Bear Force II

Bad Name Studios

Bear Force II is a non-profit Star Wars overhaul modification for Mount&Blade: Warband I worked on as a hobby.

Project Details:


Note: The Github for this project is private.

Project Pages

Steam Workshop

ModDB

My Contribution

As this was my first project in the industry and done purely as a hobby, I have very little documentation from during my time working on the project. However, I can provide many images of my 3D Artwork as well as Levels I've designed and created. I can also tell you a little bit about my work as Community Manager(2016-2017) and Lead Developer(2017-2020) for this project.

Maps

During my time working on Bear Force II, I have made a very wide array of maps as this was one of my favourite things to do. Below you will find collapsible groups of some of the maps I have made/worked on.

Scarif - Assault

Scarif - Assault was a rather successfull attempt at re-using the existing "Conquest" game mode and creating a more versatile, checkpoint-based siege game mode.

Dagobah - Swamps

Sith - Temple

Muunilinst - District

Mygeeto - Bridge

Scarif - Islands

Lightsabers

With the release of Mount&Blade 2: Bannerlord, the long-awaited sequel to Warband, kreeping up on us. The team started preparing for a "Bear Force III", sadly these plans were never executed as many people lost interest in modding the sequel when it was revealed there likely won't be any Multiplayer modding tools available for any forseeable future on the game's Early Access Release.

However, before this was revealed, we, like many others, prepared for a sequel to our mod in the new game. One of my contributions to this would have been Lightsabers. Below you will find a collapsible group containing some images of Lightsaber renders I made in Blender at the time.

Shield Generator

One of my many little projects during my time working on the mod was to create a tool that spawns a protective shield within a radius upon usage. While we got to the final stages of implementation, this feature was sadly scrapped.

New

Old

Umbaran Road

We made plans to create an entire new set of assets so we could create new maps on the mysterious Star Wars world "Umbara". My task was to make the roads used by the natives of the planet. Sadly not everyone delivered and limited time/resources made us scrap the idea.

Powerpack

One of the many things we watched out for when making new assets was whether we could potentially re-use already existing textures on new assets we made. One such example is the implemented Powerpack I made where I re-used a texture used on troopers seen in the mod.

Spider Droid

The Spider Droid was a neat little project I was trying to make work. The hard part was that the engine of Warband (the multiplayer side at least) does not support custom skeletons so we had to make a rig that could walk on four legs but still follow the rigging of a human skeleton. 

The feature was never implemented but it is still a neat bit of research I had to do to get this far in the first place.

Video

A video showcasing a test of the skeleton inside the Resource Editor/Viewer of the game.

Community Manager

My main responsibility as Community Manager was organising weekly events. The amount per week would vary between 2 and 3, the duration of each event between 60 and 90 minutes and attendance was generally somewhere around 100-200 people per event. As the mod markets itself as a tactical shooter, many people in the community formed groups, or clans, to help organise themselves against their opponents in these weekly events.


It was my task to organise these groups into two teams every event, discussing and enforcing agreed upon rules, managing inter-community relations and serve as a bridge between the developers and the community.

Lead Developer

Starting off, I had no experience in game development whatsoever, the most I had done was some level editing. All I had was a driving passion for both the community, the mod I had been playing for over 2 years now as well as a big interest in becoming a game developer. I saw this as a perfect opportunity to learn what I can in my spare time, being allowed to work in, but also manage a group of semi-professionals.


I myself did not do a ton of programming during this project, we had plenty of more experienced people for that and because I was still in the learning process, I decided to focus more on managing the project as well as learn some 3D art in my spare time, as this was something we lacked people for. The result thereof can be found above.


Thus, I spent most of my time organising updates and patches, what new features we should focus on, what bugs needed fixing the most, create roadmaps for future updates and much, much more. Below you will find both an example from one of our Steam Workshop's many patch notes pages, as well as an example of one of the many development articles I wrote for the project, from our ModDB page.

Steam Workshop Patch Notes Example

ModDB Development Article Example