The making of the game
Remixed Expansions
May 2005
After the final update for Gladiator Trials was released I found myself suddenly wishing to continue the game through an expansion pack, so in May 2005 "Gladiator Trials: Dark Times" was born. It was to be done in 6 months and contain many new features including:
7 new buildings - Winery, Bakery, Alchemy, Teasury, Armorer, Well and a Market place
A whole new campaign - Spanning 10 scenarios
Improved Interface - Being able to pick up swords and dip them into barrels at the alchemy
Multiplayer (as mentioned in the previous chapter)
For an expansion pack it was quite a list of enhancements, the game stayed in the design phase for many months due to my lack of free time. At one stage in late 2005 I decided to instead try and create a remake of Gladiator Trials using C++/OpenGL to allow for effects and features that simply weren't possible in Revolution. It was to be called "Gladiator Trials: Remix", but never really got beyond a couple dozen lines of code.
It wasn't until after giving up on the remix that I decided to go back to trying out the expansion I had been designing. There were plently of neat features I wished to include, many of which failed to go beyond the design stages and others that made GTII the game it is today. The balancing was at first designed to be handled dynamically, with the game calculating the levels of each gladiator and adjusting the arena to suit the player's skill and his gladiator's levels. I read some interesting discussons about dynamic difficulty and decided later on to go with a set maximum level for each scenario.
Dark Times introduced the unique appearance of gladiators, it was slightly more combinations at first with skin color, tattoos and heads being randomized. The idea of different hair styles was dropped after realizing you couldn't see a gladiator's head when he wore armor. A gladiator in full plate armor without a helmet just didn't make sense.
An early design choice was to have a violent arena, leaving blood trails and hacked limbs around the place. I realized the potential negative side to this, and planned for a password protected option to turn this feature off. Once the time came to add this, the excess artwork and the benefit of this feature both weighed agianst including it in the final game.
