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Gamasutra has posted a new postmortem article focusing on 11 Bit Studios' Anomaly Warzone Earth. The strategy game puts players in charge of an army needing to get past powerful defense towers set up by alien invaders. In the article the developer's senior writer discusses what went right, and what went wrong, with Anomaly Warzone Earth.

The Liquid Engine has been in development by the lead programmer Bartek Brzostek, in consultation with the designer Michal Drozdowski (back then, the only designer, now design director) and with artist Przemek Marsza? (back then, the only one, now art director) since December 2009.

In April 2010, the base allowed us to build the first raw level. Fast? At the time, Bartek had over 10 years of experience in engine and advanced tools creation for building graphics and the logic of a game, so the decision to build our own engine was pretty natural -- let the guy do the engine if he's been making engines for years. He needed only time to prepare the fundaments of the new engine.

Indies are often advised to not waste time on the creation of proprietary tools and just quickly go into production on some external engine. This, however, has some serious drawbacks we wanted to avoid.

Firstly, no engine supports all platforms. For us, it was extremely important to port the game to as many of them as possible to enable multiple revenue streams. Secondly, using a third-party engine provides you with certain tools and features but no more. If you need something really custom, you're screwed; the engine developer won't deliver custom features for a small indie startup. Sometimes there is an option to acquire the source code and develop these features on your own; however, in most cases, it's not free. In essence, by using an engine out of the box, you give up a lot of flexibility and involve third-party risk. Most startups have no real alternative to this. We, however, did.

Gamasutra: Anomaly Warzone Earth

Anomaly Warzone Earth

Buy Anomaly Warzone Earth

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