Critias Empire News

While there's not much visually to show off recent progress on Critias Empire, a lot has been happening in the background. As well as taking a much needed vacation (2 short ones in-fact!), I've been polishing the game for pitching to publishers and an eventual demo.

[h2]Trailer Time[/h2]

Critias Empire has evolved over the past year and a half since the first trailer was released. It was high time a new trailer with updated graphics was made, and that's exactly what happened in June.

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For those of you who haven't checked out the Steam Store Page recently, you can also see new screenshots of the game, in addition to the new trailer.

[h2]Pitch Perfect[/h2]

I'm currently looking for a publisher for Critias Empire, and I must admit I underestimated the amount of effort that goes into the process. Not only does the game need to look great (which benefits everyone), but putting together all the disparate thoughts and underlying ideas behind the game into something both coherent and presentable has taken a lot of effort. Think multiple powerpoint presentations, each for a different situation or potential publisher, detailing every part of the game development process.

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

Road building is scheduled to get a new UI in the coming month. Also on the cards is laying the design and code foundations for eventually making a tutorial. Depending on the time, I also want to circle back round to the exploration and prophecy UIs and make them both more visually appealing and more useful.

I'll also be at develop conference in Brighton, gauging publisher interest and getting feedback on the game.

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!

Throughout the game's life, the disasters in Critias Empire have been limited to earthquakes and the terrain shifting they induced. As cool as they are, it's time to add in more different disaster types, which is the focus of this update.

[h2]Eerie Silence[/h2]

It's important that the player knows when a disaster is imminent. Not only so they can prepare, but just as importantly, to give them a sense of tension and anticipation. Already in the turn before a disaster, the music changes from baroque/romantic classical music to an eerie ambient background track. But that can be easy to miss if music volume is turned down, as can other signals such as the disaster countdown turning red.

To fix this and add extra immersion, the map now gains a grey pall, the seas turn a stormy grey and the clouds that fringe the game map turn to brooding thunderclouds. All in the turn before disaster strikes.



In the turn immediately after a disaster, the clouds and seas remain dark, while the lighting intensifies to reflect that the world is suffering the aftermath of disaster.

[h2]Then Boom![/h2]

Nothing says disaster like a volcano. Especially when we have the very real historical eruption of Mount Vesuvius, that famously destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum, as dark inspiration. Ironically that eruption helped preserve and inform much of what we know about the ancient Mediterranean world today.

In fact, the cover image of this update is of a later (probably fictionalised) eruption of Vesuvius, by painter Joseph Wright of Derby, which matches the broadly Romantic art movement style of much of the art of Critias Empire!



In terms of how volcanoes affect the game, clearly anything in the path of the volcano or the lava streams it sends are going to get destroyed without intercession of the Gods. I.e. spending prayer points to relocate those land uses and buildings in the turn immediately after the disaster. Just as how it currently works with earthquakes that leave cities, farms, mines etc underwater.

I would like to at some point make separate shield and stratovolcano disasters. The latter would rain down ash and send out pyroclastic flows, rather than flood the land with lava streams. However that will have to wait for later.

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

For the time being, I'm going to concentrate on updating the steam store page screenshots and making a new trailer. There's also still a bit of tidying up the volcano code to do.

I'm also going to stop making predictions about when a demo or the game will be released. This month I was hoping to work on Critias Empire much more than I was eventually able. Suffice to say, there will be a demo at the point where I feel the experience can really shine and give an authentic flavour of what the final game will be like.

To that end, I also aim to begin a new round of balancing before the end of May, and will most likely be more of a fine tuning of the existing balance rather than anything radical.

As always, if you have any feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, do get in contact or leave a comment!

Improving the user experience and look of the game with both big and subtle changes has been the focus of recent work on Critias Empire, the details of which are covered in this update.

[h2]Water World[/h2]

The water graphics in Critias Empire were created many many years ago, to the point that some people were commenting that the game has a retro feel. Whilst the game was never going to compete with the latest AAA graphics, the visuals of the game were not supposed to look that old!

Rather than reinvent the wheel, I decided any one of the many water graphics packs that are available off-the-shelf would be a significant improvement on what was being used before. After some experimenting, I eventually found one such water plugin that I liked (and works with the technical limitations of the game).

[h2]Are You Experienced?[/h2]

The UI is finally starting to improve in line with the plans I've had going back months. The visual upgrade is nice but, more important are the user-experience "UX" changes. No longer does the game try to bombard you with every single stat it can at every opportunity.



