I've been working on a kind of strategy game called Fall of an Empire (https://fallofanempiregame.com), it's a bit like a mix between Crusader Kings, Total War, Mount and Blade type games (just the overworld, not the battles), but rather than expanding you're trying to prevent an empire from collapsing.
It's a ton of work, especially with the number of systems - you've got combat, resource management, settlement development, food managment, espionage, diplomacy etc - these all need to play together well. And then you've got to add in the storyline, graphics, marketing -but I think I'm making pretty good progress.
I'm still using Unreal Engine 4 because I started work on that version and I haven't needed to upgrade to 5 since it's been released.
I've got a free prologue that I'm releasing on October 1, so now until then is a lot of polishing to make it work well.
Steam recently made some changes that are pushing game studios away from prologues. Instead, demos can have their own steam pages. Plus all hyperlinks will soon be banned.
I also noticed your game has been up on Steam since January 2022 and by the looks of it, you've done about zero marketing (steamdb.info). Hope that's on the horizon, it's a pretty darn important part of game development now!
Thank you! If you replace a prologue (as standalone game) with a demo, can you transfer the wishlists?
Marketing isn’t my strong point, if I ever had the money to make another the first person I’d hire would be marketing. My boss owns a PR agency and she said she can help in getting it out to journalists but that’s about it. I tried CPC and it came in at about $1/wishlist.
In case anyone has the same problem, I asked and they can't. Luckily I only have couple of hundred wishlists on the prologue so I'll switch it out easy.
This looks fantastic! Love the premise & well done for what looks like an incredible solo effort. I was tech lead on Ozymandias & have another minified 4X in the works at the mo & putting out feelers with publishers etc. Sounds like you plan to self publish this one but I’d love to chat & see if there’s any way I can help with your launch, whether just through advice or via introductions etc. You can reach me at biggles (at) bravobravo.games though I may end up finding a way to contact you directly first :-)
In all seriousness, there’s a constant nagging in TW community for more historical games. Pharaoh didn’t cut it for the wast majority of players. You could capitalize on that, the genre would benefit from that.
If this one does alright my next would be a crusades game with similar-ish mechanics, feudalism, the pop system from Victoria 2, multiple-settlement provinces and realtime movement.
They recently released Pharaoh: Dynasties which is pretty much a complete overhaul of the base Pharaoh game, and is pretty much what the game should have been.
They gave everyone half their money back, this free upgrade, new factions, bigger map and a ton of changes. Overall its been a big push from their side to keep the player base happy.
But yeah, there's obviously a big market for historical games, from city builders, combat, etc. and I'm here for them all.
A safe generalization about Dynasties is that “no one cares”. It has about 2.5k players now, same as Attila (one of the most controversial titles released 10 years ago).
People keep bringing up Dynasties, but it’s obvious CA doesn’t know how to make successful historical titles anymore. They dropped the ball even on 3k which had some kind of potential.
I started in uni during the start of Covid because I was playing Warband and I wanted to see if I could do something like the overworld in Unreal. Then I left it for a few months, got the idea of turning it into a proper strategy game and worked on an off until this year when I really started working on it. I probably put in 2-3 hours on weekdays after work and 6-7 on weekends. I think that I'm definitely more productive now because I have more experience, and I had literally no money at all at the start due to not having a job.
This looks great! It seems to solve the issue I always had with civilisation where the game becomes progressively easier as you advance ahead of the AI, leading to a late game which involves lots of management but little risk.
I wondered this myself and found some. I've played: When Rivers Were Trails, Thunderbird Strike, Dialect, Zulu Dawn, This Land Is My Land. There are a lot of options in boardgames (maybe more than with video games?), such as Burn the Fort.
Most paradox games enable this to some degree. It's pretty limited in terms of imagining what this could look like outside of the european conceptualization of civilization progress but it's there.
A feedback: the art and assets feel like they are AI generated but an interesting game idea, not sure if it makes sense as most the need to defend an empire that took me days to build greater than a procedurally generated one.
It's a ton of work, especially with the number of systems - you've got combat, resource management, settlement development, food managment, espionage, diplomacy etc - these all need to play together well. And then you've got to add in the storyline, graphics, marketing -but I think I'm making pretty good progress.
I'm still using Unreal Engine 4 because I started work on that version and I haven't needed to upgrade to 5 since it's been released. I've got a free prologue that I'm releasing on October 1, so now until then is a lot of polishing to make it work well.