Joe G: When I was about thirteen or fourteen I used to play a ton of games like Crusader Kings, Mount and Blade and Total War. I had a pretty bad computer – which is how it is when you don\u2019t have a job yet – and so I couldn\u2019t play the newest ones. In school, we had awful netbooks that couldn\u2019t run anything made after 1999. There was a lot of Age of Empires during lunch breaks.<\/p>\n
I mostly gave up on gaming when I got into university. I was so busy with assignments, extracurriculars and trying to fit in a social life that I just didn\u2019t have the time. I think Fall of an Empire\u00a0is therefore slightly retro – it\u2019s got a bit more of the DNA of those older games.<\/p>\n
In 2020 during COVID-19 I was stuck at home in the country with my family (I\u2019d gone up to visit during a break in restrictions, and it was better than being stuck in a small apartment 23 hours a day), in my last year of uni. I didn\u2019t have much to do, only a couple of online classes, so I was playing Mount and Blade again.<\/p>\n
I had also been messing around with Unreal Engine for a couple of years, so I decided to try to make something like that game\u2019s map in Unreal. That took me a couple of weeks, then I decided to add settlements, then provinces, then more and more gameplay elements. I was very on-and-off with it, but after a while, I decided that I should actually do something with the game and perhaps release it, so it took about a year of polishing to get to the state it\u2019s in now.<\/p>\n
![\"Fall](\"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/ss_7d5a0fe2ad6dedd7caf4c6be5f38e03182d4d1e9.jpg\")
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Matt S: I would suggest that in most 4X and empire-building games players take great pleasure from seeing their empires grow. How do you think they’ll respond to this?<\/strong><\/p>\n Joe G: I think you\u2019d be right, it\u2019s definitely a major draw. What I\u2019m hoping is that when they\u2019ve played enough 4X games over the last twenty years they\u2019re looking for something a bit different, where it switches the formula up.<\/p>\n In addition to the games that I mentioned above, I also took inspiration from some old, old games: Space Invaders and Tetris, two of the oldest. In Space Invaders, you start off with slow-moving aliens and shields to defend yourself. As the game progresses, you lose the shields and the aliens speed up and fire faster, making the game more difficult. It\u2019s the same in Tetris: the longer the game, the more blocks fall, bringing you closer to the end of the game.<\/p>\n I think one of the main problems with 4X and grand strategy games is that all the difficulty is upfront. The early game is by far the most important: fail here and it\u2019s game over, succeed and you\u2019ve got a head start that makes the game easier. The midgame is still fun, but succeed there and the endgame is a walk in the park – just mop up the far weaker enemies with your giant blob to achieve whatever arbitrary condition the devs put on you to receive a cutscene.<\/p>\n Matt S: Were there any particular “empire deaths” that you’ve modelled this game on? How did you go about researching the mechanics that you’ve worked into the game?<\/strong><\/p>\n Joe G: It\u2019s definitely a very Western Rome-themed game, so that\u2019s where most of the inspiration comes from. All the styles – clothing, buildings, names, are based around that. I tried to make the Empire seem authentically ancient, and on its last legs.<\/p>\n It was interesting in my research to find how in the later Rome, the political system became more feudal, despotic and tyrannical: the plebs (common people) got tied to their land, the Emperors became more authoritarian – there\u2019s an interesting analysis about how statues of Constantine the Great were similar to statues commissioned by Stalin – the tax collection also got more brutal, which caused a constant peasant insurgency.<\/p>\n I also took some inspiration from the fall of the Byzantine Empire a thousand years later: some of the styles and names are more Greek than Latin, and the culture of the Empire is strongly Christian, something that was less the case in Rome and more in Byzantium.<\/p>\n Matt S: I notice in the media release you do flag how small Australia’s games industry is (at least in terms of the number\/frequency of games released) – did you find your own game a challenge because of this?<\/strong><\/p>\n Joe G: Tech in Australia is fast-growing industry, but there’s a big contrast between software development and game development.\u00a0\u00a0If you\u2019re in the inner east of Melbourne you can\u2019t go a day without running into someone who is doing something in AI, or making an app, or working at a software company. It’s not quite the same when it comes to game development because the industry is smaller here. I haven\u2019t run into any other game devs in my personal life – I think the last time would have been in university. I haven\u2019t been to any game development events in Australia either.<\/p>\n The size of the Australian market alone means there are less development firms, and less funding available for game development. We’re also a less mature market compared to the US or Japan markets for instance, but I think this is beginning to change with more local freelance and indie developers releasing some really impressive games.<\/p>\n Matt S: Empire-management and 4X games are notoriously challenging to balance and resource. How did you approach that challenge as a one-man-band?<\/strong><\/p>\n Joe G: The game is totally self-funded with the salary from my full-time job, and after important things like rent, food and savings, is pretty low budget, so I have tried to do as much as possible myself (of course, I’m not a great artist or musician so I had to outsource for that kind of stuff – the artists have all done great jobs, and my friend happened to know a really good musician so he did my soundtrack). This, of course meant that there was a ton of work that I had to do, which is difficult when you have a full-time job and want to do anything else. I usually put in three or so hours after work, and 6-12 hours each on Saturday and Sunday.<\/p>\n I think real, hands-on playtesting is the key to this. When you make a game it\u2019s hard to properly evaluate its merits because it\u2019s very hard to stop yourself from blasting through the game at 4x speed and hitting all the objectives as fast as you can.<\/p>\n If you get someone you know who plays games, and watch them do a full playthrough, you get a much better idea of how it needs to be balanced. You can see them go through and say \u201cHold on, why is the Tax Collector building not worth constructing? Shouldn\u2019t it increase my taxes more? I think cavalry are too weak for how much they cost. What\u2019s the point of garrisoning troops? The unrest doesn\u2019t actually increase enough to matter.\u201d<\/p>\n Since balance is really subjective (see Helldivers recently, that game switched up weapons to supposedly be more balanced, players hated it, they got a ton of negative reviews) the number one thing is to make sure that other people think that it\u2019s balanced.<\/p>\n Matt S: Finally, what do you hope to achieve with this game?<\/strong><\/p>\n Joe G: I want to have released a game that influences other games. I\u2019d like for it to be part of a renaissance of strategy games. They used to dominate the PC market in the 1990s – today more people are playing 1997\u2019s Age of Empires 2 than they are 2021\u2019s Age of Empires 4. Where\u2019s the new hit like that? FPS games are huge. Every year or two we seem to get a new groundbreaking RPG, every couple of months a new Soulslike action RPG. Strategy games are few and far between, much more of a niche than the other genres.<\/p>\n![\"Fall](\"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/ss_c598a5c75acb2b0585b3b0a1ce6205e7ac2d519c.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Fall](\"https:\/\/www.digitallydownloaded.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/ss_bfea22cb4919d759232cd2e3b2091fe4a2557c75.jpg\")
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