Making Gears Tactics: News Wrap Up

Can you believe it’s been 4 months since Gears Tactics was released? We’ve loved seeing your streams, videos, fan art, reviews, and comments in that time, it’s been incredibly humbling for us all to see and hear how much you’ve all enjoyed Gears Tactics.

Over those 4 months, we’ve also been talking about how we made Gears Tactics. We do our best to share these articles and talks as they crop us, but we thought we’d collate some of them into a news post for those who are interested in the nitty-gritty details of game development.

Destroyed Beauty: Texturing Gears Tactics

The first article we wanted to highlight was this interview with Substance, where a handful of our artists talked with the team there about our advanced texturing workflow and how it allowed us to make the decaying world of Gears Tactics as beautiful and gritty as it is.

When Art Meets Scalability

Back in May, our Technical Art Director Raouf Bejaoui and The Coalition’s Technical Director Cam McRae penned an article for Gamasutra about how Gears Tactics was optimised for a range of PC hardware, removing the barrier to entry as the title was set to launch on XBOX Game Pass for PC.

This piece is fascinating in its detail but, if you’re anything like me, you might need a couple of re-reads to get your head around some of the complexities of hardware optimisation.

How Splash Damage Built Efficient Material Systems for Gears Tactics

More recently, Raouf Bejaoui (Tech Art Director) and one of the Senior Tech Artists on Gears Tactics, Matthijs Verkuijlen, sat down with 80.lv to discuss the Climate Aware Material and Temperate Aware Material systems that they created for Gears Tactics that allowed our artists to control the level of wetness, water accumulation, burning and other effects within the game.

This article includes some videos to demonstrate these systems in action and is well worth a read for anyone interested in Tech Art or game development more generally.

Make It Fast: Simultaneous AI Actions in Gears Tactics

Last, but by no means least, is ‘Make It Fast: Simultaneous AI Actions in Gears Tactics,’ a talk by our own Matthias Siemonsmeier about some of the challenges in designing the AI system in Gears Tactics. We knew it had to facilitate fast and simultaneous enemy turns while never being confusing for our players, while still channeling what Gears and strategy fans love; high kill counts and tough, solvable challenges.

We’ll be sure to showcase more articles as they happen, so keep an eye on our Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channels for more.