Greetings everyone,
Last week we launched our "Ask Anything to Chris Beatrice", Lead Designer on the all-time classic and original Pharaoh from 1999.
We'd like to thank everyone for sending out questions to Chris. He really had fun reading and answering them all. As we received a lot of questions, we had to write two different news to post everyone's questions and answers.
In this first part, you will find below all questions and answers related to the following topics:
- Development and Gameplay
- Art Direction and History
- In-game features
Dropbear (Discord):
Q: Do you also eventually break down and just build slums to get to the population goal on some maps? Also, how much research went into pyramid building for the game?
Chris: Some people do play that way. It’s unfortunate that sometimes there are exploits like this that players can do or things they have to do, either to win or to get through boring flat spots in the game. It takes a lot of testing and polish to smooth all of those things out. Some missions in Pharaoh take a long time! It can be very hard to playtest well enough to identify all the pacing and balance issues that might crop up. One thing you learn as a designer is players don’t automatically play the game the way you want or expect them to.
Pyramid research: well, yeah, a ton of work went into that. Though scholars still don’t really know all the details about how the pyramids were built (can you believe the Egyptians do not seem to have recorded this anywhere?). Again, though, back in 1999 it was all books! (and I still have them… some with the sticky notes still in). The internet was fairly useless for things like this at the time.
RANCOR (Discord)
Q: How long did the development take and P and QotN take?
Chris: Pharaoh took less than a year, but remember of course we were building on Caesar III. So it’s not really accurate to say Pharaoh only took that short a time. It’s not just about having the C3 “engine” (which, in those days, wasn’t really a thing), but it is about having a fun, playable game from day one, thanks to C3. There is a lot of overhead starting a game from scratch, a lot of interdependencies, and fluidity that make it hard to get the basis for the fun established.
CotN took a lot longer because we were simultaneously getting the company off the ground, dealing with Microsoft dropping us, etc. It ended up being about four years from start to finish.
GloriousCraft (Discord)
Q: How was it developing and working on Pharaoh? Stressful? Fun? Did you think it would ever reach the level of success it did at its time?
Chris: Fun? Stressful? Yes! Both and a lot of other things. Exhilarating… The experience of going through a game development cycle is very special. Once you’ve done it with a bunch of other people it’s like everyone who hasn’t done it is a “civilian.” Because it pretty much demands your whole life. At least that’s how it used to be. I wrote the Pharaoh tutorial in the maternity ward the day my son was born! I ate three meals a day with the Pharaoh team for nearly a year.
And with games, it always feels like (and often is true that) the future of the company is on the line. If the game fails or doesn’t come in on time, then some people, maybe everyone, will lose their jobs. Or the parent company won’t support your next project. Or if you’re independent it’ll be harder to get funding, etc. If you have the right people (which we did) then it’s a feeling of camaraderie, mutual sacrifice, and shared risk that is hard to express. It’s the hardest you will ever work, yet it’s not like having a real job.
I’d never designed a game before, and in a single year, I found myself as head of the studio and designer of our big title. I knew that I didn’t know what I was doing… so I made sure first and foremost not to break anything that was fun in Caesar III. That provided a very good safety net, though it was not always easy (players and some members of the team pushed for changing things that I felt would have undermined the C3 magic).
I never thought it would be as successful as it was, no. Everything just came together right, and the marketing group at the time, particularly the European wing (in France) really got behind it. In those pre-social media days, traditional marketing mattered a lot (press events, advertising, including billboards even).
Sajuuk (Discord)
Q: What was the thing you enjoyed most about developing and/or designing in Pharaoh? Did you feel that, in the process of developing Pharaoh, you wanted to make it the most in-depth and as "historically accurate" as was possible in the context of a game, and what challenges did you come across in the process of having to implement so many unique features (like the monuments and the inundation) on top of the Caesar 3 engine?
