about how video games—specifically war gaming—are created and developed. Grela helped develop the new game Squad, and the soon-to-be released World War I game Beyond The Wire.

First: the Nerd and Ames discuss Armenian-Californian guerrilla fighter Monte Melkonian and the book about him, My Brother's Road...and the outbreak of heavy fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh between Turkish-backed Azerbaijani forces and Armenians. 

At 25:38 - Maurice Grela joins us to talk war game development.

Check out our guest Maurice Grela's new WWI game Beyond The Wire. Give the game a boost by wishlisting it on Steam. Play Beyond the Wire for free — go to the alpha signup page here.

Go to Maurice's page here to play his prototypes through web browser.

Total time: 1:56:24

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

Files

Comments

Maggie+Al

At some point you should talk about the even worse nerds like me, tabletop wargamers.

Will Sundstrom

its not crusader kings, but I'll take it! Really excited to dig into this one!

princeamir301

shout out to my Arma community out there.

princeamir301

has anyone else messed ariund with Arma and Arma mods?

Doug Cartel

battlefield 2 was around 2005, and call of duty modern warfare was uhhh 2007 iirc

Jimothy Realname

Looking forward to this. I was playin squad way back before they added humvees and shit

Moe Ski

Thanks for the Correction D. I should have googled it before mentioning it :C

Moe Ski

Prince, if you like Rising storm 2, you should try out beyond the wire. It's been a pretty big influence on our design

Jimothy Realname

Rising Storm 2 is good. It's close to the perfect balance between realistic and arcadey. Squad is a lot heavier on the realism side, and a lot of the time you'll just be firing at a treeline where you think the enemy might be, which I like as well

Karl Mathew Prager IV

Funny thing is. In Squad I have been in a logistics truck listening to teammates making all sorts of horrific comments lol. Just like real war :p

Ellen Harold

I want to thank John Dolan for his wonderful, amazing newsletter. It is so illuminating & well written. I am fuzzy on some of the details, but in the 1920s, one Nicholas Roerich, a White Russian avant garde painter and set designer, traveled to Tibet, which I think the British had made off limits to tourists. He was a Theosophist of some kind, a mystic who styled himself a Guru. The British government had a fit because they suspected Roerich of stirring up Tibetan nationalism. In the 1930s Roerich started a serious movement to protect architectural monuments from being blown up in war, which attracted many eminent celebrity figures (sort of a prefiguration of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites). Who could be against it?) FDR's mother was one. She had a long-standing interest in Eastern mysticism, not uncommon in her generation. Anyway, it was a long story but it ended up with Vice President Henry Wallace hiring this guy to collect seeds of diverse species of wheat in China to improve disease resistance of plants. But in once China, instead of collecting seeds, Roerich started meeting with Tibetan and other Chinese nationalists and may even have gone back or tried to go back to Tibet, and Wallace fired him for dereliction of duty. The Brits, naturally, went into hysterics all over again and Guru ended up being deported from the US for tax evasion or something. Somehow Wallace got stuck with responsibility for the whole scandal and it contributed to his being swiftboated in the 1948 election by the popular press, who accused him of weak-minded mysticism and taking advice from dodgy eastern gurus. The British, I suppose because of his involvement with Roerich, whom they hated, had sent Roald Dahl to spy on him during World War 2. Funny thing is that Roerich is still highly thought of in Russia and Gorbachev's wife was (is?) a fan.

grey

Cant wait to listen to this. I have hundreds of hours on their other shooter 'Squad' and I am looking forward to this.

grey

Ive seen people playing as insurgents blasting jihadist tunes over the local chat in the back of logistic trucks hahahaha

Ombak Magazine

Also cool about Roerich: The first modern international pact to protect cultural heritage called the Roerich Pact. It was the direct precursor to UNESCO. Also, he is name-dropped as the aesthetic inspiration for the city in Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness."

