As such, he recommends that readers should try such a project if they’re interested. On the project management side of things, he has also learned to keep changes small and to keep his momentum going.Īll of these lessons have also helped him in his day job as a software engineer. He is constantly trying to understand how things in the game work, and then figuring out how to build and improve them. “Regardless, I want to try someday.” Lessons learned from remaking Dune IIĪn ambitious project like this is quite an undertaking, but Hendriks has learned a lot from it. What he would most want to add is multiplayer support, though that is a feature that he has no idea how to do. Hendriks has other changes in mind, such as new playable factions with unique structures and Dune lore-related elements, but those are still far off. As he only works on it in the evenings after his day job (and mostly by himself), Hendriks estimates that he will need another few years to complete the game.īut the core gameplay is functioning, and players can already jump in and blow up some quads and ornithopters. Cutscenes haven’t been integrated either. The game is far from complete now, as it still lacks an options menu and the ability to save your progress. Hendriks received help from fellow fans in the Dune2k forums who polished the graphics for him. Hendriks said that the early iterations of Dune II – The Maker made use of graphics extracted from the original game, but they were too tiny in high-res. The graphics are updated, though it still looks undeniably like Dune II. Hendrik’s improved AI gathers units into groups and then sends them in attack waves, which is more like Command & Conquer than Dune II. “Rather, I try to think how I would implement an RTS AI that would make a game like Dune II fun to play.”įans of the game will remember that after a while, the original AI would send units to attack the player’s base one at a time – which made them pretty easy to repel once you had enough rocket turrets. “I don’t aim to recreate a Dune II AI,” he said. Dune II – The Maker is different because it is made from scratch with an original engine and modern improvements such as unit grouping, map zooming, and improved enemy AI. If you look on the Google Play Store, you will find other Dune II games but these are direct ports of the original game, optimized for mobile. Soon after, he started from scratch to begin what would become a 20-year open-source project called Dune II – The Maker.

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