Critias Empire News

Thank you once again for all the feedback on the demo. It's answered a lot of questions I had in my own head about what works and doesn't in the game. As well your feedback and bug reports have assisted in finding and crushing a host of bugs. Also in helping shaping my thinking about the direction of the game. In this update I'll be going into exactly what has been happening and the next steps on the Critias Empire road.

[h2]Empty Handed[/h2]

I finally got around to improving the survey / exploration feature. Adding in search hints means no survey ever leaves you with nothing at all, which given the relatively high cost of surveying, is a good thing. Or at least the survey hints will tell you when there's nothing to be found, so you don't waste time and resources.

Combined with the priorities filter, the hints also allow you to sniff down the resource you actually want, and over time get a bit of a natural instinct for where might be a good place to start a search in the future.



The priority filter also gives you an idea of what exactly there is to find. I'm hoping this acts as a clue for players who get to the middle of the game and ask "ok, I build my empire, I can't see any marble nor gold, what now?"

[h2]Woolly Balance[/h2]

Originally I balanced the game with the final version in mind - much larger maps and more gods, disasters and wonders. It was only later in making the demo that I decided on a condensed version of the game with a radically cut down number of land uses (buildings), products, gods and disasters.

Releasing the demo made me realise that some of the assumptions in the demo balance were actually left-over from previously and no longer made sense. In particular, estates didn't make sense to build versus the number of workers they needed, and the wool->cloth economy needed for cities was far too demanding. Both of these I have made fine-tune adjustments for, which have already been patched into the demo.

The gods and disaster spawning has also been less even than I'd hoped. The game was balanced for gods slowly getting angrier and angrier as the game continued, to keep pace with player progress. However from talking to you fine folks, seem you either get wrecked early by the disasters, especially from Poseidon. Or reach a tipping point after which your economy is strong enough you can just build your way out of trouble. Sometimes even by accident of just building the favoured-by-the-gods buildings - temples, harbours and mines - that you would have built anyway.

The game also had a bug that would mean disasters failed to find a target location and spawned "empty" disasters where the ground shakes and the skies darken but no volcanoes spawn and no land changes. This combined with the uneven god balancing led to a lot of games where there was neither a threat of disaster, nor any special resources needed for victory spawning.

The disaster no-show bug should now be fixed (at least I hope!) In the short term, I will be rebalancing which land uses (buildings) please/anger which gods. In the medium term, this very direct, mechanical way of interacting with the gods will be replaced by the more subtle "Decisions" system I spoke about in previous blogs.

[h2]Difficult Direction[/h2]

However, the biggest learning is that the skill level of you the players is wildly different. I balanced the demo with the objective of not having anyone get stuck in the horrible death-spiral of not having enough stone, food or workers to build and operate mines and farms. Which in turn are need to collect the stone and food already lacking. And more generally, I leaned towards making the game forgiving.

On this front, I'm really happy this death-spiral issue has hardly come up at all. (Or maybe the people who get stuck in this cycle don't stick around long enough to give any feedback).

However, I've instead found more people commenting that the game is too easy. Specifically, it's too easy to spam mines. As well, being able to build anywhere dilutes the need to carefully plan where to build and expand.

I have a few different ideas of how to tackle this, and it also ties in with another piece of feedback I received.

[h2]A Plethora of Non-Options[/h2]

When I launched the demo, I was in two minds as to whether to include all the different options for changing Tenets, Gods, maps and disasters. My concern was that this would be seen as a promise for a lot of content.

While later versions of the game will have lots of things to switch up each time you hit the new game button, right now, most of those things are not implemented. The result has caused much confusion. The game presents false choices - options that aren't actually changeable.

I realised what the game really needed was "scenarios". Fixed game setups that can't be changed, with a story wrapped around them.



I have implemented the framework for adding scenarios to the game, and I'm now focusing on making two scenarios. The first will be a re-packaging of the existing demo balance. And the second will involve a different balance (different buildings, product and wonders) plus some new surprise features that I've been working on recently.

