[by Kenn Hoekstra]

Writing The Soldier of Fortune Strategy Guide Our very first guest editorial is by none other than Raven Software's Project Administrator, Kenn Hoekstra! We hope you enjoy this awesome article, as Kenn relates the process he went through to create the Official Soldier of Fortune Strategy Guide!

The best way to describe my Project Administrator position at Raven Software is this: “I do all the things that no one else has time to do.” That about sums it up... So when Brady Games started working with Activision on the strategy guide for Soldier of Fortune, guess who got the call? You got it... Activision gave my name to Brady Games as a resource person for the strategy guide. They didn’t really have an author lined up yet, but they wanted to get all of their ducks in a row before they started production. As I talked to Brady representative Debra McBride on the phone, it dawned on me: If I’m going to do a bunch of the legwork for the guide, why not just write it myself? I mentioned the idea to Debra and she liked it. I told her I would have to check with Activision and Raven about contractual obligations, but I would get back to her. And so it all began... I spoke with my superiors at Raven and they, in turn, spoke with Activision’s legal department. They agreed to allow me to do the strategy guide as long as it was on my own time and didn’t interfere with my duties at Raven. I thought it would be a piece of cake to work full time and do the book on the side. Oh, how wrong I was... I called Debra and told her that everything was a go. We worked out a list of milestone dates to correspond with the game’s release and we did a conference call with some of the other Brady Games staff to put some ideas out on the table and discuss the layout of the book. After several calls like this, I had an outline in front of me. The ball was totally in my court now. At the time I started production of the book, the game wasn’t in any state to start a walkthrough. Level objectives, puzzles and even paths were changing on a near-daily basis. About the only thing that was finalized were the first four levels of the game as we released them months earlier in the form of a single player OEM bundle with the Razer Boomslang Mouse. Even the weapon effects and damage scales for some of the higher end weapons weren’t quite finished yet. Rather than procrastinating (as I am prone to do), I dove right in and got to work. Because Soldier of Fortune is a fairly straightforward game, I didn’t want the strategy guide to end with a level walkthrough, weapon stats, cheat codes and a deathmatch guide. The best guidebooks I’ve seen have lots of extra things in them: concept art, interviews, behind the scenes information, commentary and any number of other bonus features. I didn’t want people to just use the book once and take it to a used book store; I wanted them to see it as a keepsake and add it to their permanent gaming collection. With this in mind, I started getting the resources together. The first thing I did was to go through Soldier of Fortune’s art directory and grabbed all of the concept artwork I could find. Then I asked our art department to work on renderings of the game’s main characters, weapons and items. My hat goes off to Joe Koberstein, Kevin Long and Gina Garren for all of the hard work they put on those. The demands of the project were such that I wasn’t the only one that would be working insanely long hours. But I’ll say a bit more about that a little later. After I had the artwork together, I started gathering resources from the Internet. I grabbed some of the best interviews I could find: one with John Mullins, our consultant, and one with the animation team about their work with the game’s motion capture. Then I put together a list of Internet links of every site I could find that had information about Soldier of Fortune and its community. I figured that would be a valuable resource to readers interested in mods and user levels after the game was released. At this point, a lot of the artwork I requested was done, so I went through and did sections on the weapons, items and characters in the game. Later we found out that higher resolution versions were needed because of the size of the book, so Joe and his team had to go back and touch them up. That was a lot of work and I really appreciated that. Once these sections were done, I did walkthroughs for the first four levels of the game with twenty or so screenshots per level accompanying them. My first FTP transfer to Brady Games was away. At this point, I hit the wall creatively. Long nights were starting to get to me. I would come in at 9am, work until 6pm or 7pm on my normal Raven duties and then work on the book from 7pm until Midnight or so. Kevin Long and I took many late night trips to Denny’s restaurant for breakfast and coffee. The work wasn’t only taxing for me physically, it also started taking its toll on my personal and professional lives. I hadn’t seen my fiance in weeks and the quality of some of my regular work was slipping. It was quite a challenge for me to keep everything balanced and I’m very grateful to Michele (my fiance) for being so understanding. Her support is what got me through the rest of the project. Slowly but surely, things were coming together in the game. I was gathering new resources all the time from the artists and designers and I started cranking out the level walkthroughs three or four at a time. I didn’t have a lot of time left on my schedule at this point because the guide got such a late start in the game’s development cycle, so the workload was brutal. Things kept changing and I’d have to make corrections and re-send them to Brady on an almost-daily basis. It was extremely frustrating, but I managed to keep things in line. Level walkthroughs were nearly finished and I was approaching the game’s final mission. The problem? The final boss AI wasn’t finished and the mission was being split up from three levels into four. Not a good thing, considering my deadline. This is where Eric Biessman comes in. Eric laid the groundwork for a lot of the strategy guide’s content since he was the one who wrote the game’s design document. As the project coordinator, Eric told me what the plans were for each of the unfinished levels and helped me tremendously with the final stages of the book. Eric was a big help to me throughout the entire process. At this point, I was really getting burned out. I was fatigued, ornery and, to be honest with you, pretty tired of playing Soldier of Fortune. Sixteen hours of Soldier of Fortune a day including nights and weekends was really taking its toll on me. By this time, we were starting to send gold candidates to Activision QA and my deadline was coming up fast. I finished the Germany walkthroughs and then did the cheat codes section for the top secret section of the book. I was done! Or was I? I sent the rest of the assets to Brady Games so their team could start doing the layout. I felt as though a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. But I wasn’t out of the woods yet... The alternate fire mode on the Microwave Pulse Gun was changed to the primary fire and the primary fire became the alternate. Other changes were cropping up, too, as the final stage of the game brought nothing with it but gameplay tweaks based on the game’s trials in QA. I had to sit down repeatedly and play all the way through the game to make sure that everything in the book was as accurate as possible. Once I got the changes written down, I sent them to Debra and the rest was in Brady’s hands. A few things slipped through the cracks. To be honest with you, I don’t know how anyone can write a guide that’s 100% accurate. Here I am, one of the game’s developers and I couldn’t do it! A level section was added at the beginning of Kosovo2 that I didn’t know about and I neglected to mention (because I didn’t know) that you have to type in /cheats 1 to enable all of the cheats and commands from the console! Making such errors was tough for me to swallow, but what could I do? But as a whole, I’m really happy with how the book turned out from a writing standpoint. Brady Games worked feverishly on the guide so they could get it in the stores at the same time as the game. After I sent the final adjustments, I had no idea what the book was even going to look like! The first time I saw it in any way, shape or form was when I went over to Best Buy across from Raven and saw it on the shelf. Wow, what a feeling that was! Brady did an amazing job with the layout and they used just about every asset I sent them in the process. All of the hard work on my part as well as Joe, Kevin, Gina, Eric and the rest of the team really paid off. My first “real” published work was something I could be proud of. I truly enjoy writing as a hobby. Could I do it under constant deadline pressure? I don’t think so... As much as writing the Soldier of Fortune strategy guide was a great experience for me, I’m not in a hurry to do it again. I respectfully declined any notion that I would write the guide for Voyager - Elite Force. I did extensive work on the manual and documentation for the game, but that’s where it ends. I have my relationship (and my sanity) to think about, after all! =) I truly hope that people enjoy the Soldier of Fortune strategy guide. The one thing I was going to do, but forgot, was include an e-mail address in the book so I could get feedback on it. I guess that is yet another valuable lesson I can learn for next time. If you are interested in the Soldier of Fortune strategy guide, hop on over to amazon.com and take a look. Here’s a direct link. Thanks for reading! [Back to the top]