Instead, the game is more streamlined in its approach to information - giving you just the important "headline" stats that you need for making the decision immediately before you. The detailed stat breakdowns are still there for advanced players, and I've been careful not to hide away access to them too deep into the UI. They're just no longer clogging up screenspace when they're not needed.

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

The UI / UX revamp still has some way to go, but already the game is looking and more importantly, feeling much nicer to play. It's also having a nice side effect of making it obvious where there are balance issues.

Looking further ahead, the trailer and screenshots on the Steam Store page are now more than a year old. I want to update them to show off all the progress made since then. The plan is to do this to coincide with (finally) releasing a demo, which I anticipate will be around early to mid May.

With the global bonus system implemented, focus has shifted to balancing other parts of the game, and the implementation of a long-planned feature - exploration!

But how does exploration work in a game with no units and the map already revealed? All will be... revealed...

[h2]Hidden Riches[/h2]

Like many resource management games, Critias Empire has advanced resource types that can only be made by combining or changing more basic resources. For example, to make bronze, copper and tin must be combined in a Forge type building.

Some of these basic resources have infinite supply. A mine will never run out of stone and a farm will always produce food. But copper and tin only occur in certain places on the map and in limited quantities.

However it would suck for the player if they were trying to build the Colossus, only to find out there wasn't quite enough copper and tin on the map. Or that they had used some precious bronze for something else and now they were short.

This is where disasters come in. Disasters need some positive benefits to the player to outweigh their potentially large negative impact. In the case of some disasters like earthquakes or volcanoes, that might come in the form of new land to expand into. But that won't always be the case.

Disasters however, bring another benefit - they refresh the resources on the tiles affected. Now there's a chance any player waiting for more copper or tin might find a new ore vein appearing on the map.

To make this a bit more exciting, the player must "explore" the areas affected by disaster to reveal certain resources. It also makes sense thematically - if a new island appears out of the ocean all of a sudden, it will be obvious, even from a distance, that island has mountains, forests etc. But not that it has copper, or where those deposits might be.

[h2]Expedition-Style[/h2]

Since Critias Empire does not have units, there must be some other way to explore. My initial idea would be that players send an expedition to an area, and that some years/turns later, the expedition returns with its results. The better equipped the expedition, the more likely they were to survive and return with some useful information.

However, in Critias Empire, players can build anywhere on the map. It doesn't make sense to send an expedition out, in the meantime built a city, farms, mines etc in the expedition area, only for the expedition to come back later as a failure.

It would also be annoying if players wanted to use the turn immediately after a disaster to move their sunken cities, mines, farms etc to a newly appeared island, only to find that it is unexplored and sending an expedition will take many years/turns that they just don't have.

Therefore, I've implemented something a bit simpler. Players select an area to explore, and it is instantly revealed. The costs for exploration however, try to simulate the sentiment behind the expedition idea. Explore an area far from any city and it will cost more. Explore a larger area or explore multiple different areas in a single year/turn and it will cost more.

Exploration costs are in food and workers, so it makes sense that to do more exploration, increasingly more people and (food) supplies are needed.

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I am in the process of implementing exploration at the moment. You can see a preview of how it works above.

[h2]Onward[/h2]

This update is nearly a month late, due to contract work commitments, but I've still managed to squeeze plenty of other things into Critias Empire since the start of the year:

• The global bonus system is finally finished! Though I still need to apply it to wonders and balance them.
  
• UI revamp has been designed, though it will only be implemented as part of the UX overhaul. Especially with building Construction and Details screens, I know what I want them to do, just need to find time to do it.
  
• AI generated art is now mostly polished, photoshopped to get rid of those crazy seven fingers, and put in-game. There are a few images that still need touching up. As well, the preview images for different map types are still in the todo column.
  
• The core loop balancing was simplified. Some of the chains of resources made into other resources were overly complicated.
  

Population and workers also got a mini-rework. I multiplied all the population amounts by x10. Now rather than a city having a population of 5, and so able to supply 5 mines or 5 farms with the 1 worker they each need, instead a city might have a population of 50, with each mine or farm needing 10 workers.

This means city growth is no longer just about having exactly enough food. Instead having a bit more of a surplus might be just enough to get that extra 1 population/worker, which in turn makes the difference between having just enough workers to run that extra mine or farm.

As well, it means when balancing the game, I can add more subtlety into the amounts of workers each land use (building) needs. A hypothetical example, mines only need 7 workers, while farms need a full 10, but an upgraded mine needs 20 workers, whereas an upgraded farm needs just 15. This adds an extra level of decision making and depth for advanced players, while not overly complicating things for players who don't care so much.

