Supremacy 1914
Earlier this month, we announced that Supremacy 1914 is marching forward onto a new battlefield - the Unity engine. Today, we’re excited to share more details about what that means, how the work is going, and what players can look forward to.
We sat down with Eugen, Team Lead of the Unity Port Team, to talk about the challenges, opportunities, and future of the game in its new technical home.
Q: Why did we decide to move the game from the Supremacy engine to Unity?
A: Supremacy is a long lasting title, firstly released quite a few years back (2009 if my memory serves me right) and while that is absolutely outstanding and shows the love and support both players and developers poured into this game, it also began to show its age.
It was becoming increasingly challenging to serve the old techstack and even harder to update and elevate it to what we dream of.
With this, we decided to re-build it in Unity, change that would help us to eliminate those barriers and allow us to further on push new features in, previously impossible to tackle via the legacy version.
What are some of the features of the Unity port that you are most excited about?
I'm super hyped on what will this shift to Unity allow us to unlock - not only will we push for enhanced visuals (VFX, UI animations etc) but we'll also be able to further expand on player customization and identity while having an easier and faster time whenever it comes to creating and launching new features for you to enjoy.
Can you tell us a bit about the Unity Port Team - how big is the team, and what kind of specialists were involved?
We pretty much had to rebuild the game from scratch, as outside of the main design and backend (which were taken from the initial version), the rest needed to be reshaped in order to not only fit Unity, but also stay true to the Supremacy feel.
A dozen developers are working on porting the game and transitioning S1914's playground from 2D to 3D, recreating artworks, rewriting game logic and features to work under Unity, yet also redesigning some screens and features to better accommodate gameplay and support the feedback we received from the community.
Did the team face challenges during the process?
Oh yes, quite several :)
We needed to make everything work in tandem with the Legacy version, which we'll still support for a bit of time until we're sure the Unity version works great for us but more importantly for you, our players!
Supremacy is quite a layered and complex game, thus some niche features were actually in need of being deconstructed and documented anew as we always had to think with cross-playability in mind. In the end, we wanted everyone to be able to switch between legacy/unity, mobile, desktop versions with ease.
On, and not to forget, it is also the first game we transitioned onto Unity, thus there were quite several bumps on our path.
Any funny or unexpected stories from the porting process?
After porting all units we found out that they were taking the opposite coordinates when issuing a move command - moving South would result in moving North and such. The code was correct so we couldn't understand why this was happening.
We nevertheless soon found out that all maps from the editor were flipped to solve some other problem from Legacy and even though this was not visible it was indeed something that happened in the background.
So, we had to mirror the mirror effect to make it work right.
When can we get our hands on this? And is there anything our players should look out for or help test as this transition rolls out?
We push to deploy the first Closed Beta end of month July - it will be invitational only yet we expect many players in. This will be mobile only, a PC version will follow up development yet we expect that to hit in early to mid 2026.
Expectations wise, this is in the end a Beta build, meaning not all features will be in and bugs will be present.
It would help immensely if players will share those problems and bear with us until we address them.
This is just the beginning - more DevDiaries and behind-the-scenes updates are on the way. We are very excited to finally share this project with all of you. For now let’s stand by and wait: soon it’ll be time to fix bayonets, diving into the trenches of the Unity Port together.
