In 2010, browser games were a popular thing. Newgrounds, Armor Games among others were destinations for millions to load up a Flash game or two and play during breaks. A typical, casual web game was a neat 5mb package with a repeating playtime of a few minutes. On July 23rd, 2010, “Echoes: Operation Stranglehold” released on Armor Games, a 29mb of a Flash game with an hour long single-player, fully-voiced campaign completely straying away from those norms. It’s been years since I played it, and longer since I reflected on the decision to make it.
Echoes is a mix of sidescroller action and real-time-strategy. It’s a game series, originally designed to have 3 “Acts” but only one game was ever released. It has a small community that continues to live on to this day — with the uniting question of “when’s act 2?” It’s been 10 years and it’s time to address this pressing question.
Part 1 — Echoes: Operation Stranglehold
In Echoes, you play as Dem, a hero to humanity fighting off invading alien forces. As standard with Flash games, you control Dem with mouse and keyboard, but then during live action, switch between directly controlling him in combat mode to controlling your army in strategy mode. This is bundled in a direct, single axis sidescroller experience.
The core mechanics follow RTS classics– you build an army, there’s a map with resources to manage, use these wisely and you’ll crush the enemy army hiding in the fog of war. You can even set rally points and queue unit recruitment!
Combat mode is similarly straightforward as a sidescroller shooter. Some its flaws become apparent when finally engaging in with the enemy: being a sidescroller with no platforms and no cover system, you end up standing there and shooting straight for a fair chunk of the game.
Action does spice up when you unlock abilities, weapons and more units, or use tactical commands to have units follow you without having to switch to strategy mode. Dem has several abilities such as initiating an airstrike, healing nearby troops and dropping additional units from the sky. Dem’s arsenal includes the melee blade, a few types of machine guns and a rocket launcher with homing missiles.
Being a sidescroller, the strategy flavor in Echoes is similar to the single-lane mini games that were popular at the time (-which were inspired by Warcraft 3 mods, that later inspired the MOBA genre). The strategy mode is a super important part of the game, but the implemented strategy mechanics fall a bit short when all the units can do is either push in one direction or fall back in the other.
In Echoes, the United Earth Nations (or UEN) controls a few massive spaceships, one of them called Mother Earth which they’d captured from the alien forces. Using the spaceships, the UEN summons drop pods with buildings and units to come down during live combat.
One of the highlights in Echoes is the visual direction. The small units running around beautiful explosions and artillery fire all while switching between shooter and RTS mode makes it into a unique experience. And something about it was just cute. We never designed it to be cute, it was designed to be badass- but I need to face the music because Echoes is cute as heck.
Echoes is fully voiced with a cast of 8 playing 23 different characters. And it better be, packing 29mb in assets! This covers cutscenes, in-game sequences and randomized unit command voicelines. The story, which may have borrowed a bit from Half-Life 2 in terms of alien invasion, allowed some talented VAs to shine in this production.
The biggest issue in complex web games is the small screen space. Echoes had 800x500. Sounds small today, but back then, 1024×768 was still the most popular screen resolution websites had to support. Echoes did not fare well with this small box, and to add insult to injury, we didn’t make it an option to remove story captions during gameplay leaving sometimes only a few odd pixels of space for action.
It’s clear to me today the abundance of game systems squeezed together made it hard for one mechanic to shine, and to really drive it home. The visuals, story and voice efforts did however stand out and made for a unique experience, especially in this unusual compact format.
Part 2 — Building a Flash Game
I started working on an undefined strategy game at 16: It was 2008, a golden age of pc gaming at which point I was consumed by real time strategy and action shooters. So of course, the most logical route to a 16-year-old was to create a mixture of the favorites: A full blown RTS game and an action shooter. Echoes have drawn a lot from Warhammer 40k, Soldat, Half-Life, Gears of War and Battlezone.
Using my limited animation and programming skills I created a 2D RTS simulation in Flash. You’d summon a unit, which consists of 4 stick men, and fight off a rival unit. The units were grouped, like in Warhammer or Company of Heroes, so they had a group AI as well as individual AI.
Echoes was my first Object Oriented project, using ActionScript 3 and Adobe Flash 9. This was a big upgrade coming from ActionScript 2, which we used to build Portal: The Flash Version a few months earlier in 2007 with code written on keyframes. Development for Echoes started using the native Adobe tools and later migrated to FlashDevelop as compilation became too big for the native IDE. Echoes is 32,466 lines of code across 122 ActionScript files. It’s not advisable to make your first OO project in a new tech also a hugely huge game. Looking at the source today, it’s chaotic. But the game worked.
