Hello everyone. I know it's been a while since I Genuinely covered anything Battalion Wars related, but today I have a special interview to go over This was an interview that was set up by Battalion Wars community member fan Battalion Very cool dude and it was with I believe it's pronounced Tancred Dijkwells Who was the creative director of Battalion Wars? There's probably a lot of cool details in here that will be new to me and hopefully some of you guys as well So let's go ahead and get started So to start off we have a message from Tancred himself. I really hope I'm pronouncing that right and it reads Hi, first of all, I wanted to say thanks to all the Battalion Wars fan community who are keeping the game alive and showing such love and Enthusiasm for this project we made over 15 years ago I never expected that the game would still have such a dedicated audience after all this time And I love seeing the creativity that goes into your involvement with it The 3D printed models the fan art the tournaments all that cool stuff I passed on information about the 3D printable models to our former producers at Nintendo And they are also really pleased and surprised It's a privilege to be interviewed by you all So yeah, the 3D printed models. I'm very familiar with I have a Good number of them actually myself. They are made by community member Benton They're very well done. I'm not sure if Benton is still Making those but if he is I highly recommend them they're super cool So moving on we have part one fan battalion questions Introductory question by way of introduction could you tell us about your career in the world of video games and more specifically the role you played in the development of battalion wars So he responds I've been working in video games professionally for over 25 years and have shipped around 24 titles working as an artist game designer lead artist slash designer and creative director Aside from battalion wars I'm probably best known for devising and directing the art Academy series for Nintendo I was fortunate enough to be interviewed about that by Satoru Iwata. That was a real career high for me So I've actually never played the art Academy games, but I know that they were pretty popular for a while So that's really cool that he worked on those these days. I have my own indie studio alongside my business slash coding partner We are Cinder cone games and we're making skeleton crew It's a colorful fun action title. So please check it out and wish list us. I Will be sure to check that out regarding battalion wars It was like every project very much a group effort with incredibly talented people contributing tremendous work at every level Many of whom have gone on to have stellar careers But basically I received and directed those games it started life as an original idea slash title But I'll tell you more about that in other answers My work on the project was very wide-raging I came up with the core concept of a tactical action game where you could give commands to other units I wanted to experience an action game with more depth But at the time I had no idea how over ambitious it was to try and hybridize genres like this back in 2002 I had just come off of making rain of fire Game of the Matthew McConaughey Christian Bale Dragons versus tanks movie as lead artist We were a tiny team. We've been playing the original battlefield 1942 at lunch times which was a revelation at the time Perhaps the first networked FPS with multi-occupant vehicles so exciting So I haven't played battlefield 1942 But I did play a battlefield bad company to a lot back in like 2012 Super fun game and actually something interesting about some of the battlefield games is that there's a role called Commanding officer so I think it was changed in battlefield for but I know in previous titles that had the commanding officer unit He was just a regular troop on the field and in multiplayer matches Both teams had one commanding officer unit who had special privileges to communicate with all the squad leaders And I'm pretty sure he was also able to distribute care packages to other troops on the field So pretty different from the way Battalion Wars handled the commanding officer unit But still somewhat similar in the sense that there was a single commanding officer unit who had access to some RTS privileges and was also just a regular unit on the field that could fight in the battle at the same time Anyway getting back to the interview Somehow I like the idea of an action game in which you could not only run and gun but also issue commands to NPC allies Something with a little more depth little did I know how much we were biting off there blending genres is a massive ask There's a reason why game styles tend to pool and distill into distinct types Mashing a couple together is something to attempt at your peril the danger of falling between two stools and making something that doesn't live up to the criteria of either genre Action slash tactics is high Still all said I like to think we pulled it off and came away with an original tactical action game That was pretty unique and still stands up as fun today We had an opportunity and downtime to put together a demo and only took a couple of weeks I modeled up the soldiers the other guys on the team made up some vehicles a cute tank and a flying thing So our soldiers were technically speaking dragons flying around the ground In our PS2 engine the only skinned slash non-segmented characters we could have were dragons Full-specleromoreer band of brothers and a few other worms. I view tactical command games were starting to appear Though typically they would offer a small squad of four based setup that was more obviously manageable Later on are I thought Unique control transfer feature would also appear as the more catchally named hot swapping in the battlefield series Though it didn't stick around so I do vaguely remember being at a friend's house and watching them play a battlefield game I forget which one but I know it had this hot swapping feature and it definitely gives off battalion wars vibes Metal Slug was also a big influence. I've worked on some 2D platform action games in the past and that really informed art style concept So this actually doesn't surprise me at all and I love that this is the case because I really like the Metal Slug games Especially the first one, but the first three are all super great But I've definitely had that thought as well that a lot of the vehicle designs in Metal Slug do remind me of battalion wars Both games have really I would say bizarre, but in a good way Vehicle designs and even the infantry and Metal Slug does remind me a bit of the grunts in battalion wars just with how goofy they are But you have to remember that this was back in the day before mobile games really and no one had blazed that clash of clans art style trail Where by colorful and cartoony meant approachable and mass market at the time of making battalion wars cartoon art style meant kitty and it was a tough sell So I could see that being the case, especially when I think back to when wind waker came out I distinctly remember there being a decent backlash to wind wakers art style and a lot of people wanted something more gritty and real Like what Twilight Princess would offer a bit later on even at school I remember a lot of people talking trash about how the game looked So it's not too surprising that battalion wars would have had a hard time selling the concept for me personally The art style was right on my alley and even to this day I still love it gameplay aside. I just think the visuals are super fun to look at I was credited as lead designer and art director on battalion wars One also concept artist script supervisor It's kind of embarrassing that I'm in the credit so many times for the sequel I think I was just listed as creative director simpler I created concept art and some early models for the characters I designed the Western frontier and ex-Leveining troops I wrote the original design document and supervised the design team working with the lead level designers to review and develop each level I worked with our script writer to define characters in story Supervised voice recording sessions helped to choose slash cast actors I gave direction to the music composer and sound effects designer So he was definitely working on every aspect of the game It seems like and at the very least giving directions to people working on all the aspects of the game Everyone on that team was incredibly passionate and skilled and it's no surprise to me that so many of the level designers coders musicians and artists went on to work on or create such high-level projects in their careers afterwards But I have to admit that I stretched myself like never before or since on this project I had to keep all these aspects of art and design in mind at all times and cover a lot of bases at once I was very fried mentally, but I loved it You