The propaganda behind Freeze Interactive' military themed, debut title is slowly beginning to mount. With a blend of FPS action and the tactics of an RTS, Field Ops proposes a very different gaming experience for Battlefield and Command & Conquer fans alike when it is released during Q1 2007.

TVG has teamed up with Freeze Interactive and the team at Digital Reality to bring you a series of developer diaries, chronicling the efforts of a start-up publisher to get a genuinely innovative title off the ground and to the market.

Mourad Majeri, Executive Producer on Field Ops, begins our coverage sharing with us the ideas behind the game, the vision and how it is all coming together.

We are a team of gamers, with a long experience in the games industry with major publishers. We decided to form Freeze Interactive because we had certain ideas about the games we would really like to play but could not find them on the shelves. We decided that we had to produce and publish these games ourselves, and that we could succeed if we put in enough passion, time, luck and, of course, money!

We always enjoyed playing military games (FPS or RTS), but thought that something was missing. We wanted to give players the feeling that they have a global experience of a modern conflict, allowing the player to live the conflict through the eyes of a Commander AND a soldier. We decided that the best way to be a commander was to play in RTS, and the best way to be a soldier on the field was to play an FPS. So we decided to mix FPS and RTS, and Field Ops was born, the Real-Time Strategy Shooter (RTSS?).

We hope Field Ops will be the first of a successful series, a new milestone in the convergence of gameplay, and we are already working on ideas for sequels that would be not only for PC but also for next-gen consoles.

Aims, Aspirations and The All Important Overview

Field Ops brings a new way of playing military games, mixing pure action and tactics, allowing you to live the conflict from different perspectives, and giving absolute freedom to the player to choose at any time how he wants to handle the situation (action, tactics, strategy, micro management, macro management...).

You will be able to play all units in FPS or in RTS, and all vehicles in standard RTS control or in Third Person Direct Control mode (as in a racing game).

The player will be able to switch at any time, seamlessly, from one mode to the other. It will be up to him to judge whether he should play in a certain situation in FPS or in RTS, depending on his own skills and preferences, but also on his assertion of the context (for example, small corridors might be easier to handle in FPS control).

In single player mode, you will play the US Special Forces against the Terrorists over 16 different maps, on 4 different environments (Cuba, Ukraine, Afghanistan, USA).

In Multiplayer mode, you can of course play both sides, over 10 different and specifically designed maps. MP will be huge fun as you will be able to play in RTS whereas your buddies in the same team can stick to FPS if they want!

"Being a new Publisher AND creating a new genre is even more difficult, but we knew this from the beginning."

Unknown Genre, Unproven Developer?

We have known the guys at DR for a long time while working for previous companies. We had fully designed Field Ops from start to finish, this is our little baby, and were looking for a developer who could develop the game based on our design.

As Field Ops is a new genre, there was obviously no studio that could say it had done the same kind of game before and already had the technology.

So we needed to find a studio with not only the skills, but also one willing to develop a new engine for Field Ops. We estimated that DR had the rights guys to do Field Ops: they had the technological skills to develop this FPS/RTS engine for Field Ops, and also were willing to prove that they are not just a standard RTS shop. Frankly, we did not really consider the potential troubles their previous titles had (all of them were RTS games), as we did not want to make a pure RTS, but to create a new genre.

FIELD OPS is not a game from DR, it's a game from Freeze Interactive, based on a very strong and unique design created by Freeze, and developed by DR.

Breaking Through The Barrier...

The videogames industry is now a pretty conservative world, with less and less entry points for newcomers, but this is basically what happens to all markets moving from the craziness of the young to a more stable maturity.

Bringing out a game when you are a new company is not an easy task. Nobody is expecting you to do well. Being a new Publisher AND creating a new genre is even more difficult, but we knew this from the beginning.

But we knew also that FIELD OPS is worth all the efforts, and that if we could prove we are right about what we say, if people can see the "magic" where mixing FPS and RTS actually works and that they have lots of fun playing the game, then things would get easier with media and publishers. This is what we have done since E3, working hard on the game, showing versions only when they have reached a stage where they can actually demonstrate the strength of the concept. Following E3, and even more after Leipzig, we got very strong feedback from the press in the main territories, and now we are in discussion with several publishers who have been able to see that the "good idea" is being turned into a very good game. So hopefully Field Ops will soon get an even bigger and better publishing support and media exposure, which we think it deserves. The good thing is that now we are not the only ones to think it deserves it.

Where Are We?

We are currently working on the polishing phase which is a specific phase during our development pipeline. The purpose of this phase is to enhance all game elements already built by tweaking/improving them.

Design side: At this stage all single-player missions have already been scripted and all multiplayer maps have been set up. This means you can play all missions from the beginning to the end.

Now the design team is working on what we called the re-scripted phase. After one round in the test team, the designers get their feedback about various subjects for the mission, such as fun factor, gameplay and obviously bugs inside the scripts. Same thing is done on the multiplayer maps.

Art side: On the other hand, the art team is building new elements to fit the design elements that the designer created for this phase, for instance new cover objects. Also at this time the skybox and water elements are building graphically. Otherwise all graphics are in.

Code side: The code team has mainly finished the hard work and is now focusing on debug/optimisation routine (especially for the network).

TVG would like to thank Mourad for sharing this insight into the development of Field Ops. Next month the coverage continues with a look at the design of the game and the issues faced in merging genres and creating a new idea...