Chris: Honestly what I enjoyed most was leading the team and the company to success. Pharaoh didn’t need a huge team, so we all knew each other really well, and were all under one roof together all the time. But it was big enough that we had separate departments and protocols for how departments would interact. The design and the game were compact enough that one person (me) would be able to tell you at any time exactly how something was supposed to work (on top of keeping really clear and accurate design specs). That streamlines the process a lot. Pharaoh was where Impressions became a machine--a bunch of separate parts working really well together. That’s what allowed us to create Zeus the following year.
Historical accuracy
Well, yeah, I love history, and the idea of doing historical research and figuring out how to translate all that coolness into a game was pretty exciting. As far as being historically accurate, we were walking a line. A game needs to be fun, first and foremost (and by “fun” we mean addictive, sorry to say). You have to want to keep playing it. Many things that were not historic supported the fun better (such as currency).
Challenges of monuments and flood
The monuments and the flooding were very demanding on the programmers. The existing engine had obviously not been developed with anything like this capability in mind. Back then there were not really game engines: a game was coded mostly from scratch to do exactly and only what was needed for that game. So we had C3 which was a great underlying structure for the city-building stuff, but not the monuments and the flooding.
But one thing that our team shined at was working together to deliver a good end-result come hell or high water. That meant the art, programming, and design teams working together to come up with solutions for whatever challenges were put to them. I think even we were surprised at the visual impact of the result because having things of that scale (pyramids and flooding) added an entirely new visual dimension.
AnubisTheDeath (Discord)
Q: What was the biggest challenge you and the team faced when developing the original Pharaoh?
Chris: Technically it was probably the flooding. Not just the visuals (using a 2d tile-based system to transform the map), but pathing. The city-building games are all about pathing (little people and vehicles moving around, trying to get where they need to) and now we’re introducing a map that is changing in real-time, with things that can travel on water or land needing to figure out where the best way to go, not get stuck, etc.
Pants (Discord)
Q: With Pharaoh, how did you and the team balance historical accuracy with gameplay and overall enjoyment? To extend the question. It is obvious that a large amount of research went into the game in order to make it as authentic as you could at the time.
Chris: I love history so much. I’ll take Vikings over GoT any day…
In making a historical game I look at it like a one-way street, that is, the history is there to inspire me, but not to limit me. I don’t owe anything to historical accuracy, but I try not to insult it too much. Because a game is not a documentary or a textbook. It has to be fun. Honestly, I might sometimes prefer to make purely educational products! But that’s not what Pharaoh is, so I basically mined the wealth of ancient Egypt for anything big that would inject fundamentally different gameplay, and/or small that would enrich that. If the historical reality would have altered the fundamental gameplay or made it less fun (as the currency example), then we had to ignore the historical reality. But in other areas, for example, the Egyptian language names for the cities--I just thought those were really cool, so I included them.
The annual flooding of the Nile, plus using all the resources of your city to build these massive monuments are really great examples where unique historical factors of the setting were absolutely perfect for bringing the city-building gameplay to a bigger and better place. With the city-building games we always had this challenge of, why are you building that city? Ratings? That’s pretty unfulfilling and not really visual or visceral. But if you’re building a city to build a monument, then you have this massive, glorious thing growing like a progress bar or something, dependent on a pretty complex underlying machine you’ve made.
Sorah (Discord)
Q: Is there anything in the game you’re especially proud of? Any funny memories while developing the game?
Chris: Personally, I’m proud of the tutorial/campaign. Before Pharaoh, the idea with our games was to get players playing the “real game” as quickly as possible. If the game was complex and needed time to learn, that was considered bad. But sometimes it was the reality. So there was often a kind of denial, as was the case with Caesar III. Give some basic instruction with a limited building set, then enable all the buildings, then off you go. That’s fine for some players, but a lot gets left out (me included, as I am not a great gamer).
With Pharaoh, I decided to embrace the richness of the gameplay and the wealth of buildings, by spreading out the introduction of buildings and resources over many scenarios. In fact, rather than try to get the player playing with all the buildings as soon as possible, I used the opposite approach, trying to make sure there were new things to introduce much further down the line. The result was a kind of synchronicity between the historical evolution of Egypt and the tiered nature of the building model in the game.
