No. 4 - Sound or “Hey, we should have that, shouldn’t we?”

Kostas Datsos, Developer at Bytro since 2016 and mostly working on the beloved CoW

"Working in game development is always a story of sacrifices. You never have the time to get all the features you want and even the features you get miss some of the fancy stuff you wanted to add.

The history of sound in CoW is still a bit more complicated. Sound was always something which made the short lists of every planning session we had. Even before I joined there were so many google docs with concrete game design proposals, you just cannot imagine it.

Not only that, but it was really the one thing all stakeholders could agree on we should definitely add to the game:
Game team: check
Management: check
Marketing: double check
Players: check. (Yeah not all of you, we know)

Still, it always fell short. In times when all features need to be measurable to see if they are successful, sound never was or will be. So when the discussion came: “Hey, let's improve our retention and introduce feature ABC” or “should we finally work on sound?” Of course we went with feature ABC every time.

But then in 2016 Dorado, our sister company, wanted to do a game on our engine - et voilà: Sound was one thing they wanted from the beginning for their game.
A lucky coincidence for CoW was that I did the sound implementation for Dorado back then and when I reunited with the CoW team again in 2019 I had all the knowledge to implement a sound solution quickly. Finally we had the “Go” from the team to bring our beloved sound to Call of War. We even had time to add new features to it, like ambient sounds and dynamic volume adjustments.

PS: Not to mention the 6 months it took us to get the music done for the game, but that's another story ;)”