Legend of the Eagles: Attack on H3
- Ehsan Tabesh
- Sep 25, 2019
- 2 min read
Legend of the Eagles: Attack on H3 is a combat flight game with an epic historical story. It's about one of the most significant aerial operations throughout history in 1981, during the Iran-Iraq war. The operation was a surprising assault launched by 8 Iranian F-4 phantoms on three far-fetched Iraqi air-bases called the "H3 air-bases" and involved some extremely sophisticated planning. This operation took about five hours long, involving four aerial refuelings during the flight and flying about 1000 kilometers in absolute radio silence.
I worked on this project during my military service (conscription) in a game development center based in the Army Air Force of Iran. Since the operation was generally a surprise attack, most of the route was flown in safe areas by the pilots to avoid combat, and apart from the bombing of H3 air-bases, there was no direct combat included, and that's not ideal for a combat flight game. Therefore, we at the development team decided to include other past missions done by the pilots of the main operation, as different levels into the game, and only leave the final bombing of H3 air-bases as the final level.
I designed all of the levels in the game, each one representing one of the missions mentioned above. Since designing levels for flight games is a bit different than for other genres, due to the player's (almost) infinite area of movement, I learned many things in the process.
First, I spent a considerable amount of time studying and researching through biography resources to find several suitable missions to include as different game levels. Then I worked on each level separately, modified them, adding some other missions to make them long and engaging enough to be implemented into the game. After that, I drew top-down layouts based on the mission routes and other elements of each level, and then I created gray box levels in the Unity engine accordingly. There, I defined an invisible box for each level, that the player could not go across, based on the assumptions I had about the player's area of movement around every mission.
Here are some of the top-down layouts for levels of the game:
In different stages of the project's development, I co-designed and balanced various systems such as different control schemes, camera movement, weapons, and AI behavior trees. For each item, we analyzed different reference games such as Ace Combat series and estimated all the features we needed for our game. Then we created some tools in the game engine for each system, which I used to balance the features while I was testing the game.
I also did much of the narrative design, story development, and screenwriting for the cutscenes and trailers of the game. Each level starts with a motion comic cutscene in which a short story about the pilot of that particular mission is narrated, so that the player gets to know all the pilots before the main operation (final level) starts. The stories in these cutscenes are mostly based on truth and on the real characteristics of the pilots. The levels and their cutscenes were then connected together by the main storyline of the game in which the pilots were getting ready for the big operation in a briefing room.
Watch the cinematic trailer:
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