Dog Days: Behind the Houndsmen

The Houndsmen charged into battle alongside their loyal canine companions in Season X: Highlanders as the game’s first animal-handling unit. But how were hunter and man’s best friend created?

Anton Mamihonov, Creative Director at Booming Tech, sat down with us to reveal the behind-the-scenes workings of the Houndsmen, from animating the dogs to balancing a two-pronged unit.

Why did you choose Deerhounds as the hunting dog for the Houndsmen unit?

Our Houndsmen are aged, lone, precise hunters, and their hounds perfectly fit such a personality. The Deerhound breed’s body traits also represent the hit-and-run gameplay we were aiming for; the breed is strongly associated with Great Britain as well.

Were other breeds of dog considered?

Actually, yes – Mastiffs could have become the Houndsmen’s breed of choice. Although, they represent a heavier, more aggressive personality, and this aggression wouldn’t combine with the personality and characters of archers we were hoping to open to our players.

Maybe Mastiffs will see their time in the future but with a different gameplay style; who knows?

Talk us through the process of animating the dogs.

We had a really nice partnership with an outsource studio that, fortunately for us, took on the majority of tasks in regard to basic animations. The problem was though, that the breed used for those sessions was a German Shepherd – and their skeleton structure is completely different from deerhounds. Our team had to add around 40% of the moves and adjust the existing ones to our needs. It was the first time we worked with animal animations, and some challenges obviously appeared in regard to how the bones were positioned during movements, their relative positions, and so on. But we also had a lot of fun during the process and hope to use this experience in upcoming projects.

How did you begin to make the fur?

Chaos Engine has an extremely scalable and customisable technology, so our graphics rendering team made a step forward in the direction of processing and rendering animal fur for Highlanders. We are excited to see many more new graphical improvements of various aspects in 2022.

What were the challenges you faced when implementing and balancing the first-ever unit that not only had people in but animals too (besides horses)?

It was a fun challenge indeed. It is the first unit with two distinguished entities; two types with absolutely different gameplay of their own. We went through a few ideas, including Mastiffs guarding archers, applying knock-back effects with charge, or being tanky and heavy. In the end, though, it didn’t feel dynamic or fun enough. We gave high accuracy to archers to snipe heroes, reduced their damage, gave bleed [to the hounds], and made Deerhounds a squishy hit-and-run force that has to be positioned on flanks to attack enemies from behind, or chase then quickly retreat themselves. The Houndsmen offer many possibilities and fun gameplay if players decide to micro-manage this unit and position it well.

I think that Conqueror’s Blade currently has too many units of general-purpose jack of all trades, and we need more specialist units with distinguished strengths and weaknesses to stimulate more tactical team cooperation and fun gameplay. It is a longer-term goal, though, and will demand some time to achieve.

Are there plans to add more animal-handling units in the future?

Bears, maybe? Dragons? Just kidding, of course. I think that we’re going to take a pause from dogs for some time, and let’s think together with players what our options are (share your thoughts on social media and Discord!).