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Only Master Strategists will prevail in Battleplans. Coming to Android soon.

Battleplans is a world full of bold colors, rich characters and masterful strategy techniques woven together into a game that works exceedingly well on your mobile device. Is it ready for release…almost. Mathieu Castelli and the team at C4M Productions wants to release the game when it is ready. A beautiful and challenging game like this takes time, but it will be worth the wait.

I enjoy strategy games. Typically, the harder the game, the better the game. In the early build of Battleplans that I played, the difficulty ramped up a little more quickly than I expected, but this wasn’t a bad thing. As with most games that are in development, there are balancing tests that the game must go through before it is pushed out to the public. What I can say about this game is that is extremely polished and a wonder to behold.  The implementation of controlling your troops is fantastic. If you enjoyed playing Ankama’s Tactile Wars, you will most certainly enjoy playing Battleplans. Both games burst with color and require the skills of a war general, when it comes to strategy. What is even better is that Battleplans has great depth, while at the same time, not being complicated in game play. It is hard to mix the two of those, but I think C4M Productions is headed in the right direction.

When I spoke with Mr. Castelli, the CEO of C4M Productions, he summed up the game for me in a few short sentences. “The synopsis is simple: conquer territories in real time battles, and defend them with tactical plans. Craft your perfect squads lineup by combining uniquely skilled heroes and troops. Start with small skirmishes and reach the competitive skill based end game with 100 units on both sides.”

If you haven’t heard of C4M, maybe you have heard of Tekken Card Tournament. C4M worked on that game, which was published by Bandai Namco. The team chose to go a different route after completing that game, which lead them to the idea of Battleplans.

“After the exciting success of Tekken Card Tournament, C4M had enough self-confidence to try something different in the strategy genre on mobile. We thought that the mobile world had seen enough TD’s (Tower Defense) and its ‘base raids’ variants. Mobile devices had become powerful enough to reach 200 unit battles with a non-specialized engine like Unity.

Also Tekken Card Tournament taught us the difficulties of good matchmaking in real-time, and the issues of real-time syncing of 200 units scared us to death, so we wanted something asynchronous. Finally, we felt that RTS (Real-Time Strategy) battles were missing on mobile. Sure, there were a few tries like Autumn Dynasty, but nothing ‘big.’

One day late in 2013, we put all of this on the table, and ended up with a simple question. How do you do asynchronous RTS? One of the team answered simply, you make a plan for the defense. We started everything from that.” – Mathieu Castelli

C4M has been using three programs primarily to create Battleplans and they are Unity 3D, Ruby (Server) and Blender (3d Assets). It doesn’t happen as much, but some game developers still overlook Android. Mathieu said that they noticed that most of their friends were evenly split in their use of Android/iOS devices, so it made perfect sense to create a game for both.

I asked Mathieu about getting into the game industry. Would it be difficult for someone to get into the industry that maybe is an artist, but has no coding experience. “It’s hard to generalize on the chance of non-coders getting into the industry. I’ll put it this way: It’s all about convincing people. If you can’t code, you have one less layer of convincing (interaction). If you can’t draw, another layer goes (visuals). But, if you are passionate and convincing, you can make with words and doodles.”

“If you look at the Battleplans team, we all learned the trade at C4M, when we started doing feature phone work for titles ten years ago. We’ve worked all those ten years together. The animator was nineteen, the game designer was twenty-one, etc. I was the oldest at thirty. So our background is C4M and it has been a crazy ride working on mobile games and apps for the past ten years. My first game was on Japanese handsets.”

Battleplans Features:

  • Attack the mysterious Skulls and other players to reclaim your kingdom in this refreshing deep real-time strategy game. Defend your territories from rivals with your own cunningly crafted battle plans. Experiment with Heroes and Troops to find the line-up that suits your style and helps you outsmart your enemies!
  • Play with other players – crush their defense plans, and watch their attacks on yours.
  • Win League wars – Conquer territories then hold them to extract precious resources.
  • Campaign the Skulls – Unlock new units from chieftains in escalating  encounters.
  • Hone your skills – Perfect your master of each unique Hero ability
  • Build your army – Scale-up from skirmishes to full scale battles.
  • Never before was a minute of battle so intensely tactical.

Battleplans is currently in soft-launch in Canada and Thailand. They hope to open the game to more areas soon. If you enjoy strategy games with unique characters and plenty of battles to take on, you should be on the lookout for Battleplans. It is a refreshing take on the strategy genre and once it is released, you will get lost in the fantastic world that C4M Productions has created. Once the release date for the game is confirmed, we will update this article. In the meantime, check out the initial trailer for Battleplans. Do you fancy yourself a master strategist?

 

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