Total War: SHOGUN II - Fall of the Samurai

Fall of the Samurai was developed by Creative Assembly, published by SEGA and released 15 March 2012.

About the Game

The standalone expansion to the award-winning Total War: SHOGUN 2 explores the conflict between the Imperial throne and the last Shogunate in 19th century Japan, 400 years after the events of the original game. A dramatic clash of traditional Samurai culture with the explosive power of modern weaponry.

Guide ancient Japan into the modern age, as the arrival of America, Britain and France incites a ferocious civil war which will decide the future of a nation.

Based on the backdrop of the Boshin War period, the new campaign starts in 1864, a time of growing resentment against Western colonial power and influence. As Japan begins to modernise and industrialise, the inevitable social and economic changes lead to increasingly militant nationalism and antipathy towards the Shogunate.

Fall of the Samurai included 6 new playable clans; Aizu, Nagaoka, Jozai, Choshu, Satsuma, Tosa and new foreign powers.

39 new land units were added, Including modern ranged units - such as the Gatling gun and Armstrong gun - controllable in a new third-person mode. New units can also be recruited from foreign powers, including the British Royal Marines, US Marine Corps and French Marines.

There are 10 new naval unit types with a total of 21 ships including New steam-powered warships, heavily armed with modern artillery. Foreign ironclad ships can also be purchased, including the Warrior-class ironclad.

Several other new features included new Port siege battles, Naval Bombardment (where offshore ships could fire into land battles), costal gun emplacements can target enemy ships during port siege battles, when ending their turn within the range of upgraded coastal defences.

Skills and Experience

Fall of the Samurai was the first project that I worked on in the Production team. Although I'd worked in Creative Assembly QA for 4 years at this point, I was interviewed for the Associate Producer job just like any other candidate. As I was already a key member of the team, I had a lot of knowledge about who did what in the team, and was able to transfer from QA to Production fairly easily.

One of the first jobs I was given was getting Total War: SHOGUN 2 translated into Japanese. I worked on this with an external localisation company, and our Graphics and UI team. It wasn't quite as simple as just adding the Japanese text stings in the database, we had to add graphics code and change UI layouts to accommodate it.

After releasing Shogun 2 in Japan (via Steam), I was next tasked with developing a software tool to generate reports from project management tool Hansoft. This was written in C++ and had an MFC windows interface. The tool is still used to this date (in 2017) in the studio, and generates customised burndown and capacity reports for Producers and the team to track the progress of projects.