Greetings everyone,
In this first part, you will find below all questions and answers related to the following topics:
- Improvements and what if
- Other topics
Naalnish (Discord):
Q: If there was one thing you could improve on in the original Pharaoh game what would it be and why?
Chris: Well, if I had to choose one thing, I would deal with combat better. Either get rid of it or make it smooth and fun (which, it’s safe to say, it isn’t in the original game).
At the time RTS games were just coming into their own, and it was hard to gauge how the game would be received if it didn’t have any combat, or what standard the combat would be held to by players. We didn’t have enough time to make it really great, but we felt we needed to give players some influence over the result of combat encounters. I just remember having no bandwidth to deal with it properly, because with a development schedule that tight you need to stay focused on the core of the game, which was the city-building...
Other questions: What compromises did you and your team make to achieve a good balance between historical accuracy and gameplay?
Looking back on Pharaoh and Cleopatra, is there anything that you think of now that you wished you and the team had done differently?
Are there any features/gameplay elements that you wanted to include but had to be cut due to technological limitations at the time? Again, thank you for the AMA, and thank you for Pharaoh, it is honestly my favorite game of all time.
Chris: 1. Compromises, well, they’re all over the place, but I don’t really look at it that way. Having currency, markets delivering food to houses, even the idea of a planned city is alien to the setting. What made many of these choices easy was the fact that we had the underlying Caesar III gameplay as both an asset and a limitation.
One thing that could have been a compromise but we made work was the fact that the pyramids, including the great pyramid at Giza, which are probably the most well-known and recognized monuments in the world, considered the height of the Egyptian civilization, came very early in the history of Egypt. It would have worked better for them to be more like the end goal in the campaign, but the historical timeline was one area where I wanted to stick close to reality...
2. I had nothing to do with Cleopatra, really. As for Pharaoh, you know, I guess, I’d have to say, no. Because nothing is perfect, and given the time and resources we had, to have made a game that people still talk about, well, I couldn’t ask for more. I guess I’d say that I wish after the success of Pharaoh I’d focused the studio entirely on the city-building games. But at the time it was kind of taboo for a studio to only do one thing.
3. Thanks for the kind words about Pharaoh. It’s wonderful to have been part of something that has touched so many people and continues to inspire. As far as gameplay elements, as I said in response to someone else, I really wish we’d done a better job with combat, either made it really good (though simple), or just not included it, and handled it with auto-calc (and maybe some more advanced troop-creation options)
And I always wished we’d been able to polish the game more.
Fro (Discord):
Q: Do you still have hope that Medieval Mayor will be developed and released one day? What was the idea behind the local work pool? More realism? But why did you decide then that a couple of houses are sufficient to have access to all workers on the map? Is that a feature you’d have made differently afterward?
Chris: I do want to make Medieval Mayor! Like a lot of creators, I have too many projects I want to do.
PC gaming and gaming in general have gone through a lot of big changes between Pharaoh and now. Now, it seems, everyone is a gamer, which is GREAT. There is room for lots of different games. The main reason I keep holding off on Medieval Mayor is I don’t feel confident I could provide enough security for the team making it.
When Sierra and I parted in 2001 my goal was not to make great games or express myself creatively--it was to make a company that would provide great jobs for the people who worked there. Honestly, that is more of what I was always about when making games. But the two go together, more than people might realize. A lot of great bands making great music fall apart because they can’t work together, you know? So I wanted to make a company that was sustainable and a great place to work, with creators from all different disciplines working well together, being listened to, etc. That was TMill.
When I set up Tilted Mill and was asking people to trust me enough to quit their full-time jobs to join our team, I needed to know that I could provide enough stability to make that work out for the long term. But things are different today, and it’s hard to sustain a large team indefinitely. At least I don’t feel confident enough that I could guarantee that level of security. Of course, some former colleagues are telling me not to worry about that, but…
Red Maw (Discord)
Q: What are you playing right now? What games have impressed you the most lately?
Chris: I’ve been playing Trine (1, 3, and 4) on Switch, and also Nine Parchments. Plus lighter games like Mario Cart just for fun. Honestly I never really played hardcore games much because playing them is in a lot of ways similar to making them, I always felt. Problem-solving, focusing for hours, etc., I’d always find myself stopping and switching back to designing. So when I play now it’s about a light, fun, co-op experience (with my kid).
Fro (Discord)
Q: Had you ever imagined your games would be played for decades?