Shad Narcher

Most FPS games make me sick, but for some reason I could play CounterStrike for six hours a day without incident. Logging in to escape the news wall-paperd with fireballs and collapsing buildings on the afternoon of 9-11-2001, I was greeted by a meme of the FPS view of the end of a match with the classic, “Terrorists Win” transposed on the trade center. Player name: “Osama bin laden” I soon got RSI’s from playing and had to quit, but I do miss the action and joking around in game.

Gee Mama

Ragdoll discussions made me think of Rainbow 6 Siege and how death animations there genuinely creep me out sometimes. Don't always look right, but when they do, downright eerie.

teh_drewski

You may know this but a lot of the motion sickness in FPS games comes from a limited field of view, so if you've not tried adjusting that to show more surroundings it may help!

teh_drewski

You could honestly talk forever about (war)gaming, you guys haven't even approached the deeply interesting and fun politics in wargaming topic yet and that in itself could be a whole episode!

a clash of purple

I feel like if they're going to keep talking about war in video games, they should discuss Spec Ops: The Line at some point. And since the Fallout series has been mentioned so many times and John and Mark are both science fiction fans, maybe they'd find something of interest in Fallout: New Vegas, which revolves around a sort of retro-sci-fi post-apocalyptic war that draws certain parallels with the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Depending on which faction the player sides with, it's possible to do a lot of insurgent or counter-insurgent fighting, up to and including assassinating the president when he visits the front to deliver a speech for the troops.

Joseph Yachimec

If we could somehow introduce the Boys to the Metal Gear Solid universe, I would absolutely flip my lid

Ilya Fishman

Idk about war games, but guys your coverage of Karabakh is kind of wild. To say that Russia supports Armenia, and oh look its a democracy because they had a color revolution, is the height of obfuscation. Russia pretends to support Armenia so long as it remains loyal to and dependent on Russia. Russia has sold weapons to BOTH sides for years (Armenian loyalty hasn't helped) and so far has done nothing but urge a cease-fire while Turkey is actively aiding Azeris.

Jeff Grey

Nerdy and hyper-specific point of order, but then what else are we here for? I'd like to point one thing out about Half-Life and its contribution to gaming narrative. Grela isn't quite right, although maybe he was just trying to save time, when he describes Half-Like as coming up with using animations and voice to move the plot along. By that time there was a well-established pattern of what is called the "cutscene," where the gameplay is broken up by some animated sequence or dialogue or skit or what have you that is intended to move the plot along. Intro cutscene to gameplay to cutscene to gameplay have kind of been the basic structure of a game with a plot for a very long time. It's that in most games of the time, and still in many to this day, the cutscenes are done outside of the game's environment and with a different graphical engine/animation program/what have you. This can be done as an aesthetic choice, but often is done as a result of technological limitations. What Half-Life 1 did is that it was the first major game to have it's cutscenes happen within the game's environment and entirely using the same graphical and physics engine as the regular game. This lends a great deal to the sense of immersion within the game. So I wouldn't call Half-Life so much a trailblazer in narrative concept, as I would in the method of delivering those concepts.

William Imhoff

Big SQUAD player here, so I can add some perspective on the community and how it works. Basically, there are two schools of thought that exist on squad, for the most part. There are people there, who are very "boot" in nature. Either currently in the military, veterans, or someone with a friend or family member in the military. They're usually very interested in the community that revolves around those things, so guns, military youtube, combat footage forums, ect. The other type of player is very interested in the social aspect. Working with strangers, and talking to them. There is a bit of "free time" you have during these games, to an extent. A good squad will be talking a lot, so there is a time in the beginning that is just pure socializing. It's not uncommon to strike up a conversation of "where ya from?" & "what do you do for a living?". There is a server called "English & Arabic, Special Arab Militia" which I think is hosted in the EU, based off of how we ping to it. On there, people from all over MENA, Europe, South America, & North America log in & shoot the shit with strangers from all over the world. I think that's the unappreciated appeal to these titles.

Playdoh

Testimony from a solider on the ground during the events of the "Collateral Murder" video: https://youtu.be/kelmEZe8whI Absolutely essential context for the already sickening footage.