Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile Wrap Report, Part 2

If you look at the colors and the sense of atmosphere in Children of the Nile, which comes out brilliantly in loads upon loads of screenshots, you'll see something that (to me anyway) is refreshing. Making all the components of the environment fuse together into one whole is tremendously difficult, especially when they're being created by different individuals. I look at so many games that have great textures, shadows, water, etc., but as an artist, I immediately see the separations between these items. They don't all live in the same environment. Each looks cool by itself, but together... well there is no together. This sense of the Children of the Nile environment being both a real place, but also a magical, almost fantasy place was hard-earned, and our artists and our composer deserve a lot of credit for that.

I think we could have done a little more in the tutorials early on to shake users of pre-conceived notions.

The design staff, of course, deserves a lot of credit - for putting up with me, for one thing. In our many long design meetings, my approach would be to rarely take the first answer to a question, or the first solution to a problem. I would always push for a better resolution, a simpler, more elegant solution and so on. And then when other areas were more fully fleshed out, I would drag the designers back to prior hard-fought battles, and reassess the previous solutions. We really exhausted all possibilities before coming to the final resolutions, and again, I'll emphasize that this game did not really have any existing road map in terms of other existing games.

For their part, the design staff has always had this uncanny ability to very quickly identify any and all conflicts that might result from a certain decision. This can be very frustrating! You think you have the perfect idea, then one of the designers identifies a trickle down effect that will result in the economy crashing, and you have to start from scratch. For their part, they also remain very willing to hit me over the head when I'm being obstinate (I wish I could get a couple of "yes men" on board, but I just can't seem to...), and that has always made me feel very confident about the design being solid.

Areas for Improvement I think we could have done a little more in the tutorials early on to shake users of pre-conceived notions. We vastly underestimated how deeply some of these notions were entrenched, and how even when staring something entirely contradicting this right in the face, players and reviewers would stick stubbornly to what they thought they knew, and insist the game was doing something wrong. Don't misunderstand me - I'm not talking about players saying they would have preferred such and such and we're arrogantly telling them we know better and are trying to force something new and undesired down their throats; I'm talking about players having been trained through many years of gaming to accept certain inherently flawed and frustrating gameplay mechanisms to the point where they assume these mechanisms are the way things just have to work. In hindsight, I think we should have stated "this game is unlike anything else" right up front in the tutorials, and perhaps gotten this message out more in the marketing and packaging as well.

I did incorporate several headline-like catch phrases in the tutorials, designed to jar players' minds into quickly dropping certain preconceptions. My premise was simple - Children of the Nile is very easy to understand, as long as you don't bring too many preconceptions to the table. These were things like, "Money does grow on trees", and "Human Resources: Managing Lives", "Knowledge is Power", "Is there life after death?", "Taxes: What you don't know can hurt you", "What have you done to impress me lately?" and "I'll give you cedar if you give me papyrus." Each of these was designed not so much to teach the player a specific aspect of gameplay, but to simply introduce doubt about any inherent (mis)understandings of the game, and then to arouse his curiosity about how it really worked.

I also wrote a section of our website designer diaries called, "bucking tradition" where I lay out three key areas in which Children of the Nile swims against the current of traditional strategy gaming systems.

As with every game I've ever done, there are a few places in Children of the Nile where the effort in terms of design and implementation wasn't matched in the end by a commensurate amount of impact on the gameplay experience. For example, there is a nice, elegant little "meal" model used when households eat. There are three farmed foods in the game, wheat, barley and vegetables. In addition, there are wild foods like fish, pomegranates, etc. Either of the two grains can be used to make bread, but only barley can be used to make beer, the favorite drink of the Egyptians. Food is the currency in the game, and wheat is more productive than barley, which is more productive than vegetables; that is, a field of wheat produces more units of food than one of barley, and so on.