A day one interview for this turn-based tactical air combat title
On October 30th, 2024, Scramble: Battle of Britain released into early access. Ever since I first heard about the game, it took me a little while to sit back and fully wrap my head around the concept: turn based air combat. When you envision air combat, you think about a flurry of aircraft climbing, diving and turning endlessly in the sky. The humans flying them engaged in dizzying, spinning combat where decisions made in a moment could result in death seconds later. Imagining air combat pausing and playing seems foreign, but my time with the Steam Next Fest demo convinced me that the concept is viable and quite enticing.
Something World War II is remembered for is the massive amount of sustained air combat on all fronts. The Battle of Britain, in particular, stands out because it was the first large-scale military campaign fought only by air forces. This is the historical setting that Scramble presents its tactical dogfighting game. When thinking of Slitherine games, names like Warhammer 40k, Starship Troopers and Field of Glory: Kingdoms come to mind. Turn based or real time strategy games are arguably what they are known for, so seeing a turn based tactical dogfighting game in their catalog is very interesting but not completely unthinkable.
Shortly before the release of Scramble, Aaron Mendoza with Skyward Flight Media reached out to Slitherine for an interview with Jon Coughlin, months after his Flight Sim Expo 2024 presentation.
Thanks joining me for an interview during the early access launch rush. I appreciate you making the time. Please introduce yourself.
I'm Jon Coughlin, the lead developer on Scramble. I joined Slitherine four years ago as the lead programmer for Scramble and I have been the lead developer for the past two and a half years.
Scramble has a rather unusual concept for this genre of games. How did the concept for this game start?
The original Scramble prototype was developed by James Carey with the goal of making aerial dogfighting accessible to players who may not be interested in picking up a real-time flight simulation like War Thunder. "Turn-based Dogfight" was the conceptual kernel that I believe he always had in mind, but he wanted Scramble to have the action and fluidity that video games are excellent at facilitating.
There have been turn-based dogfighting games before, but almost all of them discretize flight into chunks of maneuvers: half a loop, quarter roll. Scramble has always been interested in allowing players to pilot the airplane, so we simulate flight dynamics and we ask players to control aircraft in an analog control space; the result is 3D dogfights that map pretty well onto the chaos and tactics of their real-time counterparts.
There is inspiration from lots of turn-based games: the board game Star Wars: X-Wing has a similar analog play space that helped validate the concept, and the video games Toribash and Frozen Synapse were discussion points I remember from early in the project.
The pitch that has solidified throughout development is "an authentic dogfighting experience without the situational awareness or reflex constraints of real-time flight games." We want our player stories to mimic WWII pilot memoirs, and in that sense Scramble is more focused on the essence of piloting and machinery and the themes of the Battle of Britain than the historical replication or raw performance numbers of our modeled airplanes.
What were some of the largest hurdles to overcome during development?
It took us a long time to dial in the airplane controls. Flying airplanes can be hard, and maintaining orientation in 3D space can be hard, and in Scramble we ask you to do both but to also lock your airplane controls for the entirety of a turn: two and a half seconds. When flying an airplane in real-time, inputting a little bit of right roll will tilt your plane a little to the right. In Scramble, inputting a little bit of right roll will tilt your plane to the right for 2.3 seconds, and at the end of that time you might be upside down, so any additional control inputs you make might be inverted, and we were finding players got disoriented quickly.
We are shipping Scramble with a default control scheme called the Turn/Climb Assist; it couples pitch, roll, and yaw into two control axes: Turn and Climb. Under the hood, your Turn and Climb inputs are still being converted to pitch/roll/yaw, but this assist gets you 90% of the uncoupled control authority in a scheme that anybody can pick up and play. If you want your airplane to climb to the right you move your stick to climb/right and the coupling ensures that your airplane does what your brain expects.
The hardest technical hurdle has been the rewindable nature of Scramble. One core gameplay mechanic has always been the ability to rewind Scramble turns and matches at any moment to analyze and to see action you may have missed while the simulation executed. When we made the choice to make every gameplay feature of Scramble fully rewindable we also signed up for every gameplay feature to take 2x or 3x the development time. We have slowly built an architecture that is cutting development time of new features down, but there's a reason most video games only play forwards.
During my time with the Steam Next Fest June 2024 demo, my own mindset shifted quite a bit. While playing, I started viewing air combat more as a series of actions rather than a single event. I think the level of flight simulation in Scramble is overlooked because of the focus on the turn-based gameplay. How detailed is the flight model in game?
