Tower defense has been one of my personal favorite genres of games in the past and present, the ongoing onslaught of stampeding fools dancing along my maze of glorious stationary defenders bringing death and decay to the running mass of impudent futiles. The heretics who zealously leap into the unending fray with blind faith in hopes to reach their destination of- okay enough of that, onwards!
My first exposure to the genre dated back to the Warcraft 3 days of wandering the custom map list and stumbling upon the chilly frozen wastelands of Wintermaul. The point of a TD is to defend a particular entity by building towers to annihilate waves after waves of attacking enemies , said entity can be a base the attackers are trying to destroy or a ship they will use to escape. Most tower defense games provides you with an array of different towers (and sometimes sentient defenders) to play with, generically a single target tower, a wide spread area of effect tower and towers that smokes out invisible units are amongst the many different kind of towers you can build in a Tower Defense game. This will eventually snowball into a strategic game of placing the right towers in key locations to deal with the diverse ongoing waves of enemies.
Today’s interview we will be chatting with the fine gentlemen of the Polish isles- 11 Bit Studio’s Pawel Miechowski will talk about their game Anomaly 2, an interesting twist in the genre, reversing the game of Tower Defense into Tower Offense where you are the attackers this time around.
Here is the launch trailer for Anomaly 2:
Nicholas: Thank you for taking your time off to chat with us Pawel Miechowski, how are things in the office after just releasing Anomaly 2?
Pawel: First of all we just left the office for some football game and a party after that 🙂 Now we’re working to fix some issues and prepare a version for Mac App Store and then we’ll have a week off to get some rest and relax.
That’s a tad bright in the office!
Nicholas: Can you introduce yourself to our readers and tell us what your background is, your favourite delicacy in Poland and how did you end up working at 11 Bit Studios?
Pawel: My name’s Pawel Miechowski, my official job title is Senior Writer, however lately I take care mostly of communications and public relations at 11 Bit Studios while my mate Borys took the writer job 🙂 I’m in the gaming industry since many years with my older bro Grzegorz, so when he has found a new company 11 Bit I joined him instantly because making games is the thing I love most and probably I don’t know how to do anything else.
Nicholas: Tower Defense games has been around for quite some time stretching back to the Warcraft 3 custom maps era. What inspired you guys to go the other direction to totally reinvigorate and reverse the format into the Tower Offense genre for the Anomaly games?
Pawel: We’re strategy gamers here playing lots of RTS and TD games, but obviously we were looking for some unusual idea, fresh approach or whatever you call it that is not similar to what we’ve seen in this genre so far. And lead designer Michal was the one who told “let’s make a game that is totally opposite to Tower Desense”. The idea started to evolve and to make it more complex game Michal added the on-filed commander who support the troops in the battle and the tactical view for battle planning and so on until the game evolved into actual Anomaly game. At the beginning we’ve created three playable prototypes. The first two sucked and the third one was good enough to continue development.
Nicholas: Anomaly is set in a near-future Earth heavily infested by alien activity, were there several iterations on the universe and environments for Anomaly or was the idea of a semi-futuristic world set in stone early in the development stages?
Pawel: The lead artist Przemek had some idea in mind from the very first scratch but he and other artists were making a lot of concepts to find the setting and environment, so they were drawing different pictures looking for a specific style. Frozen America and hot-jungle were the environments they found most interesting to develop. So in the end, yes, there were some iterations and please also keep in mind that the alien sci-fi setting was like a must-have as our game has sci-fi story. We’re fanboys of sci-fi culture here 🙂
Transform and roll out! Oh wait-
Nicholas: 11 Bit Studios also developed Anomaly Korea, a standalone product/expansion from the Anomaly universe. Curiously, what garnered the interest to create another Anomaly game set in Korea instead of any other parts of the world?
Pawel: This was again Przemek’s idea to search for some good looking environment and we found Korean style to be sexy enough to put the game in such settings, but in the end we’ve got some feedback from Asian gamers that the environment is not always looking Korean-like. Although ironically all buildings and landmarks were created from the photos of real Korean buildings.
Nicholas: Was it a difficult process for the developers to further improve and innovate the Anomaly games with the sequel Anomaly 2? What sparked the idea of the Morph mechanics to tackle different situations?
Pawel: Morph mechanics was like an answer to the complaning that the game is not offering different squad solutions. In Anomaly 2 you need to morph your units and change the squad like crazy to adjust to different battle situations. We wanted to have new original units so lead designer Rafal created new units and morph mechanics to make the squad more varied and with more tactical options than in Anomaly Warzone Earth.
Nicholas: Can you give us a glimpse on how building Anomaly 2 from the ground up was like? How long did it took the team to develop the game and what are the obstacles you guys encountered?
Pawel: The first ideas and concepts appeared already after releasing the first Anomaly. The development started around a year and half ago and the challenges we have had were related to proper balancing of the morph mechanics so the gamers can later enjoy this feature and have fun with discovering how many combat possibilities they have. However, totally the biggest challenge was to create a multiplayer engine and then all the multiplayer mechanics and then to balance the entire mode. It’s like completely new game!
Nicholas: Having played Anomaly 2 brilliant asymmetrical multiplayer, I would say I enjoyed a fair portion of the online rendition more than the single player campaign. Was the game built for multiplayer in mind before the development phase of Anomaly 2?
Pawel: Yes, we wanted to create the multiplayer for a long time and we wanted to create something unusual. I believe I can say that MP mode in Anomaly 2 is something you’ve never played before. And already in Anomaly Warzone Earth there were some plans for MP but we finally had no time for it. Then we asked people on Steam community what kind of MP they’d like to see and tower offense vs tower defense was definitely the most popular option in the poll. So eventually when there were first plans for Anomaly 2 entire team wanted to make some original multiplayer.
Nicholas: 11 Bit Studios also developed two mobile games outside of the Anomaly universe prior to the release of Anomaly 2, that being Funky Smugglers and Sleepwalker’s Journey. Being a fan of both titles, Sleepwalker for it’s heartwarmingly stylised art and Funky Smugglers for it’s engaging and addictive gameplay- are there any lessons you guys learnt from these two games that aided the development process of Anomaly 2?
Pawel: Tough question 🙂 We learn all the time with each game and our philosophy is to create each game that is better than the previous one.
A journey of sleepwalking
Nicholas: What are the plans for 11 Bit Studios now that Anomaly 2 has completed it’s development cycle and released to the public?
Pawel: New platforms await for Anomaly 2 and we already have a completely new project in development – it’s something we’ll be focusing on in upcoming months.
Nicholas: Thank you so much for taking your time to chat with us Pawel Miechowski and I wish you the continual success of Anomaly 2 and 11 Bit Studios!
Pawel: Thank you very much! Greetings for TheSmartLocal readers!
Check out 11 Bit Studios website here.
Funky Smugglers- Can you feel the groove?
So as I’ve mentioned before in my previous article, the fine gentlemen at 11 Bit Studios passed me two copies of Anomaly 2 to giveaway to two lucky readers. (Lucky you!)
This is how it will go, i’m not going to do a fancy giveaway where the readers are require to submit some beautifully godlike crafted artwork of the game or anything ridiculous like that, all you need to do to enter this giveaway is to prove your existence by writing something on the comments section and I will randomly pick 2 lucky buggers to receive a copy of Anomaly 2! Oh how delicious!
I’ll announce the winners of the giveaway on the 3rd of June next monday along with another article if things fares well. May the Gods of Probability smile upon you!
Anomaly 2 on Steam here.
You can view the gameplay trailer here:
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