Now that we've started production on MAKING HISTORY II, I've been encouraged to share with the community some thoughts on the new design. Therefore I intend to write a little bit here and there about new features and discuss MAKING HISTORY gameplay fundamentals. There are many opinions on what the game is and how it should be different. As a company we welcome discussions about the game and we're happy users want to help us make it better. Often the community offers ideas that were already working on or have considered. You don't really get a sense of that since we rarely expose our internal reasoning on why a certain feature is included when others are not. Game production is in many ways a very messy process. You never know if something is actually going to work as intended until you make it. Every time you introduce something new there's a chance it might break. Its a bit like cooking and sometimes it's best not to watch the chef handle the food.

With MAKING HISTORY II, the game will become a series - something we've hoped for all along. Even before we finished work on the first MAKING HISTORY, I was already thinking about this next installment. As the person responsible for game design, I resist introducing changes that don't match the game's core tenets. Its always very tempting to include new features and details because we can or because other games might have it. If I may use the cooking analogy - again, you can over do it with ingredients that don't fit. This can spoil the entire experience or merely overload the player with bland complexity that's ultimately inconsequential. That's not to say we are trying to make the game more simplistic or trivial. On the contrary, MAKING HISTORY II will undoubtedly be a more complex game than the original. The intent is to provide a more active and enriched gaming experience, not just add stuff for the sake of it.

So then, what is the MAKING HISTORY gaming philosophy and what are some of the big changes ahead for MAKING HISTORY II? I'll be addressing both of these questions in future installments of this design update. Let's first clarify that MAKING HISTORY II: The War of the World is a turn-based grand strategy game. Its setting is the early to mid 20th century. Thematically and from a content perspective, it belongs to the WWII strategy genre. However as the title suggests, MAKING HISTORY also provides an experience that embraces the idea that players can influence and experience historical alternatives. This is the essential core design philosophy of the MAKING HISTORY series and one that influences all areas of the game design.

I tend to think of MAKING HISTORY as a game system, as something beyond just a single game set to a specific era. The gameplay is geared towards classic strategic level nation management decisions. This is not just a game limited to conquest & war. In MAKING HISTORY as in the real world, fielding an army is the result of economic and domestic choices that for the most part decide the outcome of wars. The War of the World will further emphasize the importance of economic gameplay and expand the responsibilities of governing that go beyond troop movements. That being said, waging war will remain as the most important part of the game. Well be adding new military features that bring depth & realism without overwhelming the player with trifling detail.

As I mentioned above, I've been thinking about a MH II game for over a year now and its very exciting to see things coming together. Some of the features I had hoped would make it into The Calm & the Storm are now a part of The War of the World. There's a lot of work ahead but so far things are shaping up nicely. It's too early to say whether or not all the planned new features will be implemented in time or if in the end some might get chopped for not fulfilling its purpose. That's just one of the frustrating aspects of game production. Next time I'll go into more detail about new features and maybe a little bit on the thinking behind some of our decisions.