My Development Journey
Hello everyone! It's been a long time since I last posted about my game development journey. The past few years have been quite a transformative experience for me.
I started working on Empire of Devil fresh out of college, with ambitious plans to create a complex medieval simulator with deep simulation aspects. As many experienced developers advise, don't try to make a AAA game as your first game, they are damn right. That lesson hit me hard, I used to work 14-16 hours on the game all 7 days. At one point I was so burned out that I just couldn't think or work on it anymore. Then I decided to take a break, make small games first and decided to see how it goes. I released two Tycoon games but both bombed hard but taught me invaluable lessons to make games "FUN" rather than overengineering them while chasing realism. Think what experience or what feel you want to give to the player and work towards it. Making realistic games is good but people play games to enjoy them.
My Game Development Philosophy
Before telling more about Empire Of Devil I wanted to talk about my game design philosophy What I want to do is to give players freedom, freedom to play as bad guy maybe terrible one, force them to make moral choices and see consequences of their actions. I want them to get a feeling that they are king/ruler whose actions will have consequences not only on them but also on their subjects. I want them to enjoy the game without moral shackles, let them do any weird batshit crazy thing they can think of in the game. For example, a game which I've recently made Project Prison: It is a prison simulator where player plays as a prisoner. Think of it more like Sims in the prison but just adult version of it where player can kill, blackmail, threaten other prisoners to get what he wants. He can play as a good guy, finish his term, don't get involved in gangs, join workshops etc. but at the end prison is a bad place—good doesn't survive in hell.
Empire of Devil: Reimagined
Imagine the same thing but for Medieval world. What would you do if you are king/Lord? Marry multiple times? Have your close people control everything and run your settlement like a concentration camp? Poison rivers and kill all people in the rival settlement or be a good guy and run it like a fine nobleman?
What's Changed:
I've trimmed down the scale to manageable level while trying to maintain the "Feel"/Experience which I wanted to give to the players.
Now the game starts in a region which due to civil war has been ravaged. Player along with his followers comes across an abandoned settlement where he has to make it again a functional town.
You have to decide on every micro aspect of the settlement management.
Each and every follower will have their own unique goal and schedule based on the way you build your settlement. As a ruler you have to make some tough choices like accepting or rejecting wanderers which is important as imagine you have only one house to allot which can house 3 citizens at the most and at a time two different groups: one Merchant who can setup and run a shop and improve prosperity of the town, or a family of three where father has been killed in the war and mother is there with her two children who have nowhere to go.
I mean you can take both at same time but if you don't have enough housing space for your citizens they will sleep outside which reduces their opinion about you.
Or maybe where you have to force a dead soldier's family who died while saving town to create a space for your special friend.
Overall choices are important. Please understand that game is still in the first person perspective. Town management etc. are handled in some cases in top down view like for building etc. but majority of it is first person game.
With your citizens you have to train militia to protect town against bandits or rival cities. Battles are now small scaled—if I have to say I'm aiming for something like Chivalry but fight system not that complicated(more arcade style but not completely watered down version of it), with max party size at a time around 150 to 200 soldiers on the battlefield.
Development Progress & Timeline
Now when game will release and how much it has progressed: Well core mechanisms are working well, I need to finetune and make graphics look good and optimize it but overall I have a nice structure on which I can build. As game will be an EA title I will get plenty of time in the future to update and improve it. But I'm hoping to start Alpha testing in Late May.
Also I want to say thanks to all old users who encouraged me when I decided I'm going to take a break. There were lot of helpful comments which helped me a lot during that period.