[h2]Selective Scenarios[/h2]

I was hoping to get these new scenarios out in time for the Steam Endless Replayability festival, but there are just too many bugs to iron out. Things like making sure the tutorial still works and that save-load still functions correctly would suck if they broke from me rushing to get a release.

So instead I'm going to spend a bit more time getting these changes really polished. As part of this, I can do the land use (building) god-affinity rebalancing mentioned above. I also plan for the second scenario to address the mine spam and build-anywhere issues. This way the first scenario is still there as a gentler introduction to the game, while the second scenario provides more of a challenge.

My original plan for developing the game was to selectively turn on/off different options in the new game screen whenever I implemented a new god, disaster or tenet (feature) that I wanted the community to test. However it makes more sense to instead create a scenario and have people play that. That way, the game slowly builds up a library of content that can be re-played at any time, whilst letting me test and balance features in isolation. (The release version of the game will still have what I'm for now calling a "Custom Game" with the ability to change all the options).

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

Critias Empire is currently registered for Steam NextFest in June. A game can only ever be in one NextFest ever, so I'm still debating if it's worth sticking with this sooner NextFest or waiting for the edition after, in October.

I also need to portion up my workload on Critias Empire with my other game, Palm Paradise Garden; also currently slated for June Next Fest. I will keep working on the Critias Empire scenarios update in any case. My plan is still to have the demo available all the time and added to on an on-going basis, regardless of the festivals and events the game is part of.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, (or especially if you find a bug I've reported as fixed!) you can always contact me or leave a comment!

The Critias Empire demo is out now! Go check it out (download link is on the Steam page).

The demo launch coincides with TurnBasedThursday Festival on Steam. I've also set up a discord server where you can hang out and discuss the game. Plus in this update I'll guide you through the work done this month and future plans and roadmap for the game.

[h2]Demonstrating[/h2]

The demo is a cut-down version of Critias Empire. There is only 1 wonder needed for victory, rather than the usual 3. As well, it is played on a small map with reduced number of products and land uses (buildings). And there are only 2 Gods and 2 disasters. I'm hoping this, along with all the future planned content teased in the New Game screen, will be enough to excite people for the final game.



If you enjoyed the demo, click that wishlist button - it's free and will massively help support the game, especially when it comes to awakening the Steam recommendations algorithm into showing the game to more people.

[h2]Charting a Course[/h2]

I've talked extensively in these updates about all the things I'd like to add to Critias Empire. My plan is to now update Critias Empire "in the wild". I will keep adding to the demo as more features are implemented.

Decisions, which I talked about in Devlog 12, are top of the list. Mostly because I think the promise of interacting with the complex personalities of the Olympian Gods isn't really fulfilled by the current Affinity system.

Survey rewards, also as mentioned in the last devlog, are also still high up on the list of improvements. If only to make the late game in the demo less of a grind.

Beyond that, I've marked various features in the game as "Planned" or "Roadmap":

Planned - These are features (Gods, Tenets, Maps, Disasters etc) that absolutely will be implemented, even if it kills me. Oracle, Festivals, Zeus, Fire and Flood disasters are guaranteed - Completing them is the measure I will use to determine when the main game launch is at least viable.

If the game has an early access period (something I'm seriously reconsidering), then Demeter and her associated Health tenet and Climate Change disaster, will come after early access launch but before full version 1,0 launch.



Roadmap - These are all things I have planned and designed - that I would love to implement - but that realistically won't happen if sales of the game simply don't justify it. My intention in "teasing" them is to get you excited as I am for the game and all its possibilities. Just not too excited :p

[h2]Shipping[/h2]

As for the last month's work, Critias Empire has been subjected to all sorts of rigorous testing, pokes and prods. I managed to implement about half the UX (user experience) and QoL (Quality of Life) improvements suggested by testers since February. Sadly two of the most requested: Undo, and hovering over bonus resources on the map, didn't make the cut.

