Posted 7/1/2008 at 10:03 AM By GamingShogun

We got the chance to interview Firefly Studios' Simon Bradbury, Lead Design on Stronghold Crusader Extreme. Stronghold Crusader Extreme is a new edition of the cult-classic real-time strategy and castle builder with an increased unit cap as well as new challenges to test player's metal. You can find our review of the game here.

GS – So, tell us a little bit of the reasons behind Stronghold Crusader Extreme’s development. Why create an additional expansion to such an old, albeit classic, title?

SB – It is old, but it is still a hugely popular title, with thousands of new people playing it every month, and the single biggest request we have had from fans, is can we have more Crusader! Whilst we are not quite ready to start on Crusader2 yet, we felt we had a great opportunity to add more life into the series with a hardcore extension to game play.

GS – How many people worked on this edition of Stronghold Crusader?

SB – 5 core people, with another 5 touching it in various ways.

GS – Many people criticize the graphics of Stronghold Crusader Extreme. Personally, we love hand-drawn sprites. However, our issue was with the tearing and pixilation of those sprites on larger displays. Why were the graphics not overhauled in SCE?

SB – Thank you, an awful lot of work and attention went into creating those graphics and the animations of daily life that they show and its nice for the guys to be appreciated! The reason we haven’t change the graphics engine is basically so that we can get our huge numbers of troops on screen. We use highly optimized, assembly coded routines to draw them and as CPU speed have exploded over the last 7 years, we are now able to take advantage of that improvement.

GS – Stronghold Crusader Extreme features a unit cap of 10,000. We were wondering if you guys tested it with an even larger unit cap? If so, where did the game start slowing down too much to be playable?

SB - Given that all the work is in fact done on the CPU it really depends on your processor. We have had 20000 running on a dev machine here, but set the limit at 10k to allow older machines to run the game well . Once we got beyond 20K we found that the AI’s path finding started to become a bit of an issue!

GS – Will Firefly Studios be appearing at the E3 expo this year exhibiting anything?

SB – Yes we will! We will be showing of our new baby which is ‘Dungeon Hero’ (see below!)

GS – What other upcoming titles are being worked on by Firefly Studios?

SB - We are working on Dungeon Hero, which is a 3rd person action title and so - something of a departure for us! We have always liked dungeons (almost as much as castles!) and wanted to put some of that passion into our very own dungeon environment. What I think will be different about ‘Dungeon Hero’ (outside of some fresh combat ideas) is that we wanted to bring a little of Stronghold into the dungeon. We wanted to breathe a lot of life into what is often a very sterile environment. So whilst we may not have woodcutters(actually we do!) - we do have goblin cheese makers, goblin resources , goblin storage areas and a sense that the dungeon is full of life and (in a strange way) real!

GS – Is there anything new you can tell us regarding Stronghold 3?

SB – Well we certainly want to do it! And we have a very clear idea as to its look and feel. But no announcements just yet…!

GS – And finally, is there anything you would like our readers to know?

SB - When (If!) you start to get our extreme trails beat. You might want to go to our website and see if you score is good enough to submit, as we are going to be building a comprehensive table of the hardcore extreme players out there!

We would like to thank Simon Bradbury, Firefly Studios, and the Gamecock Media Group for making this interview possible!