I think "a series of actions" actually maps directly onto the concept of the OODA loop, which I believe is still used to teach dogfighting tactics around the world. I think that every turn of Scramble is functionally a forced iteration of the OODA loop. There is no time pressure in Scramble, so if we carry that analogy forward Scramble nullifies the OODA loop discrepancy between players, but if you play Scramble with a turn-timer (probably a mechanic that will become optional for multiplayer matches) you are suddenly right back into OODA loop theory.
In terms of flight modeling depth, Scramble is a flight simulation with aerodynamics coefficients, asymmetry, multiple types of drag forces, phenomena like stall and control stiffening. Every damaged component an airframe accrues manipulates its overall flight envelope. We have subsystems like radiators and fuel tanks that feed your engines. These things can leak, explode, catch fire, and if your radiator dies your engine will become damaged as well.
Machinery is one of our design pillars. We want the airplanes to feel and behave like machines. Even the pilots behave like machines; tired pilots black out easier, blackout is dependent on the amount of blood in a pilot's head, and that blood decreases under positive G and increases under negative G.
We will be increasing the depth of our aerodynamics, damage modeling, and pilot physiology throughout Early Access, but we have a rich set of mechanics right now, and I think that everyone who picks Scramble up and invests a couple hours starts to connect with the fact that there is a solid simulation underpinning the gameplay.
Would players that have experience with combat flight games/simulators find that their knowledge of tactics translates well into Scramble?
Having experience with real-time flight games should complement your tactical competence in Scramble, but I think that Scramble is a much more tactical game than almost any real-time flight sim delivers. In real-time games you can't escape the impact reflexes and coordination have on performance, and you can't escape the disorientation and quick decision-making that lead toward the study of concepts like the OODA loop.
I think a lot of real-time flight sim pilots might be surprised to find out that their tactics are actually underdeveloped. Scramble is all tactics, and I actually think that combat flight sim fans might play some Scramble and develop some better tactics and see this enhance their performance in the real-time games.
At a minimum, playing a lot of Scramble has taught me to stop chasing enemies for prolonged turns when I fly in IL-2. It's also taught me to roll way more to keep myself unpredictable, rather than trying to purely outturn an enemy on my tail. Those are obvious lessons when you read them as text, but Scramble gives you so much time to analyze your maneuvers that I think those tactical lessons sink in more than they ever will playing a real-time game.
Scramble is a dogfighting classroom.
At the end of each sortie is a result screen that grades players actions with a five star system rating system. The graded categories include “Aircraft Shot Down”, “Aircraft Damaged”, "Pilots Survived" and" Bombers Deterred". Are there ways to get a high rating without shooting down every aircraft?
We rely on the attrition theme to drive our scoring mechanics, so we harshly penalize the player for losing airplanes, and we brutally punish the player for losing pilots. Your top priority should be to bring your pilots and airplanes home healthy. You'll always max your score by killing everything in the sky and keeping your airplanes pristine, but you can still score very high by keeping your aircraft clean and downing a small number of enemies.
There is so much gameplay left to be implemented throughout Early Access that scoring will continue to get tweaked up to our v1.0 launch, but we will always try to reinforce the theme of attrition in our scores.
While I do think the Instant Action, Mission and Random match modes were a good way to introduce people to the concept of the game, Squadron Leader seems to be the defining game mode. What are the dev team’s thoughts on how this game mode has turned out?
Players will notice that Squadron Leader is a separate button from Campaign, which is greyed out. Squadron Leader is not the Channel Defense Campaign feature. The campaign is still in development, and we will exit Early Access and consider Scramble: Battle of Britain v1.0 when our Channel Defense Campaign is complete, but Squadron Leader is a lightweight game mode where we are exploring the systems that will make up the building blocks of our campaign: squadron management, pilot health and wellness, permadeath, chaining missions together, pilot traits, and more.
Squadron Leader (SQL) is a permadeath game mode where the player manages a set roster of 12 pilots for up to 30 days of dogfights. Each day is split into four time slots in which a section of 1-3 pilots must scramble, and the dogfights are randomly generated with aircraft type, count, and advantage; bouncing a flight of two Stukas is a great draw, and being bounced by six enemy fighters is trouble.
Every pilot in SQL is generated with a name, portrait, nationality, health and stamina, and up to three unique pilot traits.