What did make it in were mostly tooltip improvements. Making the build info tooltip sticky after hovering over the land uses (buildings) in the build menu - this alone has changed how I personally play the game. There are now tooltips on (nearly) everything, and my hope is that will help with game transparency and learning.



I also rebalanced cloth and wool economies needed for cities. And I put in quite some work on behind the scenes saving/loading functionality. Game saves are now backward compatible. You can open an old save game from a previous version, and It'll use that version's balance data, rather than the current balance data. This also means I can test different game balances without affecting player's current and previous games. In the really far future, I hope to use it to provide "alternative" rule sets and scenarios.

[h2]Joining the Fleet[/h2]

I've been taking part in #TurnBasedThursday on twitter for the last two years, and now the community behind that has organised a Steam Festival, aptly named TurnBasedThursdayFest. It runs from 4th April to 8th April, making it the perfect chance to launch the Critias Empire demo.



Critias Empire being part of the festival selection is something for which I'm incredibly humbled. This is a community that has supported each other, including me, for a long time and is one of the reasons I love working in the games industry. Not only are the other developers lovely people, but their games are also great. Even for attention-hogging and time consuming 4X strategy genre, video games are not zero sum, so I highly encourage you to check out the other games also in the festival.

A number of those other games are also now linked on the Critias Empire store page in their own special section. Definitely give these a look if strategy and turn-based games are your jam!

[h2]Sailing Far and Wide[/h2]

I've also put not-inconsiderable effort into marketing material for the demo launch. I have created a gameplay video without commentary for use as b-roll should any content creators or press wish to use that while talking about Critias Empire. The presskit link is here and I've also added updated screenshots and gifs to said presskit.

You can also now see my beautiful face (eh?) on the broadcast stream on the Critias Empire steam page. I will hopefully be live later in the week, but before then you can watch the pre-recorded video where I play through the Critias Empire demo and introduce the game, explain various concepts and mostly try not to get my ass kicked by the Gods in the process.

[h2]Stormy Waters[/h2]

Doubtless when the demo launches, some of you will find bugs myself and other testers have not yet come across. Please do use the Bug Report feature: Either it will automatically pop up, or you can press the bug report button, or you can press F8 to open it. I won't be able to reply to every bug report but I will read them all and they can be immensely useful!

As well, I have implemented data tracking / analytics into the game. This is mostly to help me with balancing the game and tracking down bugs. However I also want to be up-front about recording/sending/using data. So if you're not comfortable in any way with being tracked, just hit the "Data Collection" option either when you first start the game, or in the settings screen.

Finally, I will mention that some testers have had problems with anti-virus flagging Critias Empire. Specifically windows defender started having problems with the game once I added in buttons to open the Steam store page and news pages from inside the game. I have run anti-virus scans on my build machine and scanned the resulting Critias Empire.exe file with external anti-virus checkers and it has come back clean and virus free each time. I am satisfied it's just windows defender being over-zealous. But in case you are worried, do run an anti-virus checker of your own after installation. Only ever install via Steam, and if you're still worried, don't click the "Read More" and "Wishlist/Discord" buttons on the main menu.

[h2]Shipmates[/h2]

I have set up a discord server for my studio - Crystalline Green Ltd. - with a dedicated channel for discussing Critias Empire. I'm still contactable on twitter/X and less regularly, facebook and reddit, but I'm a big discord user, and in case you are too, or you have questions or problems that aren't getting such a quick response elsewhere, you can now find me on discord.



[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

One of my other games, Palm Paradise Garden, was accepted onto the Steam Farming Festival. So my focus between now and then (end of April) will be on finishing the demo for that game. I will however spend my evenings and weekends fixing Critias Empire bugs, so expect one or two small bug fixing patches between now and the end of the month.

After that (or maybe before, depending on my schedule), as mentioned I'll be aiming to firstly make surveying less painful. And after that get stuck into implementing Decisions feature.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, you can always contact me or leave a comment!

Back at the start of February, I put out a call on a few discord servers where I regularly hang out for people to privately test the Critias Empire demo.

