By Fionn Kelly.

Veiled Threat is a real-time game of tactical infantry combat which I feel will also appeal to many more hard-core gamers than one would, at first, believe. As a confirmed grognard who normally stops reading after seeing the words "real-time strategy," I would ask you to continue reading on. This game and concept has greatly impressed me, and I think it might impress you too.

Features which are planned:

• Graphics rendered in 3D Studio with millions of polygons per scene.
• 800x600 or 640x480 16-bit screen modes supported.
• Dynamic lighting, shadowing and 3D perspective.
• Characters can go anywhere on the map; there are no terrain restrictions, only limited obstacles to overcome.
• High level of detailed character AI adds to players' interface control and overall game experience.
• Missions are not based on a "key" to the level but are instead tactically solved so the same level can be beaten more than once in different ways.
• Strong story and character-building; RPG character improvement qualities give players additional incentive to create bonds with their units.
• Comes with built-in level and mission editor to add playability to the game.
• Motion Picture quality CD Audio background music.
• Multiple difficulty settings for different levels of players.
• Random mission generator for instant play.

The following interview was conducted by email with Geoff Howland, founder and owner of Lupine Games on April 1st, 1999:

I have been doing game programming/designing as a hobby and studying it as a career for the past 12 years and about a little over a year ago I decided to take the next steps necessary to actually start on it so I did a few small projects testing out some of the latest APIs to make some kinds of technical decisions on what kind of platforms to start on and then started working on a bigger project which through a couple of obstacles became Veiled Threat.

Veiled Threat is a basically modern day small unit tactical warfare game. Our emphasis is on making as many options for the player available so that they can actually be able to tactically plan how they want to approach their objective and not simply have to figure out a maze/puzzle that the designer created for them or learn a "key" to the level enabling them to use that single feature for a victory every time.

The Wargamer: How long has Veiled Threat been under development and what was your initial aim when starting to program?

Veiled Threat has been in development now for 9-10 months from when I began calling it Fireteam and Force Recon as its project codename, I was leaning more towards Force Recon at the time but later a trademark issue came up and I had to change that and obviously another game came out called Fireteam, which was actually the original name I had for VT when it was conceived.

The initial aim was basically the same as the goal now, there were only a lot more blank spaces on what details would be in the game. My top-down idea was to make a game that was as true as possible to the tactical decisions you could face while running a covert operation, but making sure that it was centered on being fun as opposed to strict simulation. I enjoy strict simulations but my personal preference leans towards games that have a bit of a cinematic flare to them, where you can have a little more flexibility to do outlandish things to see if they'll work.

The Wargamer: How has Veiled Threat expanded to become the game it is today?

Most of this is just iterative designing. Since my concept was to provide every possible action I could to the player I have been added on more and more actions available to them as we have developed the levels. When we added in walls to an area an obvious action that needed to follow was the ability to climb over them, or cut through them if they happened to be a fence. In this way I'll continue to add in more animations for different action based mostly on anything I think would be a relevant choice to using the terrain to either move through/over or against the enemies.

The Wargamer: Can you explain the plot behind Veiled Threat? What kind of background story will be present during the game?

Someone told me recently that a game came out last year with a similar plot to the one I have for VT, so there is a possibility I may have to change the concept. However, right now I'm not leaning towards doing that, if another game said something similar was going on, we'll just do it better. :)

The plot is that it is a few years from now and governments have started to outsource their militaries using professional mercenary armies instead of their regular paid ones. This starts in the less affluent countries and spreads across the world as it seems to be working very well, and the governments can no longer justify the costs of maintaining a large military base when all operations are tending to be more and more surgical strikes and less dependent on manpower alone.

You command a team of recon and cover ops troops in the mercenary army V.E.I.L. (Volunteer Expeditionary Infantry Legion) and are given various missions your country/client needs to have performed for them and ultimately learn and help prevent a larger conspiracy that is going on in the world.

Well a basic plot is pretty obvious, if I am playing a game and there is a plot that interests me I am more likely to want to see what happens next and how I can progress the story and how it will end. It adds an extra incentive to playing the game and winning.

However VT will actually use a modular plot system, where you can fail mission objectives and continue on the objectives you left unfinished will snowball and become harder to deal with and you will pay the price of not getting them first time. One of the things I want to provide the player is an actual CHOICE in plot directions as well as in gameplay. I like giving give and take situations where you can't necessarily do everything, and if you do there may be a price to that too.

For instance, you could be given a mission objective of rescuing a POW that is being moved in a base, and once you arrive at the base and start setting up the extraction you also learn that an enemy general you have been hunting for is leaving a different section of the base at roughly the same time. You now have the choice of continuing with your original mission, scrapping the original mission and assassinating the general or trying to do both. Trying to do both may spread your resources thin and you may not accomplish either, but you may also lose a man while you are trying.