Pilots deplete stamina throughout each dogfight and pilots with low stamina have lowered G-tolerance, which has a big impact on their survivability. Pilots maintain stamina levels between dogfights unless they are sent on leave, so flying multiple sorties in a day will quickly exhaust your pilots and make them vulnerable.
Pilots who receive damage in matches or bail out of their airplanes must spend multiple days in the infirmary, and pilots killed in a dogfight remain dead for the duration of your SQL run.
Pilot Traits provide positive and negative performance modifications that impact airplane control, gun effectiveness, G-tolerance, aircraft defense, frequency of subcomponent failures, and more. Some traits are passive, and some traits activate in narrow situations like while tailing an enemy or when under fire. Pilot traits dramatically change the core Scramble dogfighting experience and they quickly became our favorite way to play Scramble internally.
We are very pleased with the Squadron Leader game mode right now. This is another feature that will continue to broaden and deepen in scope throughout Early Access, but at the state of EA launch I think it's the definitive way to play Scramble: Battle of Britain; it's the game mode that most delivers on the Attrition theme I keep ranting about.
Scramble does not seem to have a story driven single player, but it does not feel like it needs one with the setting of The Battle of Britain being self-explanatory. Was a traditional character driven story for the campaign considered?
The Channel Defense Campaign will put you in the role of Squadron Leader throughout the full Battle of Britain, and you will manage your pilots at a deeper level than what we have in the existing Squadron Leader game mode. The Battle of Britain will have a meta narrative flow to it, but we don't expect it to be story-driven in the sense of written narrative content. Pilots will have more life to them, and they will grow and change throughout the battle. They may get into trouble while on leave, and they will bond or feud throughout the course of the campaign. I'm going to mention pilot memoirs again here because we want the player story of the Channel Defense campaign to mimic the stories of the different famous squadrons of the RAF that you can read in books. But the stories of your squadrons will be told more through mechanics and player choice than through raw dialog.
It is great hearing more detail about The Channel Defense Campaign beyond the short description provided a few months ago. Thank you for that. The Royal Air Force pilots that players manage during their campaigns have unique character traits that can change gameplay. Do the opposing pilots also have traits players do not know about?
Luftwaffe pilots will eventually have character traits as well. At the time of Early Access launch, we only apply character traits to RAF pilots in the SQL game mode, but all of these mechanics are new and we are bringing them online and adjusting balance slowly; Early Access will see lots of new pilot traits, mechanics, balance adjustments, and expansion to the scope of dogfighting gameplay.
In Squadron Leader, I wonder if it is not wise to take on every fight the player is presented with. Does leaving an unfavorable battle without fighting have a negative impact?
Leaving a dogfight healthy is always a viable tactic. Squadron Leader doesn't really penalize you harshly for making that choice right now, but soon we will build in some more SQL scoring metrics that track your points and stars per mission, so you will find the most success in the SQL game mode by maximizing enemy losses and minimizing player losses and maximizing squadron longevity. Early Access gives us the space and playerbase to balance those metrics through playtesting, which we would never have the bandwidth for as such a small development team behind the scenes.
I am sure you have read this joke online, but I’d like to ask it on record. Have you heard people describe this game as playable TacView before? Do you have any comments on that?
"Playable TacView" is one of my elevator pitches to people who already enjoy DCS or IL-2. In real-time dogfighting games you have to do all sorts of post-processing to analyze your performance and tactics in hindsight. Scramble has the analysis tools built-in. You are analyzing tactics every single turn. You can analyze the tactics of a match live, while you play.
When streaming Scramble live, your natural inclination is to hop into the review phase and dissect your performance the way people have been doing in debrief videos for real-time games for decades.
Tactical Mode examples.
We have an isometric diorama view that we call "Tactical Mode" that allows you to more quickly rotate and translate the dogfight airspace, and it's not coincidental that the tools are inspired by the TacView program that players are already familiar with.
Once again, thank you for taking time to give some insight into Scramble during this busy time. Congratulations on its release!
Scramble: Battle of Britain is out now, available on Steam. Next week, Skyward Flight Media will be releasing an in-depth review of the early access launch version of the game. Look forward to it!
About the Interviewer
Co-founder of Skyward Flight Media. After founding Electrosphere.info, the first English Ace Combat database, he has been involved in creating flight game-related websites, communities, and events since 2005. He explores past and present flight games and simulators with his extensive collection of game consoles and computers. Read Staff Profile.
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