Staff – November 5, 2019 at 10:00 AM
For many aspiring game developers, a mod can mean the beginnings of a career. If a mod is good, it might attract a modest audience. If a mod is really good, it might garner enough support and momentum to become its own standalone game.
Such were the hopes and dreams of Hrvoje Horvatek, who, as a student, found himself restless. “As I was finishing college, I realized I loved making games as much as I loved playing them,” Horvatek said. “I managed to do a simple multiplayer arcade as my thesis and was looking for an opportunity to steer my career in the direction of game development.”
Horvatek and a friend started meeting up to build their own project out of a mod for Warcraft 3. In those early days, the two worked out of a garage. Though they’d found a foothold amongst Warcraft 3’s modding community, their ambitions began to balloon far past what Warcraft 3’s editor could allow.
So they made their own game engine. Then, in 2013, they named their studio: Ironward. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, they grew to a six-person staff, working full-time on a game that was once a mod.
That game was The Red Solstice, a top-down, squad-based shooting game that takes place on Mars, which has been colonized by humans. While the solo campaign mode puts the player in control of an entire squad, its multiplayer campaign allows up to eight players to fight together, each controlling a single unit. The game’s RTS-like control scheme serves as a humble reminder of the game’s past as a Warcraft 3 mod, but it’s come a long way from what Horvatek had previously considered a “garage project.”
But Ironward wasn’t finished; they had even larger ambitions. In 2017, they released a follow-up to The Red Solstice called Solstice Chronicles: MIA, a twin-stick shooter that builds upon the story of the original. Players missed the network multiplayer functionality that had made The Red Solstice’s co-op experience so unique, and demand for a similar multiplayer mode in Solstice Chronicles: MIA began to mount among the game’s fans.
There was one catch: it wasn’t quite as feasible as Ironward’s fans had hoped. During their attempts to implement it, however, Ironward started developing an entirely new game, adapting the twin-stick mechanics to a game format that was built with multiplayer in mind.
Just for fun, however, Ironward considered ditching the twin-stick controls for the RTS scheme they’d used in the first Red Solstice game. The result was unexpected: The change in controls simply made the game more enjoyable.
“We were no longer telling ourselves, ‘Yeah, this will surely be fun once more features get made,’” Horvatek said. “We started having fun then and there, even with the product in a very unfinished state.”
The result is The Red Solstice 2: Survivors, a game that iterates upon the original’s RTS-inspired, squad shooter format. Ironward implemented a new layer of strategy and resource management that strings combat missions together via a series of meaningful choices. Saving a civilian might mean the risk of sacrificing a squadmate, for example. Success and failure isn’t as black and white as it was in the first game; the outcome of each individual mission has a bearing on the next.
The Red Solstice 2 also sees the introduction of a new, alien biomass that slowly spreads throughout levels, heavily shaping the environment and reducing visibility across the map. As a whole, AI enemies are much more sophisticated than they were in the first game. The alien monsters can now listen for the player’s position, conduct ambushes, and employ more advanced techniques for avoiding fire.
Lastly, every bit of The Red Solstice 2 can be played with others, from the story campaign to one-off skirmishes. Drop-in, drop-out co-op allows players to take technologies they’ve unlocked from their own campaign and bring them into their friend’s game. Even experience generated from skirmishes is transferred across games.
True to their history, Ironward made The Red Solstice 2: Survivors by following their instinct, innovating upon other ideas to make something that pushes their own limits. “It is our most ambitious project so far, and we strongly believe anyone who enjoys action-strategy games will not regret checking it out,” Horvatek said.
The Red Solstice 2: Survivors will be available for PC sometime in 2020. Add it to your Steam wishlist here.
