C&C Inside Interview (English) - 5/2/05
German version Here

Hi Edan Dover, thank you for spending your time in this interview. At first I would like you to present you and your projects.
Well to say a bit about myself, I’m a junior in high school in New York, I’m a musician & composer, a web designer, and founder and leader of Star Wars mod for C&C Generals Zero Hour, Star Wars: Imperial Assault. My modding projects are limited to Imperial Assault, it occupies plenty of my time =).

Have you ever worked on other mod projects before Imperial Assault, maybe for other games?
Nope, I came into Imperial Assault with an idea, a liking for the game, and an interest in modding, nothing else. I do not have any other modding experience outside of Imperial Assault, and quite frankly, I’m not a huge video-game player. While I keep up to date on the latest games, I don’t play too many.

How did you came to the idea to take Star Wars as mod scenario? Are you just a hopeless fanatic and come to the idea by yourself or was it another Game (Star Wars: Battlegrounds) or Mod (C&C Meets Star Wars, Renegade: A new Hope) that inspired you?
I wouldn’t say I’m a Star Wars “fanatic”, but I do love Star Wars. My inspiration was gathered from an exploration of the C&C community in attempt to find more information about the soon-coming-out Zero Hour. Visiting sites like CNCDEN regularly, I learned how to start making maps for Zero Hour, and submitted them to sites. When I saw Lion posting mod news, I started investigating them—before I did not even know what a mod was. In addition, I wanted to design a website for the C&C Community, so starting this mod seemed like the perfect opportunity. I knew it would be a lot of work, but I had no idea it would impact the community and my life to the level it has and development would continue over 1.5 years later.

Because of Empire at War you try to get your mod completed as quickly as you can and you even joined the Derelict Studios for this plan. Aren’t you afraid that this could be bad for the quality of the mod?
When we (the IA team) learned about EaW, while we were excited to here a Star Wars RPG finally being developed, it was also frustrating to hear—especially when we started seeing screenshots. Our mod was around before the creation of Petroglyph studios, and it seemed unfair that they could take a name like “Empire at War”, almost the same as “Imperial Assault”, and put all the people who made the C&C games in the staff. While it is frustrating, I’m still extremely excited to play EaW and know that Imperial Assault will be very different from EaW. In addition, IA is a mod of the C&C Community, and because of that I don’t feel the development of other games will diminish our potential. Like I’ve said countless times before, I’m going to continue with IA to the very end, regardless of the development of other games.

The Demo-Level of your campaign was quiet hard for the first mission of the first campaign. Do you plan to make a campain for advanced players and pros?
Haha, you have some practicing to do =). I’m not sure at this point exactly how difficult the campaigns will be (as they have not been created yet), but I do know that they will logically increase in difficulty as you advance through them, and I assure you they will not be a walk in the park like previous ZH missions have been.

Your balance seems to be like in Red Alert 1, where the allies had weaker units and needed to fight smart against the soviet superiority. Was that your plan when you started the mod or did it just result from the technology?
We came to this mod with a very detailed concept design, and our excellent concept designers have correctly predicted many of these possible issues, including the inferiority of Rebel technology. We came into the mod knowing that Rebels would be significantly inferior to the Empire in technology, but we solved this by agreeing that strategy and micromanagement would allow the Rebels to prevail. As a result, we’ve made the assumption that while less experienced players will be best with the Empire due to its brute strength, more advanced players will see the advantages of the Rebel Alliance as they become more experienced playing the mod. In addition, Rebels will be much more effective at rushing, especially with the ability to put infantry on their cargo skiffs (supply-gathering vehicles). All final balancing will be done when we get to the beta stage.

In the final version you plan to integrate the Old Republic and the Separatists in the game. May you tell us some details about this sides and in which version we will be able to play them?
The Old Republic and the Separatists were added to our mod about 6 months after development when we were offered some clone-war-era models and skins. While the concept has been fully written up for them, and we do have many of their models and skins, we have not begun adding them to our code due to our effort to get the Rebel Alliance and Empire completed first.

Could Episode III cause that you have to change some of the ideas of this two sides?
Definitely, especially for the clone-war factions. We’ll impliment those ideas we see fit to help enhance our mod.

You have plans to convert the planets from the movies to the game as maps. Don’t you sometimes have problems, because the groundtextures and the style of graphics in generals doesn’t fit to this?
Tibmaker got us a bunch of new textures to add to those in Zero Hour (including death star textures), however, unfortunately, there is a limit on how many textures there the engine can handle, so we’ve had to cut a lot of them out. Nonetheless, with experimental lighting, the ZH textures, larger trees, new civilian structures, and several new textures, we have been thus far successful in making our maps appear to be part of the Star Wars Universe.

Aren’t you afraid that LucasArts will stop the project someday?
We’ve considered that a lot, and we’ve decided that although the possibility always is there, we cannot let it stop us from celebrating the Star Wars universe and continuing construction on our mod.

Is there something you would like to say to the community?
I’d like to encourage everyone to visit our site if you haven’t already, www.imperialassault.com, download our alpha, and say hello on our forums. Thanks for your continued support and thanks to CnC-Inside for the interview! And yes—we will put together a German version for our final releases. Thanks again.