Xavier Agulló

As users were acquiring smartphones, the era of java games started its sunset. Gameloft New York needed to transition into 3D games and it was decided we would work on an arcade-style combat flight simulation for the iPhone. That’s how “Star Battalion” was born.

Flight games offer some characteristics that make it an ideal choice for a small team. First, you don’t need character animations since the gameplay involves mostly vehicles. And second, flying in open locations with extensive sky boxes, allowed to reduce the poly-count and alleviate the frame rate. On the other side we were working with early, very unstable, versions of proprietary tools (...forget about Unity!) and just painting objects on screen was a real challenge for devs.

The creative direction came from Gameloft headquarters in Paris. And this involved the concept art for ships and characters, same as the main story outline. Later on, reviews slammed us for being a cheap knockoff of “Star Wars”. However, I must admit my alternate proposal (Main characters were dead ace pilots, wielded into space-coffin-machine-ships) was disturbing and definitely not mainstream.

The game involved a lot of cool design tricks to keep the dogfight fun. Like auto-targeting, an excellent missile locking system or the subtle scaling of enemy sizes to prevent them disappearing or becoming too small in the distance. The game’s default controls were based on the Gyroscope, now considered a gimmick but all the rage back then. I’m also proud of the different scenarios we had in the game, including a mission in the scrapyard remains of a big battle, or escaping an enemy base with a captured ship.

Reviews were mixed and ranged from excellent (SlideToPlay) to mediocre (IGN) …a common curse for a genre that is divisive even on console/PC. Commercially, the game was NOT a success either but it was considered an accomplishment for the studio for transitioning smoothly into bigger scale projects in 3D.