Now the choice, if it was nearly impossible to complete both objectives do you let your man die and not replay because you don't know if you can do it again? Do you just pick one or the other? Either way you may end up not being able to complete one of the objectives and the story will progress based on what you did and didn't do.

I believe that kind of modularity to the story will bring a great immersive feeling into the game, because it makes the world VERY reactive towards how you play the game, and you are always in the situation which you made for yourself, it wasn't simply dictated off of a script I decided to have written a year before you played the game.

On the subject of characters, each of your men will have their own set of statistics that will increase based on experience. The men aren't one-dimensional idiots who cant climb a wall or throw a grenade because they are snipers, but they will have things that they are better at because of practice. As you play the game you will actually be able to mould the men to your liking to develop a toolbox of men to use. In different situations you may want to use a different man for the job, all depending on your plan to attack the objectives.

The idea that the men become customized to your playing style and that if, you lose them, they are permanently gone (unless you restart the level, but the idea is if you lose them you decide to keep going) then you have to deal with morale decreasing and getting a green replacement. I believe this, combined with the ability to make men yourself, will add to the immersion a bit as well as you begin to care about how your men improve and don't want to lose any of them. I think games that make you restart immediately if you lose anyone are breaking any kind of immersion you have during playing and I also have a problem with games that use men as cannon fodder where you aren't supposed to care if you lose 100 men, because you just wanted to see how
well your enemy was defended.

A running man.

The Wargamer: Could you describe the gameplay in Veiled Threat for those who are not familiar with it? What will the player's aims be? What will set Veiled Threat apart from Close Combat III, Commandos and other real-time strategy games?

Very unfortunately I haven't been able to play CC3 yet because I've been too busy working, I actually get very little time to play games more than their demos now.

The gameplay however I often initially describe as being a mix between Commandos and Rainbox 6. I actually don't think Commandos has any sort of tactics to it, I think it is a good game and very innovative in its implementation, but it is really maze-puzzle game. However it shares some similarities with VT in the interface which is pre-rendered 2D isometric tiles with an overhead few.

That's about where the similarity ends though, as in VT you can interact with basically everything in the world, climbing over walls, going into buildings, going on multiple levels of them, onto roofs, shooting out the windows, as well as a slew of other things.

A good way to describe the gameplay in VT is just to understand the co-operation you need to use between your units. You will normally have about 4-8 units in a mission (8 being high) and you will need to use them to co-ordinate all your movements.

In VT your sight is limited by your line-of-sight, so while you can see all of the landscape you cant see any of the enemies except ones that are in one of your units fields of vision. Normal field of vision works in a circular manner as your units will of course always be looking around them, but this becomes limited very quickly as you use a unit to infiltrate a base because the unit will be standing close to walls and using obstacles as cover, and those will block his vision of enemies as well as theirs of him. So the other units will be vital in finding clear paths and often causing diversions or taking care of enemies that may be in his way.

You can use your other units as sniper/spotters, so that they have a thinner field of vision but can see much farther. If you can position them with a clear line of sight and especially above ground, such as out of a 2nd story building window, then you can see further and over some obstacles you couldn't from the ground. Having spotters is absolutely essential for sneaking into a base as it ensures you aren't about to bump face to face into an enemy who will either alert everyone, shoot your man or both.

In addition to using spotters to help you see ahead you will have a variety of silent kill options, such as sneaking up behind an enemy and grabbing their mouth as you stick your knife between their back ribs into their lungs, or grabbing them from around a corner and cutting them through the throat and stabbing backwards into the back of the neck. You can see a current animation of a frontal knife attack which would be performed on a surprised enemy who just rounded a corner where your man comes up with his knife through the enemies neck then wraps the enemy into a headlock and pulls up to break his neck.

A wireframe of a frontal take-down. Imagine the kneeling soldier has been surprised by the walking solder (perhaps he just rounded a corner) and now has to take him down using only his knife. This level of detailed animation is present in the game.

A lot of what we are trying to provide is attention to detail in all the aspects that we can, to again, provide more of a feeling like its your choices and your actions matter.

For experience in the matters above, I was trained in the Marines as well as various martial arts over the years and I have been lucky enough to find not only a great artist but one that has over 10 years in extensive practice of Ninjitsu which makes it easy for both of us to discuss different moves knowledgeably and come up with interesting animations.

The Wargamer: Could you give an example of a mission which is currently in the game?

Currently in our Alpha demo we have two mission objectives, you have to extract (take hostage) an enemy scientist and destroy a prototype tank that he developed. There was actually a bit more to this, including being able to steal the tank and drive it around shooting things, but we had some time limitations with the GDC (Game Developers Conference) that just finished.