I am eternally grateful to those who gave their time to play it and give feedback! You've massively helped both from a technical perspective, and also in terms of both inspiration, motivation and helping clarify the path forward for the game.

[h2]Bugs Bugs Bugs - Part 2[/h2]

Just about every player who tried the demo found some bugs. Some really obscure ones floated to the surface, which was great. Perhaps more usefully, a variety of people played the game in ways that are just completely different from how I approach it. This in turn gave me a huge list of small improvements to make to the game. Some things players just didn't understand, whilst other parts of the game that are awkward or fiddly to play, that I've got used to, were made clear to me as not being ready for players.



In particular

• I don't have an ultrawide monitor, but a few testers did, and my "solution" for these screen types proved hopelessly inadequate. I now have a fix that I'm hoping to test very soon.
  
• Tutorial bugs continued to crop up. One especially nasty bug left players unable to rescue their mines and farms after a disaster, and actually gave them the wrong idea about how rescuing was supposed to work
  
• Lots of UI elements still don't update correctly, which is incredibly annoying as a player (if you think you have enough resources to do something, and then the game says "uh actually no, I just forgot to tell you").
  
• The error handling and bug reporting system was the worst offender in terms of me being used to it being slightly broken. A number of errors that don't actually affect the player and are more reminders for me, that should have been handled silently, interrupted the player and made the game seem way more error prone and buggy than it is. As well, my bug reporting system didn't quite report enough information for me to diagnose some of the really critical game breaking bugs, which is disappointing to say the least.
  

[h2]Foggy Horizons[/h2]

In feedback, Surveying came top of the list of half-baked features. I nearly didn't include it in the demo, but leaving it out would open up a big hole in the end-game. It's essential to the idea of resources refreshing and the player going from seeing disasters as purely negative, to seeing them as an opportunity to find new sources of rare gold and marble.



I have improved the usability of surveys, adding in some small quality of life features to make it a bit more usable. The biggest problem now however is that it's badly balanced. Surveying is (rightly) expensive, but the rewards simply do not match that. And the random nature makes it feel completely random and arbitrary. There's not much thought in surveying, which is no fun.

I plan to tackle this in two ways:

- Rewards for "failed" surveys.
- Clues on where actual useful results might be. I want players to be able to sniff out the valuable resources they want, or get a hint that what they're looking for just isn't there right now.

Hopefully I'll be able to talk more about this more in the next update.

[h2]Decisions[/h2]

Last month I teased a new way of interacting with the Gods, which I'm calling "Decisions". The general principle is that player actions don't directly affect God anger and patience, but instead have a chance to trigger a "decision". When triggered, the player is given a short scenario / story about what the Gods have been up to and think of the player's actions. The player is then given a couple of choices of how to react. Each choice has a chance for different good and bad outcomes. These outcomes in turn drive God anger and patience, which ultimately leads to disasters. Or maybe the Gods give rewards, making them no longer exclusively negative actors. Or even one God gives a gift and another gets super angry!

I think it'll make for a much more immersive way of interacting with the Gods, and bring the Gods closer to the aim of being a bit of a mysterious puzzle for players to have fun figuring out. Plus it should long term allow for fun things like playing Gods off against each other, sucking up to one God in particular, or manipulating the Gods into making "favourable" disasters.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

I've not had time to work on Decisions yet, but I'm convinced from talking to players testing the demo that it's the right way to go. I have applied to be in a Steam event in early April and if I'm accepted, then my aim will be to have Decisions in the demo, and the demo ready in time for the festival.

it will be tight, considering I am also now working on two further small games (which you can find here and here for those interested). Work on them is going well, but as with game development, there's never enough time for everything.

I've also not had any feedback from the publishers I contacted at the end of January. Partly I've been slow to chase them up, but I know some of them did play the demo (going by the in-game analytics), so if they were really interested, I think I would know by now.

So for now I'm going to continue working on the basis I won't have a publisher. That means taking part in Steam NextFest in June. As well, I now have a release date in mind, though I still need to finalise a few things before announcing exactly when.

