Unity of Command II News

Better believe it! The announcement will go through “proper” PR channels as well, but here goes the blog version. The game is scheduled for release later this year (Q3 2019) and all of the rest you basically already know if you’ve been reading this blog.

You've probably noticed there are no preorders, because we’re nice indies, and the only thing you can really do right now on this page is wishlist the game.

So, um… do wishlist the game (hard!), and also tell all your friends. And that’s it, that will do actually. While we’re here though, I’ll do a short development update, so here goes…


The info on the Steam page will not be news if you’d been following UoCII dev diaries on our web. It mentions the campaign [Dev Diary 8], headquarters [Dev Diary 4], bonus objectives [Dev Diary 2], fog of war [Dev Diary 14] etc. Actually most of what’s on this page has already been mentioned multiple times.

In the screenshots, you can spy the HQ Selector in lower right, which is a quick UI method to reach your HQs. Right above that you can sometimes see the re-designed messages: a lot of the work lately has gone into various transient UI messages and “dings”.

There are many new units in the screenshots too. For my money, the Gebirgsjäger and Indian infantry stand out. Bonus points for whomever spots the New Zealand infantry with their “Lemon Squeezer” hats first.

The trailer has been put together with an emphasis on game footage. I hope you like it, I think it gives a good idea of what the game is (and will be) like. It was super interesting to be involved in making it, even though I’m not a big consumer of trailers personally. Normally I have them disabled in Steam and jump straight to the screenshots.


While the main game loop of select-move-attack has been solid for a year, the game allows for several dozen HQ actions and theater assets, each of which needs its own workflow and animations. We’ve been going through that list for some time now, but there are 36 more items still left to do. I’m not even kidding.

Low level campaign work has mainly been completed as well. The editor supports scenario variants and branching, and is able to manage units which are persistent in the campaign. We also found a good solution for unit name localization, that should hold up for community content. For example, if you use “101st Airborne” in your scenario, it will automatically be translated in all supported languages.

The work on the special Normandy map also progresses well. The landings scenario would barely fit in our default scale, so we decided to zoom-in and it’s looking good so far. We should be using this approach as necessary, wherever we encounter high unit densities (final Soviet offensive on Berlin comes to mind).


You may have noted that the Steam page lists Croteam, the makers of Serious Sam and Talos Principle, as our co-developers. Croteam are our cross-town brethren, and as the bigger studio, have been super helpful for years already. We’ve now made things slightly more official, with Unity of Command II formally listed as a co-production.

This is a good thing and not bad. The game gets to be even better, and I totally promise we’re not adding headless kamikaze anywhere.

Feel free to AMA in the comments. This is usually the case here, but now even more so because it’s a bit of a special occasion 😀

Cheers,

Tomislav

Hello and welcome to Unity of Command II Development Diaries!

We’ll be posting a brand new Development Diary #20 shortly, here on Steam’s announcement section, but here’s a short recap in case you missed any of the previous entries.

While it’s true that Unity of Command II hasn’t been properly announced until today, it’s no secret that we’ve been working on the game and, in fact, have been at it for quite some time.

The sequel is on its way, we confirmed that much in this Anniversary post in the Blogs section on Unity of Command web quite some time ago.

The very first Development Diary (‘No More Wipeouts!') was published just a couple of months later and can give you an idea of what to expect from the upgraded mechanics, while the second diary entry (Objectives) weights the pros and cons of timed objectives in the game (spoiler alert: it looks like we’re keeping those).

Excellent reads, both of those, but Tom, our Project Lead on UoC2, has set a high standard for himself and decided to start from scratch. “I’m restarting the dev diary series” announced Tom and then proceeded to explain the envisioned changes to the losses management system in both a scenario and a campaign. The third diary entry (Are You Experienced?) also hints at tweaks to the familiar veterancy levels and mentions upgrades between scenarios for the very first time!

A brand new feature, headquarters, was announced and explained in Report to HQ, ASAP!, while The Supply Network and Move it, Soldier! shed some light on the refining process of the defining mechanics in Unity of Command; planned changes to supply logistics, fighting and maneuvering are detailed in Dev Diaries 5 to 7.

Campaign drops the bomb with the first ever Art Preview, but the excitement doesn’t stop there as Tom announces the switch to a brand new in-house 3D engine built on Python while staying recognizably Unity of Command. Developer Diary 9 (Map Making) takes the next logical step and explains the process of map building, apparently a tedious task with a very limited room for automation. We use the word ‘shader’ for the very first time, marking a new chapter in the development of Development Diaries.

Performance diary answers the age-old question - will this game run on my age-old PC? - with a resounding ‘probably yes!’ but please don’t tell that to anyone just yet as we’re still tweaking things in hopes of making the game look even better and running on lower spec hardware. Oh, and if you read the comments section in Dev Diary 10, there’s also a brief mention of planned additional content for the game which is a politically correct way of saying yes, there will be DLCs!

A rather novel game development technique was introduced last year in the Summer of Systems: the team decided to ditch any low-level system that wasn’t implemented by the end of August. Good news: team crunched and ended up implementing most of the planned systems. Steam release is casually confirmed.

An open invitation to modders was sent out in So over with Under-The-Hood, a Dev Diary 13 that also publishes a new screenshot, describing an interesting problem: the units were drowning in the terrain, which is kind of a point of military uniforms, but apparently not really good for gameplay. The solution? You’ll have to read to blog, unfortunately.

Alternatively, you could start browsing through Dev Diaries 14 -17 that discuss new features like The Fog of War, Intel system or the weather modifiers, but truth be told these are just excuses for the team to show off a bunch of new visuals. While the subtleties of screen space ambient occlusion are hard to notice, the Unity of Command II is starting to look just plain gorgeous! Case in point - this Trick or Treat screenshot.

TL; DR
And that was all before we officially announced the game! If you read between the lines, we’ve spilled the beans on pretty much all major improvements to the game and explained the reasoning behind most new features. But not all of them - stay tuned, there's plenty more to talk about and show you here before the game is out in Q3 2019. The work continues!