Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile Wrap Report, Part 1 (Strategy)

Another tremendous challenge we faced developing Children of the Nile stemmed from the unique nature of the gameplay and model. Since all components in the game are inextricably linked, and completely inter-dependent, essentially the game cannot work at all unless and until all of it works. Obviously, with all (good) games, this is partly true; that is, each component serves an important role and synergizes with the others, but with this one, it was essentially impossible to have any real gameplay until the vast majority of the systems were implemented. Almost every system in the game is meaningless without several others. The way we tackled this challenge was to do a rudimentary or partial implementation of most systems first, then redo them later. Again, this is somewhat typical for a lot of games and developers (and we've certainly approached development this way in the past), but this was a case of having to do more up front, and then often replace the system entirely with the final one later on.

the point... was to not let the ambition of including everything undermine the goal or the necessity of doing the core game right

Best Decisions Many of the design decisions made on Children of the Nile were very painful. This always stemmed from the fact that the game had no real pre-existing model to follow. It wasn't like we were doing an RTS, a shooter or something you could easily label like that. And this was on top of the fact that the traditional city-building genre itself defied definition in a lot of ways. For example, in so many ways, the category is like some of the Tycoon games such as. Roller Coaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon. Some people (and some publishers) view these as the same genre. These games are essentially business sims, with people that you don't produce or directly control, just like the Impressions city-building games. To include things like combat and multiplayer in these games would essentially be ludicrous.

But then, you can look at it another way... Unlike the Tycoon games, the city-building games are set in the ancient world, a strategy game staple. And you have strategic goals, and detailed resource management... and suddenly, you get a lot of people calling them RTS games. The Caesar games were in real time before just about anything resembling a strategy game (other than, notably, Sim City). You may remember back to a time when the assumption was that strategy games were turn-based... then Dune II and WarCraft came along... anyway, the point is combat and multiplayer play have always occupied a funny position with the traditional city-building games. They were never about combat, and it usually wasn't done with very much detail. And multiplayer was non-existent except for the last in the Impressions city-builders, Emperor, for which the addition of multiplayer did not turn out to be any kind of a benefit to the genre, really.

So, the decision of how to approach combat and multiplayer play in Children of the Nile was very important, and there was no road map. I mean, if you were making an RTS, these questions would be no-brainers. For us, if we made the wrong decision, say to include multiplayer, this definitely would have severely impacted the single-player experience, and increased the cost. But if it turned out that single-player gaming had become passe or something by the time we shipped, then we'd be in a different kind of trouble. The same with full-blown combat... with games like the Total War series out there, we would have had some serious competition for an ancient world combat game, and meeting this challenge would have, again, negatively impacted the building / economic / essentially non-violent core game. But, if the vast majority of players felt an ancient Egyptian sim without large-scale combat was really lacking something, we would be in trouble there.

In the end, the decisions came more easily because the game was really telling us what it needed to be. It's another paradox about project design these days - it used to be that games, particularly strategy games, were very comprehensive. They had four or five different modules, and you could do everything in the game, just not in a lot of detail. For example, one of the first games I worked on, Lords of the Realm I had a castle design and building section, a real-time combat level, a castle siege level, a county management level, and a world level. If you read a description of the game, it would tell you that you could manage individual farm fields, allocate the population of the county, conscript soldiers and lead them into battle in real-time combat, move armies across England to strategically take over other counties, design and build custom castles then defend them in siege combat, etc.

Sounds pretty good, huh? Well, to do all that nowadays, the production costs would be through the roof, and, more subtly, it would be a huge challenge to keep the fun of the gameplay on track while doing all that to such a high production value. For all that, my point is simply that today games, at least successful ones, tend to do just one or two things very well. They really focus in on a single game dynamic or two, and are generally played out entirely on one level. I think in many ways that's good, but unfortunately, the ugly cousin of this is that so many games are basically clones of existing ones. But for Children of the Nile, the point of that was to not let the ambition of including everything undermine the goal or the necessity of doing the core game right, and that was an essentially peaceful, engrossing single-player game about building, and about the lives of the people in it.

[For practical reasons related to its length, the remainder of this Wrap Report, with a lot more from Chris Beatrice plus some thoughts from colleague Jeff Fiske, will be published separately within the next few days. Lists of the previous ones on both RPG Vault and Action Vault may be found on the next page. - Ed.]