Consequently, the game will initially release with fewer Gods, disasters and Tenets (features/systems). However, the feedback from the demo so far is that there's plenty to keep players entertained just with what is currently in the game. And nothing is getting cut. Those planned Gods, disasters and Tenets will simply move to being post-launch updates.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, you can always contact me or leave a comment!

After spending the last 3 months of 2023 travelling South America, I am back to working on Critias Empire. A lot (lot lot!) of bugs have been fixed, the demo is ready and there's even a tutorial now!

[h2]Bugs Bugs Bugs[/h2]

Way back in August, I took Critias Empire to devcom conference in Cologne, Germany. Mostly for pitching the game to publishers, but I also had a table at the show on which I had the game running. I got a huge amount of feedback from watching and talking to people who played the game.

There were a lot of bugs, UX issues and things which as the developer, I could ignore or work around, but which tripped up new players completely unfamiliar with the game.



Since returning from my travels at the start of this month, I've been hard at work fixing more small things than I could possibly list in this update.

More heartening was seeing people understand the game and enjoy it, and then start taking about all the different aspects of the game. That was a really big morale boost for me personally and a good sign the game is on the right track.

[h2]So, what do I do?[/h2]

However, I didn't have a tutorial in time for devcom, and so I had to babysit the stand and explain how to play to each new player.

A tutorial therefore became top priority in the new year, both for the game in general, and also for the more immediate aim of being able to put a demo in the hands of publishers, and not have them go "ermm... bwah?... what?" when they open the game.



The new tutorial is more basic than I'd like, both in terms of content, and in only giving the player one way to learn. But I'm quite pleased with how it isn't too restrictive. The player can mostly ignore it, rather than being forced to jump through hoops. I know many strategy game fans are the sort to learn by jumping in and making mistakes, so this is quite important.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

The demo is all set up on Steam and ready to be launched. I sent beta keys for the demo to many of the publishers I pitched to in the summer, and a few more beyond that. Waiting to hear back from them before deciding if and when to go live.

The plan is to keep updating the demo and building it "in the wild". Ultimately I want Critias Empire to be a living game that continues to evolve and improve. So aiming to get into that mode from demo launch onward.

Priorities wise, there will doubtlessly be bugs and issues to fix once the demo goes live. Beyond that, I have some ideas on how to make interacting with the Gods a bit more fun and less formulaic.

And after that, the long planned "Festivals" feature should also give players an extra dimension when it comes to playing into or against the Gods.

Lastly, I have started working on a couple of new games. These small projects are designed to give me a bit of a break from Critias Empire, and get something out on the store that can earn a bit of revenue and sustain development in case I'm not able to find a publisher for Critias Empire. For those of you following me on social media, you may see me talking about them very soon. But fear not, as work is still continuing on Critias Empire in parallel.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, you can always contact me or leave a comment!

In preparation for the demo, the game has once again been re-balanced, this time focusing on the gods Poseidon and Hephaestus respectively. With this has come new God related features, plus a lot of bug fixing and user experience improvements.

[h2]Gods Get Tough[/h2]

After meeting lots of publishers at Develop conference in Brighton in July, I realised, perhaps unsurprisingly, that they all want to get their hands on a demo of the game. So they can see if it's fun, or at the very lease see that it has the seeds for something great in it.

To that end, I decided to rebalance the game yet again. This time however, the focus was on making a really great demo to convey the essence of the game to potential publishers. That meant making what was already in the game more coherent and less a bunch of parts that would "eventually come together". Then making that shine.

In particular, the connection between the gods and the disasters was weak.

I decided to take the two existing disasters in the game - volcanoes and earthquakes - and pair them up with two gods, each of whom would spawn just that one disaster. Hephaestus is the god of volcanoes (amongst other things), so naturally he was paired with volcanoes. Meanwhile the earthquakes in Critias Empire are all about changing the land and sea, so made most sense to give to Poseidon.

