Task Force Admiral is an up-and-coming videogame from Drydock Dreams Games from under the wing of iconic wargames’ publisher, MicroProse Software. This interview has been sitting on my desk for quite a while, gone unpublished waiting for the perfect moment. Now that I got my hands on a vertical slice of the game (and I’m more than impressed!), it’s time to share it with the world. So sit down, grab a snack, and let’s talk with the man leading the team behind the most graphically impressive wargame ever created, Amiral Crapaud.

Strategy and Wargaming

Hello, and welcome to Strategy and Wargaming. Task Force Admiral gives me vibes of a massive undertaking. This must come from a place of passion for both history, and the theme. Could you enlighten us how all of this came to be?

Amiral Crapaud

Thank you for this opportunity! As for what we’ve been making and how we came together to make it, that’s a long journey indeed. It all started around 2015. Back then I was contemplating this weird idea of achieving a few goals in my own bucket list before the next decade – I was in my early 30s, but it felt as if there were things that couldn’t wait for retirement.

A new WW2 carrier game, awkwardly, was among those items I felt I really needed to see done before I transitioned to my next stage in life. It just so happens that I always had a soft spot for the topic, and the South Pacific in general. I might be French, but I am one of these guilty souls who end up being more familiar with US Navy historical facts than I am with these of my own Marine Nationale. This perhaps can be traced back all the way to my first encounter with the French comics series Buck Danny, about a US Naval aviator and his friends, the first issue of which was taking place aboard Yorktown at Coral Sea & Midway. The series certainly did interpret the era very freely – these were the late 40s & early 50s and actual, accurate information in the days preceding René Francillon & other serious authors was comparatively scarce. Buck & his friends would steal a Betty from Guadalcanal & land it aboard Yorktown, and Ryukaku at the Coral Sea. Yorktown would fly Hellcats and after that Wildcats, among other fantasies. It was all fine for my 6-year-old standards, not knowing better at the time.

This changed in the early 90s with my interest in video games. Dad brought home two important discoveries which would shape things to come. I think our first simulations were Lucasarts’ Their Finest Hour and Microprose’s Silent Service II. I have to admit, back then perhaps TFH was more of my jam gameplay-wise, because SS2, even with the rudimentary IBM speaker, was a very stressful experience. Hearing that screechy crash dive alarm, seeing these depth charges get on you in full animated glory, then experiencing these moments of violent screen shaking, were perhaps my first personal contact with what I’d call an immersive gaming experience. Then, the other beautiful memory I have of both titles – that they had in common, each in their own way – was the care given to the historical dimension.

Strategy and Wargaming

Things were different back then…

Amiral Crapaud

You could not expect too much in-game in regard to extensive content due to the inherent limitations of the day – yet, what they could not always achieve extensively on a few 3 ½ inch disks, they made sure to make for it in the manual.
In the early 90s, big, heavy, knowledgeable manuals were the norm for games of that kind. They transpired all the love and expertise these teams had deployed when crafting these diamonds, and I can still remember my trauma when I came across Comanche’s diminutive packaging on a shelf when it came out. I was telling myself – heck, that might not be the game I am looking for… The important thing is that this was my first contact with more serious content regarding history, tactics, men of war, and their hardware. It all came from this gaming culture and was reinforced during the course of the years that followed with titles such as F-15 II, M1 Tank Platoon, Task Force 1942, or 1942: The Pacific Air War. Clearly, I wanted more of this clever mix MicroProse had achieved, that is making immersion the name of the game in the simulation world.

Nearly twenty years later, in 2015, I got in touch with JB, the man who would become the Dev in the team, through the French combat sim website Check-Six, of which I was a longtime member. He was himself just fresh from his own foray into the indie game scene as the co-maker of BOMB (which you can still check out here on Steam) a nice “a-la-Crimson-Skies” experience. From that very moment, early on, I knew he had all the skills I needed to make my own dream come true – and he had the tech too! Knowing he had made all this using his own engine, I had the intuition he would be able to solve any problem we would come across – which is exactly what he has been doing for the last few years. We got to meet Julien, our 2D artist, through Check-Six too, and Rizki, our 3D artist, through careful and hard-earned outsourcing effort – some of the magic offered by the modern internet and a lot, a lot of luck. I sold my apartment to use the money to fund all this, and here we are.

Strategy and Wargaming

The fact that you sold your own apartment to see this come through shows a lot of passion and trust in your project, and by what I played, I can see why. What an amazing thing this is. Gameplay-wise, what can we expect from Task Force Admiral?

Amiral Crapaud

Thank you! Well, worry not, I still have a place to live – but that’s what investments are made for, at least in regard to one’s dreams – to enable them and to serve them afterward until they hopefully succeed. And in today’s world, that sort of financial security is a blessing and is much appreciated. I think by all the people involved in the project. Having a full-time professional dev working on this allows me to concentrate on what I do best, which is game design and managing the rest. Not having technical or artistic skills of my own is my greatest shame. Having experienced and talented team members in charge of making the game proper is the only reason why I remain optimistic about our chances, and why I even attempted this to begin with. Not everybody has the brains and the innate talent of chaps like the self-taught one-man army behind Project Wingman, I am afraid!

