After taking a long shot in my previous Strategy and Wargaming News by asking you if you had any contact information on the of The Troop, it was Tom from Giant Flame himself who reached out to me and agreed to an interview about the team’s World War II turn-based wargame, The Troop. Read the whole thing. I’ll bet with you that you won’t see coming what are the five games Tom would take with himself to a lonely island to play forever.

What’s Giant Flame’s history?

The Giant Flame team was put together specifically to make The Troop. We have prior experience working together for years on a lot of projects but decided to put a name on it for this one.

Have you worked on previous games before?

We have worked on a lot of projects over the years, some games, some not. But this was the first time we have properly committed to making a game just because we wanted to make it. It is also the largest game project we have ever undertaken.

How did the Troop come to be, and what games inspired it?

The game is quite obviously inspired by tabletop wargaming in the ASL/Bolt Action/Flames of War style, as well as video game classics like Steel Panthers, The Close Combat Series and even Combat Mission.  We had a vision for a turn-based game specifically; something where the player can control the pace and it is all about careful thought, not speed clicking.

What motivated you to start working on it?

The game began as a side project technical exercise to help keep up to date with Unity’s latest features and was originally very small in scope. But it grew, as these things tend to, and we quickly decided it had more potential so we put together a demo and showed it to a few people. The response was so positive we decided to create an initial batch of 13 levels and see if they could find a home in the WW2 wargaming community. We made the game available in Early Access (at full price!) without telling a soul, just to see what would happen. To my amazement, people quickly found the game and began giving us huge amounts of feedback. It grew from there.

The Troop is certainly a labour of love for World War 2. What came first? The interest in the conflict, or the love of gaming?

Interest in WW2 for sure. I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by it. I read a lot of memoirs and AARs from Normandy and with every anecdote I kept thinking “Could that happen in our game, could we make it so that could happen? Would it be fun?”

Can we expect more from The Troop in the following years, with things like Mission Packs or DLCs?

We have no idea yet what will happen moving forward. I’d love to do some DLC (we have thought about it a lot) and there are some extra features we know the community would love, but we cannot commit to anything yet. There are only 3 of us, we have no publisher to rely on and funded the project entirely ourselves. Right now we’re just over the moon that we managed to get it to full release in the state we wanted.

What are your favourite games? And what other gaming genres and franchises do you enjoy playing?

Weirdly I rarely play war-games in my downtime now. I love shooters, as well as open-world games where I can truly develop my own unique character. I actually play more Fortnite these days than any other game, mainly because I have friends with similar schedules who will play with me and it is a bit like being in the pub. James (who did some of the German faction VO work in the game) and I play most weeks and invariably get destroyed. I used to very much love the XCOM games, both original and modern… perhaps that really cemented the appeal of turn-based play. The old Close Combat games will forever have a place in my heart.

Every game developer I interview has to face the gauntlet and answer this question: you’re only allowed to pick 5 games to play forever, what games would you choose and why?

• Half-Life (The original) – I can play this game again every few years and it never fails to make me happy.
• Skyrim – just so big!
• Fortnite – as long as I still have friends with whom to play!
• Arma 3 – I have actually hardly played this but I know how much of a wonderful sandbox it would provide. I spent countless hours making levels for the original Operation Flashpoint.
• Battlefield 3/4 – classic mass multiplayer, never gets old.

Any message for fans of the game or people on the fence about buying The Troop?

Play the demo. We have updated it to include a full-sized mission now in addition to the early teaser levels, I think you’ll know if it is for you. If you are still unsure one way or another, hop onto the Steam community discussion board and ask whatever questions you have. The community there are super helpful and really knows the game well. A lot of them have over 1000 hours in the game and some more than 2000.

The Troop will launch out of Early Access on the 10th of October. The game has been in Early Access for nearly two years now and has come a long way since.

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