[h2]How Angry?[/h2]

All the previous work on disasters from months ago made it easy to set up and balance Hephaestus and Poseidon with their respective disasters. However there was no way for the player to ever see or get a sense of what was going on.

To solve this, the new "God UI" shows various indicators that the player's soothsayers and mystics have divined about the gods. The information is purposely ambiguous and mysterious, and the hope is that players will have fun figuring out the god's intent and behaviour from this.



The God UI also includes an "Appease" feature, which allows prayers to be spent to lessen a god's anger or increase their patience. I'm not sure yet if this is a good idea and whether it will remain in the game, but for now it's a nice way for the player to directly interact with the gods.

As well, the gods now have a positive or negative affinity with certain land-uses (buildings). I am also undecided as to whether this is something the game should be be so explicit about, or whether to instead have more subtle clues (spooky noises and vfx perhaps could be cool, but could also be missed by players? Rather than unambiguous big fat up/down arrows as currently in the UI).

[h2]Favour with the Gods[/h2]

To support all of this, the gods each get their own prayer points resource. This concept has actually been lurking in the game data for years, but was never used until now.



How this works with rescuing and repositioning in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is still being worked out. The current plan is to have the rescue cost in prayer points of each god be a combination of the god's affinity with a particular land-use, plus which god spawned the disaster now threatening that land-use.

If there's a volcano, then praying to Hephaestus is going to make most sense (and therefore make rescue cost in Hephaestus-points cheaper). After all, the gods are nothing if not egotistical, and anything that will make the citizens of Atlantis (and the player) pray to them more is surely a good thing.

Likewise, Hephaestus is probably going to want a hefty price for rescuing the temple of another god (say Poseidon). Whereas Poseidon will want any temple dedicated to his name to be preserved, and so make the rescue cost cheaper.

The only thing still to figure out is the UI for letting players choose whose favour they want to spend. Once that's done, I will be working on implementing this next.

[h2]Protection[/h2]

Another element of interacting with the gods that needs a revisit are shrines. These protect the land around them from disaster, but are frankly overpowered. The current thinking on this leans towards the idea that each god has their own shrines, and that these only protect against disasters spawned by said god.



How useful this actually is though will need testing. The hope is it will combine well with the plans for the prediction feature (aka prophecy UI). This feature has suffered greatly from constant changes to how disasters are implemented. Hopefully there will be time to finally re-implement predictions soon.

[h2]Floating[/h2]

In addition to pitching the game to publishers at Develop conference, I will also be pitching the game at devcom/gamescom in Cologne next week! In preparation, I had a few close friends play the game, and wow! There were a lot of issues. Lots of small user experience issues, rough edges and misconceptions. Plus a hatful of balancing problems. Though not many programming bugs or crashes, which is a good sign.

The results mean it doesn't make sense to have a demo for Steam Strategy Fest. It's a shame, but no point in releasing the game with so many problems. Not to mention the complete lack of tutorial.

However, of the very long list of things wrong with the game, I've already made some progress fixing them. More bad things are red, there's more feedback on why players can't do things, and there's even little floaty text boxes to show materials spent when building.



[h2]Roading[/h2]

The road placement UI also finally received somewhat of an update. It now shows the cost of placing a road section and will be expanded to include the benefits of placing road in a specific place. The plan is also to let multiple road sections be built without having to re-open the build UI every time.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

Top of the priority list are: The rescue cost revamp, shrines revamp, prediction feature re-implementation, finishing the road placement UI, and a whole lot of small UI things.

The aim is to get all that done at least by the next update, plus re-balance the exploration feature and refine the existing balance.

Which is a lot! Especially since I will be away travelling from mid September until the end of the year, and unlikely to get much work on the game done in that time.

That said, I am quite proud of the progress made on the game in the last two weeks, so I'm optimistic I can get at least some of that done. I came very close to burning out at the end of July. I took a break from work, cleared some existing commitments that were stressing me out and things have been much better since. (This is also why this update is a bit later than normal).

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, you can always contact me or leave a comment!