The team was spread across multiple time zones and we used email, Skype and Google Drive (then just “Docs”) to communicate and develop the game. We didn’t use source control.
Team Effort
By mid 2008 I approached Armor Games and pitched “Echoes” as a working title. The name was inspired by a local cover band that did all kinds of Pink Floyd hits. It was pitched as a unique mix of genres, featuring an immersive story- all packed as a web game. Coming strong from making “Portal: The Flash Version” a few months earlier, Echoes officially got sponsored by AG with a budget of up to $5000. Being a funded Flash game was huge. But in retrospect, it was the email that followed that made the biggest difference.
Armor Games introduced me to Axel Hammarback a week after agreeing to fund the game, following my query about animators. With a unique animation style and pumped to make something grand, Axel joined shortly after.
The game was originally slated for Q2 2009. It wasn’t until a year later, in summer 2010 when Echoes finally released, taking a whopping two years to build. For a standalone Flash game that was considered *a lot* of time. Throughout, Axel was the voice of reason and balance in an otherwise ambitious concept that kept adding up. Truthfully, it’s not just that the game wouldn’t have its unique art style without Axel. The fact is there wouldn’t be a game at all.
Delivering on promises vs. fun
In 2009 we had a 25 page long script of scenes for Echoes, excluding in-game unit lines and commands. This then naturally lead to auditioning, casting, recording, editing and then coding those scenes- eventually finding some were good on paper but rough in-game and needed more work. That’s a lot of dev time.
Focusing on storytelling left less time to add features that would have utilized what already makes Echoes unique, that could have produced tens more hours of fun. For example, a good customizable skirmish mode as featured in many strategy games at the time. But when pitching Echoes I mentioned an epic, immersive story campaign that was a first for a Flash game, and it was inconceivable to me to backpedal on that promise.
We did make an effort to extend Echoes by adding a never ending survival mode. The survival mode throws waves of enemy Hybrid forces at you at an increasing rate while you’re building your base, with a timed highscore of survival. There’s also a special “vending machine” near your base that can be used to unlock the original soundtrack and additional weapons as you’re working your way up the waves. We did deliver a campaign that was rarely seen in Flash games, but classic RTS skirmish mode never made it. It’s hard to know which one would’ve left more impact.
Vector graphics and sprites
Around mid 2010 playtesting feedback came in and one pressing issue was performance. You may remember Flash games had a similar, sort of a smooth style. It’s because most of the graphics and animations in Flash games were created with the native Flash vector animation tools. These come at a cost: while a user’s PC could run Company of Heroes on max video settings, around 25 of our units animating in Flash and the game would start to lag.
What Flash games did at the time was what video games did traditionally- use sprites. Unlike vector graphics, sprites are pre-rendered images with set pixels and are easier on your machine. Using sprites, we could render tens more units on the screen at a time without an issue. But as I was implementing sprites, I quickly realized we have another problem- vector animations weigh far less compared to sprites. Remember the game ended up being 29mb, already about six times the average Flash game at the time? With sprites, we need to pre-render big images and squeeze them in the game, which means it would end up an even larger file, unacceptable.
Echoes ended up having both: There are no sprites loaded with game, yet the game runs sprites. The SWF file containing the game includes just the small, smooth, lightweight vector animations of all the units. Echoes is done loading at about 90%, and the last 10% in the load screen is your computer playing all the unit animations in the background and creating them as new sprites in memory. This way we kept the game file small and rendering fast with sprites. For a web game, Echoes was still heavy- but this technique did save it from absolute doom.
Ready, set, go
While writing this and going through materials, the first Echoes build I found in my old hard drive was a nasty punch to my face. Did I really release Echoes with those bugs? With this horrid sound mixing? It was only after 30 minutes of playing and then plugging in another old hard drive that I found the actual, final version of the game ( — which I could’ve just downloaded online, dummy). The version I was initially playing was one compiled a few months prior to release, already with all content but lacking many bugfixes. Comparing these builds was an eye opener into how much polish makes a video game, in sound, in balance, in pacing despite already having all of the content implemented.