Raph'Link-Skywalker (Discord):
Chris: I am amazed that Pharaoh lives on in some small ways!
Pharaoh deities: The idea was to find a set of gods that synched up with the broad areas of gameplay. We could have had more or less, but when you get too many they run the risk of being less distinct from one another.
Game engine and development: Yeah, you’re right. The tools and tech were archaic, and our tech was behind the times even back then! But so are/were a lot of great games. The end result is all that matters, and if the gameplay is engaging you can get away with a lot.
Making games in those days was a lot of smoke and mirror illusion. It still is, to a large degree, because you are always trying to get the most out of limited resources. It comes down to the different disciplines having to work together to solve problems. The designer says he wants such and such, the programming lead says “well, we can do this but not exactly that,” then the art lead says, “well if you can do this then we can make it work like such and such,” and so on.
Whether Pharaoh helped give people an overview of ancient Egypt… I don’t know! I think most of the world is and was already pretty interested in it, which benefitted us a lot. However, I will say, reading about the annual flooding of the Nile and how important the river was is not the same as playing a strategy game and feeling almost like your life depended on it. That was something I was really happy with it. You know, when you get into a game it feels like the most important thing in the world. I don’t think anyone who played Pharaoh is ever going to need it explained to them how vital the Nile river was to the ancient Egyptians.
The game probably doesn’t give a sense of what life was like in ancient Egypt, like, from the perspective of someone who lived it, but I think it does convey the factors affecting the development of the culture and the unique history and geography of the place.
I would definitely like to have seen other settings for the classic cb games after Pharaoh and Zeus, yeah.
Honestly, it’s a shock to see the enthusiasm around Pharaoh. The game changed my life. Before Pharaoh, I was not a game designer. Now (according to Google) that’s what I am. But, seriously, as a creator mostly what you dream about is your work living on. It’s not so much about commercial success (though the two are often related), it’s about making something that is outside of you that goes on to have its own life.
Vinorcola (Discord)
Q: What was the most challenging part of the game development (Maybe including the first version of Caesar as Pharaoh has grown up over Caesar)?
Q: Was there any part that made your team redo some work from scratch because of technical limitations or anything else?
Q: Did you use a common algorithm (Dijkstra, A*, etc.) or did you have to make homemade algorithms for better performances? Thank you for your answers.
Chris: I was only marginally involved in the design process of Caesar III (which was designed by David Lester and Simon Bradbury), but I was a witness to it. And fundamentally that’s where Pharaoh’s success comes from. In other words, they did the hard part.
The flooding of the Nile and the monument construction were pretty much entirely new systems, both from a design and a technical standpoint.
GamerZahk (Discord)
In Caesar 3, there's what I call the 'immigration glitch' where on Very Hard only, between 200-300 population, people were automatically unhappy and moved out. This can get you stuck between 200-300 population forever until it ticks over 300 by force or chance and the city becomes happy again.
This isn't an issue in Pharaoh but recently I tried the demo copy of Pharaoh and the immigration glitch was still there in the demo.
Q: I just want to know if this indeed was a bug that was fixed sometime between the Pharaoh demo and Pharaoh release or if it was a game design choice that was decided to be removed? As a second question, was the difficulty of the military on some maps like Qadesh tested on Very Hard? Because they're near impossible. Thank you for reading/answering! These have been questions I've been dealing with for years.
Chris: It sure sounds like a bug that was fixed. In those days a lot of the development and testing of the game happened post demo.
Caesar ZX (Steam)
Q: Hey Chris, been playing Impressions city-building series for 24 years now. Here is my set of questions :
1. How are you and David Lester doing lately?
2. How did you end up working with David in the 90s?
3. Were all those marvelously exquisite 2D art assets in the games (the ones with walker mechanism) since Caesar 3 made with 3D software or hand-drawn in 2D?