Now in regard to gameplay, Task Force Admiral is designed as a fusion between two distinct, yet co-existing dimensions of WW2 naval combat which have been hard to integrate over the course of the last three decades. As you certainly know well yourself, there have not been that many simulation or wargame-grade games successfully bringing together the surface and the air dimension in the same product, at least in 3D, and on a tactical scale.

Historically it has remained a challenge since the very early days of the genre: games of the 1990s like Carriers at War, Task Force 1942, or Fighting Steel focused on one at the expense of the other (sometimes to the point of ignoring it entirely for a gameplay purpose). Add submarines to the mix, and you end up with the peculiar situation of three obviously connected dimensions being kept apart due to technical issues or gameplay concerns. Great Naval Battles tried to bridge this early on in GNB2, but by today’s standards, it is obviously a bit dated. The game that does it best within the same tactical instance, in my humble opinion, would be Rule the Waves 2, but even then of course it is 2D, and the game’s paradigm is a (remarkable) fictional setting. Its 3D equivalent, Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts, is not currently heading in the direction of adding naval aviation to the mix.

Right now, besides Evil Twin’s effort in Victory at Sea, there is no other product trying to consolidate, if not reconcile carrier air-ops and surface units within the same framework and unités de lieu et de temps, if you pardon my French. For example, back when we had planes taking off and landing off-screen, and other tricks of the same kind, slicing the action in episodes so as not to have them interfere with another, or only so much. In Task Force Admiral we are trying to remedy this traditional approach with a novel attempt that encompasses all these dimensions. Time will tell if we succeed or not, but it requires a long journey, where trial and error are the norm as we experiment on some mechanics and concepts that have not been experimented on before. There’s no point in turning Task Force Admiral into a reskin of, say, War on the Sea – we need to show something different if we want it to matter.

Besides making it happen all on the same battlefield, another pet feature of ours is clearly our treatment of the Fog of War (FoW). It is certainly easier to demonstrate in-game than it is with mere words and pictures, but long story short, it is mostly about rehabilitating FoW in naval combat as an actual decision-making factor. We want to push this concept way beyond what exists today, where FoW is more often than not just a matter of blurring reality by making, say, reports a bit more inaccurate. On that level, we have to fight, if not struggle, against a lot of misconceptions born from popular culture, which derive from movies and other games and have evolved to a point where they actually define how carrier combat should be done in the stead of the actual facts and processes. Reading any serious account of the way these battles were fought (say, Lundstrom’s Black Shoe Carrier Admiral or Parshall & Tully’s Shattered Sword) will make it clear. 

In real life, commanders do not have a real-time influx of information from their scouts. They do not see what they see, only glimpses of what they encounter. They do not even know where their scouts are: due to radio silence, a carrier scout not making contact will never raise its base on the radio net so as to hide their existence both to the ears of the enemy. This also means that your scout could very well be dead, shot down by a Combat Air Patrol (CAP) fighter, and if the crew did not have time to send a message, you will never know about it. I lost count of the times in history when a large H6K flying boat was shot down by US carrier CAP fighters before it got time to tell its base about it. In most games, it would probably mean immediate action on the part of the AI. In ours, its base will never know it has lost a bird before the next routine radio check, and even then will not always be able to deduce your location. As one can imagine, it radically alters the flow of battle and its paradigms.

As such, Fog of War is not just a veil that shrouds the enemy order of battle – in its “Friendly” incarnation, it adds a new dimension to command and is the necessary step so as to recreate the actual battle dynamics of the time, wild goose chases and friendly fire incidents included. The aim is to generate intuitively an in-game world relevant to the fleshing-out of the role of a commander, and as such we define Task Force Admiral as a command simulation, a specific genre that has been illustrated in the latest years by innovative designs such as Radio Commander or Radio General, and touched by the inner workings of others like Flashpoint Campaigns, Command Ops or Decisive Campaigns.

Part 2

Part 3

What’s Next?

I would like to let everyone know that a Kickstarter is expected to start during the Winter, and there’s a possibility that there might be something… playable *wink wink* for potential backers. However, Task Force Admiral team states that the Kickstarter isn’t necessary to finish the game, but instead will be focused on creating new gameplay options, and the creation of a boxed edition of the game along the lines of a Microprose product from the early 1990s. If you were to ask me, yes, I want to have a big box of Task Force Admiral alongside my game collection in my office.

Follow Strategy and Wargaming Socials

If you enjoy Strategy and Wargaming, then you need to follow its socials. Are we the best strategy gaming website around? I would say so. Heck, what other options do you have? The Wargamer? Please.

So why not give us a follow on the cesspool that is Twitter, or join the 1000 other geriatric patients on Facebook? Or subscribe down below? Or maybe do everything? I don’t care, I’m not your grandmother.

If you enjoyed the article you can help by buying me a coffee

I’ve been running Strategy and Wargaming at my own expense since 2017, with only the ad-revenue to cover for the hosting, with everything else being done by me. It’s thanks to the goodwill of video game publishers like Slitherine, Hooded Horse, and others that I’m able to cover games prior to their releases. So, If you’re an avid reader, you can afford it, and want to support the website, please consider Buying Me a Coffee by clicking this link.