Chris: No! It’s one reason I was not eager to get into making games, actually. If you write a great book, people will be reading it a hundred years later. But because games are so tech-dependent, they don’t age well, however successful they might be at the time. So we have franchises that last decades, but no so many individual games. In this sense, Pharaoh has greatly exceeded my expectations, and I still miss working with that team.
Jolanser (Discord)
Q: After Impressions made the city-builder series, Tilted Mill went on and made Children of the Nile which has many different systems (pull walkers instead of push walkers, the economic system, the difference in social classes). Are there any of these systems or mechanisms in Children of the Nile you would have wanted to back-port into Pharaoh or the other games in the city-builder series?
Chris: That’s a really insightful question/point! Yes, I do think all the time about how the different systems work and how they might be combined for better gameplay.
I’ve done a few designs over the years and always found myself merging the good aspects of the two approaches that you identified so accurately. The push system is great for moving around a lot of resources without a lot of “walkers”--the advantage there being the visual communication to the player of what is happening. But the downside, obviously, is the non-sensical outcome where a house says it’s lacking something even though it’s right around the corner. In these cases, a targeted pull system works.
VAIA (Discord):
Q: If you had infinite resources available and you were making Pharaoh 2, what would you add or change?
Chris: Honestly, I would spend a lot more time and money on a lot of things that are invisible, vs. being explicit features or other content. That means playtesting and polishing, fixing, or getting rid of what’s not working until the game is truly seamless and near perfect. But that was not the model we used back in those days. I would resist the urge to make it more realistic (either visually or in terms of historical accuracy) and make it a smoother experience that was easier for beginners to get into.
AmenusUK (Steam)
Q: Your msg site tiltedmill appears to be broken. is it gone for good?
2- Can you tell us how many units of Caesar3, CaesarIV, Pharoah, Emperor have sold worldwide to date?
To conclude I love all these games and so looking forward to the new Pharaoh coming out.
Chris: Whoops, uh, yeah, I’ll get Jeff Fiske right on that.
2. I think it was more than four million overall, but I may be way off by now.
Tearfrom the red (STEAM)
Q: Hi Chris, if you could make a successor to the game using any civilization at any time in history, what would you pick?
Chris: Medieval Europe! I like this setting because it was a time of great technological development, and also feels kind of quasi-fantasy, like ancient Egypt. And the castles provide a similar opportunity as monument building. I’m not sure how / if I’d integrate combat, though.
Lucas_Amorim (Steam)
Hi Chris! First of all, thank you to provide me one of the best experiences that I already had in the 00's pc games. You're like Sr. Myiagi for me when I speak of game developers.
Q: How you made to searching and studying about the old Egypt civilization? Did you talk to historians? Buy some books? Attended museums?
Chris: Thank you so much for the kind words.
For research, it was lots and lots of books, on top of many years already spent studying. I watched whatever videos I could find as well. This was basically pre-internet. I still have most of the books I bought for Pharaoh. I bought them with my personal money so I could hang onto them.
Navin Kumar
Q: Why did they choose so few of the Egyptian gods for temples? Unlike Zeus
Chris: The short answer is: Because Pharaoh was about the monuments whereas Zeus was about the gods.
With games, unlike other forms of entertainment, it’s vital that players are already somewhat familiar with the “rules of the setting” so to speak. Whether it’s fantasy or sci-fi or history, this is true, because as an interactive media, the player is not simply receiving—they are also participating. If they make a decision based on experience or intuition and it does not produce something like the effect they imagine, it’s no fun. It’s frustrating or even infuriating. So if I’m playing a fantasy game I expect the rogue character to be good at shooting stuff, for example. Any attempt at a clever twist on that runs the risk of ruining the player’s experience. To put a positive spin on this principle, by using that rogue character you, the designer, are capitalizing on the player’s prior experiences. Then you need only stoke the fun, not make it entirely from nothing.
Most people are very familiar with the Greek and Roman gods. In fact, to many people “ancient Greece” and “mythology” are synonymous. If you ask someone to name a few, and what they represent, they will be able to do that. But not so much with the Egyptian gods. We are talking entirely about popular understanding here, of course. With Egypt, “what it’s about” is the pyramids.
So it’s a question of focus. Pharaoh would have worked fine with more gods, but then they’d have been more nuanced, the lines between them even less clear, on top of the fact that they are unfamiliar to most people.
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