I’ll say it: Echoes didn’t have a cutscene “skip” function at first. That was intentional. We actually thought no one would want to skip dialogue. Please don’t kill me. It was corrected following more playtesting feedback and made it for release.
Yet still, just before release, I knew Echoes wasn’t perfect. Yes we had the time to polish it and we did, but I could not find a way to address its core gameplay issues without reworking the entire game and taking another few months to a year. And as I’ll explain below, my time was running out. At this point in development we had to make the best of what the game can be given the circumstances, polish it where it’s most impactful and make it a memorable gameplay experience.
Echoes Act 1, Operation Stranglehold was released in summer 2010. We had Playtomic analytics implemented in the game, which abruptly stopped service in 2013. At that point, Echoes was played by over 10 million players (around 60% of them on Armor Games). Additional stats were lost when the analytics service died. It’s rated 86% on Armor Games and 4.25 out of 5 stars on Newgrounds as of today.
Part 3 —When’s Act 2?
In the old We Create Stuff blog or our now abandoned Echoes Facebook page, you’ll find some old artwork posted from Act 2. The game was in development for a few months before halting.
Act 1 did provide a lot of harsh feedback about the core flaws of Echoes, some of which I mentioned earlier playing the game. But we weren’t demotivated- the game managed to recoup the sponsorship funding and some more. It was played by millions of players and has grown a small community of followers. We had a chance to improve its core in the next game.
Act 2 was designed to address the game’s biggest issues: Finding deeper “strategy” in “real time strategy” and making single lane combat more engaging. Here’s what we had planned:
- Cover system: We were working on a cover system both to units and the combat mode with Dem. For units it would work similarly to the way it does in Company of Heroes, where units can take cover with nearby environment and get a defense buff. With Dem, you’d use cover during combat, going in and out like in Gears and other third person shooters.
- Multi lane system: For the most part, Echoes would remain the same single-laner, but in various parts of the map in Act 2 you’d find a junction allowing you to go up or down. This leads to side missions and alternative paths for you to take your army from and flank the enemy.
- Skirmish mode and computer AI: This was finally planned for Act 2. Maybe even playing as the other side, as Hybrids.
- Third faction: The third faction we had planned for the game were failed Hybrids, zombie-like neutral units who would attack both the UEN and Hybrids alike. They are scattered around maps, mostly guarding resources and bonuses.
- Dem can take a ride in spawned vehicles like jeeps and tanks! It’s inspired by Danpaladin’s Supersoldier
A few months into development I got a letter with my military service recruitment date in 2011. I knew it was coming but I pushed it away. Where I’m from it’s mandatory service, and it’s for 3 years. I was living some fantasy to compromise through service and work on Echoes during nights. That of course never materialized as boot camp knocked some sense into me. Everyone involved was paid for their work on Act 2 and Echoes finally entered hiatus. Regretfully, this wasn’t announced to the community. I later found similar stories for others in the team — basically, life happened.
In writing this post, I plugged in two of my 2007–2011 SATA hard drives: I’ve extracted source code, art, animations, sounds and hundreds of emails and conversations that made Echoes Acts 1 and 2. For years after I couldn’t get myself to dig through these because I felt at fault over never wrapping up the series. But at some point you get perspective. I now realize Echoes was a typical indie dev effort in which effectively nobody worked full time (both Axel and I, who were deepest in development, were students) and yet we built something cool for people to play. It was a wild, fun ride!
Games live on
To clear things up, Echoes isn’t in production and there’s no Act 2.
The other day I read that Flash as we know it is officially discontinued in 2020. Technologies come and go, but video games will live on. I love the odd genre mix we made and it was challenging and fun to build. I’m hopeful to see more games taking the unusual route.
Big thanks to Armor Games for sponsoring Echoes into reality, and to the talented team- Axel, Greg, Paul, Samuel, Erik, Zach, Susana and the cast- James, Marie, Jazz, Daniel, Kira, Luke, Shir, and Nick. And ofcourse, to the amazing Echoes community!
You can play Echoes here for free. You’ll need Flash player.
Up next
I’ve recently got back into game dev full time with the same friends I built We Create Stuff. We’ve revived the community with a Discord server, which in turn convinced me it’s time to write this piece. Today we’re working on a new game, an indie psychological-horror called In Sound Mind. I’m ridiculously excited for what we’re making. With a bit of patience and maybe fewer than 10 years I’ll cover it too. Here’s a shameless plug.
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