Only a few hours are left until the release of Archamon. I would like to look back to the first ideas and difficult beginnings of Archamon’s development, which spanned many years.
It was my dream to create a medieval game, whose main components would consist of economy as well as castle and fortress building, but where one would also have to face dangers, and a world map would be generated randomly and differently every time. In short, I sought out to create a game which would not involve too much economy, as in Settlers, or too much war, as in Age of Empires, but would be somewhere in between the two.
Thus, Archamon!
That was my initial vision, and here are some fun facts about the development of the game:
- The first attempt was created in the winter of 2004, written in Pascal, as a game for DOS (Windows 95/98). It was already called Archamon and this is how it looked
- The Archamon you experience today started to take shape in 2007, and the real game in 2009.
- Archamon was intended to be a turn based game until 2009.
- In its initial versions, a game day was divided into hours and a game year took over three play hours (today a game day takes about a half hour).
- Originally, Archamon was intended to have a multiplayer option but this was postponed due to technical challenges (I am working to address this problem).
- The engine is my own and it is very old-school. Therefore, I named it Archaeopteryx (after the extinct bird-dinosaur)
- The whole game is the work of one programmer, done during the early mornings and evenings, and is composed of ~170 000 lines in code C#.
- The models, animations, drawings and music of Archamon have all been created by external collaborators whom I have never met in person (except for one).
- The Archamon logo was created by my brother, and despite of more appealing potential designs, his original one remained.
- Archamon was registered under Steam Greenlight in September 2013, and it was accepted in January 2015. Archamon has been Greenlit!!!
- While developing and working on the game I got married, re-built a house, and had two children!
- Before the game was ever published, Steam Greenlight closed.
And now, even if there is still plenty to improve (and not just graphics), Archamon is ready to be played!