Since I love bonus points, the tank option can actually be achieved in a couple of different ways, which basically come down to using a distraction to get the enemies to look somewhere else as you run a unit in, sneaking in through a building next to the tank and then crawling out the window to place the charges, sneaking up by silently killing one of the guards and dragging his body off to hide it, then placing the charges and finally just rushing it with all your men and strong arming your way in.

The tank prototype in the alpha mission.

The Wargamer: Could you please tell the reader about any real-life military experience you have and how this training and experience has influenced the game and your aims in creating it?

Well like I said just a bit ago I was in the Marines, so I have a good deal of understanding how our current military system works, as well as information I've collected from talking to other more experienced Marines, such as some retired Force Recon men and some other various branches of the military. I also have spent a good deal of time learning and understanding different warfare tactics and events that happened over history, although I will say I am definitely more of a hands on person than a factoid one, but I generally have a yearning for any information on it I can.

I think the biggest, most accessible way that all of this has influenced how VT will turn out is just in my ability to understand the options of any situation and then making those options available to the player. From what I've seen, this seems to be the biggest downfall in other games I've played where I felt too constricted, it didn't seem like the designer either understood that there could be gameplay provided by allowing certain things, or else they just decided not to provide them. I want to remedy that situation in VT and bring, what I believe will be a revolutionary step forward in how we see tactical games made now.

The Wargamer: What kinds of missions will the player be exposed to when playing Veiled Threat? (Pilot rescue could be a cool one to do given its topicality ;-) ).

Certainly, rescuing people, extracting people, assassinating people, doing reconnaissance, getting information out of someone/somewhere, destroying things, stopping something from happening, protecting something from being damaged, creating a faux attack. We want to run the gauntlet of variety in missions, cause variety is the spice of life. :)

Oh, there will be a LOT of maps and basically all the terrain types we can think of (suggestions welcome too), some of which will be: jungle areas (of varying types for different world locales), dessert areas, urban areas (of various wealth/pop. density), ships, oil platforms, forest areas, arctic areas, non-arctic areas in snow, mountainous areas, valleys, etc.

We want to provide not only additional visual aspects by changing maps but also ways of HOW to play on them. An obvious one would be that in arctic maps you leave foot prints, so enemies may follow them (unless they look normal, and very treaded). Foot prints coming one-way from out of nowhere will possible cause an alert etc, crawl prints definitely will.

There are obviously more places for traps like tripwires and places to hide right next to an enemy in the thick of a jungle, and in a valley or mountainous type of terrain you may be able to use height differences as an advantage.

Your men emerge from the jungle ready to wreak havoc.

Notice the different types of tracks left by walking and crawling soldiers.

Basically its the freedom of movement and choice that I want all of VT to be dripping with. I don't think it is so much of a problem to avoid them, because naturally artificial barriers to play don't come up, designers have to think them up, that's why they are artificial. ;)

Actually, the real problem with my way is figuring out how to do everything and how to make it fit in memory. Its easy to say "we'll do everything in existence", but that isn't possible to implement. So with my way I am doing everything relevant to the maps and player, which is still taking quite a bit of time and resources but I am positive the result will be worth it!

Yes, you can play basically at many different levels, just like you could in physically approaching the same situation. The enemy however will cope with your methods and try to stop you from continuing with them so you will be forced to continuously update your playing style based on what you've done before.

For instance if you try to stay hidden and not set off an alarm and then kill off enemies silently as they patrol, the computer will start putting 2 or more man teams walking patrols, that way you can't easily ambush them silently. If you are making it through levels not killing anyone OR being detected, they will spread out single man groups more to cover more areas to try and spot you.

If you try to attack from afar using snipers to pin enemies into buildings to accomplish the mission, they will start shooting out mortars to try to hit you and will also try to rush you with men and preventively next time they will send our far reaching patrols to try to stop you from being able to set up snipers and get to them faster if they hear them (same with long distance grenadiers).

Here a sniper inside the building draws a bead on yet another victim ;-)

You can also use explosives and booby traps, and the enemy will deal with these in different ways as well.

You lose! ;-).

Commands can be pre-ordered and then triggered by either pressing a button or by an event such as "when the X blows up do sequence Y", so that you can be more of a leader than a button clicker to getting your men to do things.

One of my ultimate goals is to be able to let you pre-plan and execute an ENTIRE mission without doing ANYTHING in the actual mission at all, besides giving pre-planned orders. This means you could think out scenarios for everything and then just execute them without actually having to issue new orders in the mission.

There will be different ways of rating your playing style, leadership and commando style presence, the more you give pre-ordered commands that work, the higher your leadership points, the more you get down and give real time orders, the higher your commando points. This way you can achieve high ranks at both, neither being necessarily better than the other, just different styles of play.

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