Republic Sniper Resurrection Project

At the end of 2011, the software consulting company we worked at had become quite successful, and turned its eyes towards publishing some of their own software. The company planned two products: a design package called Briefs, and a game called Turncoat, which was going to be released in episodes. Each episode would have an opening cinematic, a game or interactive sequence, and a closing cinematic. We were going to tell the players up front that one of the characters was going to betray their team and the Earth Republic, and every episode was going to fill in pieces of the puzzle to answer the question, “who is the turncoat?”.

We started pre-production and spent about two years working on story and world-building and doing some very basic prototyping. We created a huge world bible and filled in hundreds of years of Earth history. It was probably overkill, but we had all sorts of details worked out, backstories for all the major and some of the minor characters, and the state of technology of both planets. We detailed the politics of both the Earth Republic and the Mars Seditionists. By 2014, we knew the universe like it was real and we knew the characters as if they actually existed.

In early 2014, the company hired two game artists to help us move into production. We had several programmers on staff with game dev experience, but none of our designers or artists did. We also realized that our original concept was way too ambitious for our budget, so we went back and wrote another set of stories in the same universe for a different, simpler game called Republic Sniper, which would follow a single character instead of an ensemble cast, and would feature a rather unique touch-based input mechanism that we’re still kinda sad we never shipped.

In late 2015 or early 2016, the company hit some bumps in the road. We aren’t going to put the details here, but the company experienced some completely avoidable and unnecessary problems that resulted in the game being cancelled just as we were finishing up our first internal playable demo.

Part of the team was let go right away. Over time, the rest of us moved on, and the game got put on a shelf and was mostly forgotten about.

Then, recently, one of the original Republic Sniper team members cajoled and prodded the guy who owned all the assets and IP rights until he pulled the old project out of mothballs and gave the team permission to continue working on it. It was a non-trivial effort to get a mobile UnrealEngine 4.11 project up and running on 4.25, but we managed it. While it’s still a long ways away from being a finished game, there’s been a lot of time and effort invested into this and it would be really nice if it could see the light of day in some form or shape.