Introducing Element Games and ‘Evil Robot Traffic Jam’. Q&A with Marcin Szymanski
There’s a new studio on the block from a talented ex Ensemble Studios member. Introducing “Element Games” headed up by Marcin Szymanski, a programmer from Ensemble Studios who has worked on many titles from Age of Mythology through to Halo Wars. Following the closure of Ensemble Studios, Marcin worked at Robot Entertainment on Orcs Must Die! and Hero Academy, the latter where he was both lead programmer and lead designer on the highly successful and award winning project. Following his time at Robot, Marcin worked at Playful Games for the first half of 2014. At Playful Marcin learnt the ropes on virtual reality game design, working on Lucky’s Tale, a VR platformer for Oculus Rift. Now Marcin is setting out on a new adventure with his new founded studio Element Games who have just released their first title for the Samsung Gear VR. Read more
Halo Wars leader powers detailed (part 1)
Marcin Szymanski kicks off part one of a multiple part developers blog discussing the leader power designs in Halo Wars. The developers blogs contains some never seen before screenshots of the development along with some technical ins and outs about the design.
“We initially prototyped most of the powers in Halo Wars’ strong visual scripting system. This allowed us to get the powers up and running very quickly. It also helped us quickly iterate on the gameplay, because designers could jump right into script code to modify each power.
There were some areas, however, where the scripting system was slowing us down. It didn’t allow for very precise control over power execution, it didn’t support cool programmatic effects, and it was very difficult to debug. Being the greedy developers that we are, we decided that we wanted more! We could have retrofitted the scripting system to support the needed functionality, but it became clear that the right direction was to move everything into native C++ code. ”
Here is an example of the early Prophet of Regret leader power:
Read all about it on the Halo Wars website!