4. Was Pharaoh planned before Caesar 3's completion or after?
5. Had Impressions ever considered any civilization other than Rome, Egypt, Greece and China back then? There are so many more questions I wanted to ask but I guess you might need a break.
Chris: We’re both doing as well as anyone else! We had dinner a couple of years ago and David and I just rudely talked about the good old days while our spouses and kids indulged us. David is a great person who changed my life.
2. I answered an ad in a printed newspaper, for an art director at Impressions (“Impressions Software” at the time). I’d been working as a freelance game artist for only a few months. In those days there were artists and people who could use computers, but hardly anyone who did both. But I had been doing digital art for a couple of years, so I got the job.
3. All the Pharaoh buildings were 3d pre-rendered. This was a transitional period where most developers (us included) were just starting to use 3d software to create assets but were not making actual 3d games yet.
4. Pharaoh was officially decided upon after Caesar III, but the idea had been floating around for a while. It was the obvious choice for the successor if the setting were going to change. That was the only remaining question (another Rome, or a different setting?).
5. As you’ve noted, there is the typical handful of ancient world settings to choose from. But it was always “...but the monuments…!” On top of that, the European (French) marketing group really got behind the idea of doing Pharaoh.
Arokh (Steam)
Hi Chris! Ever since I saw the preview pictures for Pharaoh on the Pharaoh Heaven webpage, I wondered, why some of those gardens/statues and other buildings like small obelisks are not in the finished game?
Q: Is there something that you really wanted/planned to be in the game but didn't happen in the end?
Chris: These things happen when you have to make a game on a very short time scale. You have to produce promotional materials before the game is even designed. You’re designing the game while it’s being developed. There was no pre-production! Even the intro sequence was like, the animators create a bunch of scenes they think are cool then we figure out how to make an intro of it later. If I’d written the intro first then the gameplay design would have been delayed.
I can’t think of anything I’d wanted to include that didn’t make it.
LiVam (Steam)
Q: If you could go back and change anything about Pharaoh, what would it be?
Q: What challenges did you and the team face during development?
Q: What drew you to this time period?
Chris: I’d do a better job on combat, or not include it, or fundamentally changed its role in the game.
2. Not having enough time to iterate and try different ideas. It was just churning out design specs and making sure they were implemented, testing to make sure they worked and hoping they were fun. But we had the existing fun of C3 as a baseline or safety net, of course.
3. I think ancient Egypt is unique in the way it is a real, historical setting, that is at the same time mystical. This amazing culture is now basically gone. Their geography was strange, they built these monuments that I’m not sure we could build even today… everyone in the world knows about them.
They were not really city-planners, though. There was only one planned city (Amarna). So that was not a great fit as the Roman setting was. But it’s a good example of how ideas develop organically. The idea for the Caesar games came from the fact that the Romans basically transplanted their city templates all over Europe and other parts of the ancient world. Then that game became the inspiration for a game about building cities in order to construct monuments.
Quackles (Discord)
Q: Why did you decide to carry over the player's monuments for the multi-missions (Alexandria, # in the Valley) in Cleopatra, but not the rest of the city? It would have been great to just pick up where we left off.
Chris: Is this only a Cleopatra question? If so, I can’t answer it. I only supervised the design of Cleo but was pretty hands-off as I was designing Zeus at the time...
Mccoy (Steam)
Q: Can you solve the mystery about the walker audio file pharaoh_e01.wav?
Q: Why is it not possible to build obelisks and pyramids in the same mission?
Chris: My friend, based on these questions, I suspect you remember more about some details of the game than I do. :)
Carsten Scheer (Facebook)
Q: Was there a feature, back in the days, you need to cut, because of technical limitations?
Chris: Well, that’s tough to answer. I mean, it’s a 2d game, so “smooth rotation” and “street-level view” might have been fun. Making a game, movie, anything, is always a question of doing the most you can with the resources you have. If PC’s had been more powerful, the Pharaoh graphics would have been higher res and had more frames of animation / higher frame rate. But I can’t think of anything the game needed that we weren’t able to do because of technical limitations.