[h2]Surveying the Horizon[/h2]

I've also been keen to find out what people actually expect of Critias Empire. Whether the (admittedly slightly out of date) screenshots and trailer give an accurate impression of what the game actually is. Or whether people are looking at Critias Empire and expecting something quite different from what I'm actually making.

With that in mind, I prepared a survey. I would be very appreciative if you could fill it out. Or if you have any other feedback on the game, I'm very keen to hear it in the comments below!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd0mR_iEtzA6WVe0Ch0l8wFtJq8JGe2x7Sa11kpwSwGqQGmqw/viewform

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

Finishing off exploration is the immediate priority, followed by actually implementing the UI / UX revamp. Beyond that, it continues to be just balancing, balancing, balancing. That said, just like with exploration, there'll likely be other things within the balancing process that get implemented or fixed along the way. Such as the prophecy, festivals and transport/roads features.

As well, I still want to get a demo out sooner rather than later, which will require polishing some aspects of the game. But this will come when I'm happy that the different elements of the game all mesh together in a fun, enjoyable way.

As the end of the year rolls in, development of Critias Empire continues to progress apace. The global bonus system foundations have been implemented, along with about half the planned bonus types. While I didn't (yet) start on to the UI improvements mentioned last blog, the game did receive some new art, which I'm very excited about.

[h2]Wondrous[/h2]

The global bonus system gives the player bonuses (or penalties) right across their empire, rather than being limited to specific land uses (buildings). Amazingly, I've worked on the game for years without ever actually needing such a system, at least until now. However, it's now key to make wonders... well, wondrous!

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To give you a flavour of what this means by way of example, the Temple of Artemis wonder provides a bonus to certain special resources: All "Fish" now get an extra 15 food added to their reserves, meaning they last longer before expiring and produce more over their whole lifetime.

There are still a few more bonus types to add, after which I need to balance and test which wonders give what bonuses. But I'm excited as I think not only will this make wonders a really powerful, interesting part of the game. And the global bonus system can be used for other things as well.

Specifically, there is a feature called "Festivals" on the roadmap, which is ideally suited to use the global bonus system. As well, many strategy games have quest systems and random events systems, which if I ever decide to put into Critias Empire, could tie into and use the global bonus system also.

[h2]March of the Gods[/h2]

Much of the art in Critias Empire is public domain, simply because when I started making the game, I didn't have the money to hire an artist, nor the skills to make the art myself. This however, has proved incredibly limiting, as I often can't quite get the art the game needs, especially if I want to keep the style at least somewhat consistent.

The arrival of AI generated art has left me somewhat torn, as it's clearly going to make a lot of artists, many of whom are my friends and colleagues, either unemployed or relegated to the far less creative work of touching up and fixing AI generated images.



However, ultimately I need art for my game, and the 18th-19th century oil on canvas styles I've been using so far in my game are all from long-dead artists. The results from my experiments with AI generation are scarily good so far. I've been able to generate portrait images for all the Gods in Critias Empire in a fraction of the time and cost that would have been needed otherwise.

Nevertheless, it's a controversial topic, so I want to be as open as possible, and respect anyone who does not want to support the game for this reason.



That said, there is still quite a lot of work to do on each image to bring it to the quality I'm aiming for. I've been using Midjourney so far and it does love to make shirtless greek Gods have far too many muscles. And when it comes to fingers, just about every God so far has had either a horrendous accident with a food blender, or spent a bit too long hanging out at the local nuclear power plant, with the 6 fingers and 7 toes mutations that come with it.

These problems though, are all fixable with a bit of time and my rudimentary photoshop skills. I'll also find out soon how well the AI algorithm handles tsunamis and forest fires.

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

While wonders still need yet more time, I'm confident they are on course to be an intriguing and integral part of the game.

UI polish is the next area of focus after that, with the first part being the experiments I've already started with AI generated art. This will fill in the holes, and make the game more visually appealing, before I move onto UX improvements and all the gloriously fiddly aspects of perfecting the game's UI.

The prophecy/oracle feature, as well as sea-routes to connect road networks on different islands are also both still (still...) near the top of the todo list.

All of which is aimed at making the game as fun and shiny as possible for the planned upcoming demo. I decided to drop out of the upcoming February edition of Steam NextFest simply because there is too much marketing and promotion work to do between now and then to make the most of it. This way I can concentrate on just making the demo and the game in general, the best it can be.