C3 Exclusive Interview | CDV on Panzer DS and Nintendo Wii Support

Mario Kroll: I started at CDV as an Associate Producer and PR Coordinator about two years ago. I now serve as Director of Marketing and Public Relations for North America. I previously was the founder of Wargamer.com, a large online website dedicated to covering military and strategy games and related content.

I have worked on and with all of the products CDV has published in the past two years, starting with Codename: Panzers, Phase One up to the upcoming Panzer Tactics DS and War Front: Turning Point. Rather than just a company spokesperson, I'm an avid gamer and am passionate about our games and, along with others on my team, provide a lot of suggestions and tweak ideas for the games we make.

The heavy lifting, of course, is all done by our excellent producers, designers and developers. In this case, the producer is CDV's veteran Guido Eickmayer; the developer is Vienna, Austria based Sproing. Matthias "Sidi" Siedlaczek, a seasoned gamer and researcher that formerly worked for Wings Simulations (the makers of Panzer Elite) helped polish the game as senior design consultant, while the lead designer is Sproing's Christoph Quas, a veteran gamer whose passion for both strategy games and Nintendo will be recognizable in the game.

C3: What was the reasoning behind choosing the Nintendo DS for Panzer Tactics?

MK: There are many reasons. But ultimately it comes down to accessibility and programmability. The Nintendo DS is the richest and most suitable of the handheld devices out there. The breadth of means for interacting with the Nintendo DS, including the touch screen and the dual screens simply make it an ideal platform for designing a compact but significant turn-based strategy game.

C3: A lot of effort seems to have gone into making your games as historically accurate as possible, are there actually war enthusiasts amongst the team or was it merely a process required for creating a realistic experience for the game?

MK: The whole team consists of folks that have played most of the old SSI titles and, as I said in the introduction, contributed to a number of key World War II products. We prefer our games historical. Plus, there is no other title on the Nintendo DS at present that sticks to history. We think that makes Panzer Tactics DS a unique offering.

C3: How many man hours went into researching all the various information sources to make your games as historically correct as it is? And how long has the game actually been in development?

MK: From design to current pre-alpha stage, the game has been in development for roughly one year. It's been a labour of love for the designer and the development team, so they want to make sure they get everything right, and include everything that's possible, or at least important, despite the constraints of the handheld.

C3: Were there any units you wished to include but have not made it into the final game? And have there been any other restrictions, be it from the hardware of in the form of time constraints?

MK: Originally there were more than 350 units on the drawing board. We reduced this to roughly 150 unique units for two primary reasons. The constraints of the Nintendo DS screen makes it very hard to differentiate that many different units visually. Further, and perhaps more importantly, since this game is to appeal to both the more serious war gamer and the casual gamer, such as Advance War DS fans, we needed to make sure each unit truly was noticeably different from the others.

For example, if we allowed the player to have both a Panzer IIIG and IIIH as unit choices, it would become much more difficult to clearly explain how they are different and then to abstract that into gameplay impacting results. Instead, we've devised each unit type, such as tanks, into three categories: light, medium and heavy. The three units available will be upgraded as in-game time advances, so early in the war you might have