It’s a big birthday this year!

2020 is upon us, and it marks the 10th birthday of Dropzone Commander!

I know what you’re thinking, veteran Dropzone fans: “But Dropzone came out in 2012!” and that’s true! However, the first work Dave did on the game was in January 2010. It takes a while to make a game, that’s for sure!

So for this WIP Wednesday, we thought we’d take a trip down memory lane to some very old WIP pics. Dave has very very kindly opened up his sketchbook to the viewing public for us all to have a peek at where our beloved game started off. Dave says:

There’s some pretty funny stuff in there (10 years ago, remember) but also the routes of the whole range really.

This was the very first stuff Dave came up with, so just take a look at your 10 year challenge before judging too harshly!

We’re starting off with the UCM, or – as they were known at the time – the Colonial Confederation. At this early stage Dave was sketching up a universal dropship, which ended up being the Condor we all know and love!

We move onto some light dropships, and we really like these designs! What would turn into the Raven started with a much more front-heavy design – a long way from the Titania pattern Raven we saw released in December!

You’ll also see Dave’s signature on the bottom, and dated the 6th January 2010!

Next we’ve got the Scourge, and you can clearly see a Tormentor taking shape. There’s plenty of detail here, and just so many numbers scrawled on! You can tell Dave has an engineering background from these sketches!

Of course we have the PHR as well, with a sneak peek at some walkers. Now, these originally started off as UCM walkers, which you can see in the cockpit of the bottom one and the nose of the top (it looks a lot like the Archangel). But these designs got moved on and turned into PHR walkers.

Finally today some of the very first pictures of Shaltari. These are quite different from what we ended up with! The shape of the fins look quite Scourgey here to me, but over the next few pages of the sketchbook Dave polished the design. One thing you can clearly see is the hole at the centre of what would turn into the Shaltari Gates – probably the most iconic style of the entire army. We’re glad they swapped the teeth for the geometric shapes though!

There we have it! Just a little dip into the goldmine of Dave’s old sketches. I’m sure we’ll take another look at them in the future, so let us know if you enjoyed this trip into the secret history of Dropzone Commander!

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