Still struggling to find time to keep the blog updated, as you have no doubt noticed. Well, such is life sometimes.

Work on Imperium has been very scarce for a period. The main reason is that Pirates and Traders has been occupying most of my development time. When you have around 75,000 users downloading a game, you get a fair amount of e-mails, comments, and feedback; I try to respond to everyone. It’s also not a “complete” game yet, in the sense that I’ve added everything to the game experience that I originally envisioned; I still haven’t implemented Crew members, Port attacks, or any of the major adventure storylines that I have planned for the game. Add in all the excellent ideas that have been proposed by the active players (both on the forums and in mails), and I probably have work in this game for at least another six months – if not more.

I would be lying if I said that I haven’t considered simply dropping the Imperium project over the past few months. However, I have done so many endless iterations over the basic ideas, that I am loath to not do something with it. I still think the world lacks a good Ancient strategy game, and while the concepts I am working with now are much simpler and more streamlined than my original vision for the game, I still like the ideas and the design and think they are worth playing. Thus I still plan to try and split my development time between my mobile and desktop projects for a while yet, and see where I stand at the end of the year.

So many games to create – so little time to create them in.

The past months have been very busy ones – taking care of a toddler eats up time. It also makes it hard to get in the kind of concentrated periods of work that I thrive on, and work on Imperium has suffered as a result. Not being the type who is able to run on idle, I have instead focused my efforts on work that is a better fit to the reality of the work conditions I currently face, where I can do work for an half-hour here and there, as well as being able to run tests in the oddest of circumstances. In short – developing for my Android phone. This has resulted in two games so far – A Brief History of Rome (a port of the Java stuff I released last year) and Pirates & Traders.

A Brief History of Rome is pretty much done (though I still have some improvements to the framework that I plan to incorporate), but Pirates & Traders is a concept that I intend to expand on further.

Where does that leave the Imperium project? Although the actual code work I’ve done has been less than I had hoped, I’ve actually done a lot of work evaluating and working on the core game mechanics, trying to figure ways to streamline the design even further. In some ways, I am actually more optimistic about the game than I’ve been for a long time. Finding time to work on it is a problem, but I remain committed to getting it done in some form. I am hoping that I’ll be better able to structure my time (and thus be able to work on Imperium more consistently) once the little one enters daycare after the summer.

I will also try to return to regular monthly updates from now on. Until next time, have a great summer.

Hope all of you had a merry Christmas and that your year has started well.

As you may have noticed, I have hardly been idle. I spent a little time this January porting Imperium Mini over to the Android just for the heck of it. It went very smoothly and easily; the benefit of working with Java. I doubt there is much of a market on there for strategy games more complex than Risk, though; so it’s not likely to make me rich any time soon. Nevertheless, it’s the type of game I wish there were more of on phones (and I was bored at the time), so…

Despite getting sidetracked on that, I did work a lot on Imperium throughout the past two months. I completed the basic game version, but ran into a few bugs along the way (now mostly solved). Work right now is focused on figuring out how to make the AI work well, as I am not very happy with it right now; it is too passive. It was while I was working (on paper) with ideas for how to solve this issue that I did the Android porting.

I’ll be having some time to think through such issues over the next couple of months, as I’m off on maternity leave until April. This also means that I am likely to be less active online for a while; so if you don’t see any updates on progress before May, that will be the reason.

Here be Dragons. Or in other words: November was the month in which I spent far too much time playing Dragon Age: Origins. That’s the problem of working on stuff in one’s free time; it really doesn’t leave space for much else, so playing games for me is always a question of sacrificing work time on Imperium. In theory, that leaves me rested and refreshed when I renew work on Imperium. In practice, it often takes a while before I get properly back in the rhythm of working, but I’m getting there.

I did pretty much complete the work on the siege engine (or at least I hope so) before the break, and am now working on the AI for the operational game. My plan is to add in the operational features one at a time in a completed state for the next couple of months, while trying to slowly expand the AI to match with the new functionality. So the first version that I hope to have ready by the end of this month, should be a functional and playable version of the game – with just the movement and battle orders available. I’ll then be adding the mobilization orders, patrols, administration, construction, as well as the rest of the orders that make up the full game. We shall see how this goes when we enter the new year.

Once more into the breach, dear friends. Well, that’s pretty much the story of October’s development work. Although I’ve also done other stuff, most of the month has been spent polishing the siege battle engine in Imperium; digging for bugs, fixing interface issues, adding a few extra options that felt like they were needed, and so on. It’s still a quite basic game engine where you choose to either reduce the walls, ravage the surrounding lands, blockade and/or assault (as defender you get to choose between staying put, offering battle or launching a sortie), but I think that there are decisions enough to make it interesting. The one new feature I added was to allow the player a choice of siege methods: rams (standard approach), circumvalliation (tightens the blockade and increases the difficulty of breaking the siege), siege towers (adds support for an assault) or mining (difficult, but effective). I expect to complete work on this latter today.

I also released the series of bug fixes I had done in Imperium Mini for a new and (IMO) improved version. I’m particularly pleased to have gotten the tooltips fixed; that problem had bugged me for a few months. Being able to isolate and fix small problems like that is one of the key reasons why I developed mini in the first place. Thanks to all of you who have helped by reporting issues in the game.

The current version will probably stay the way it is for a while, unless some major issues crop up. For a future release, I would like to experiment with changing the combat system, e.g., by allowing battles between stacks of units (with a simple Warlords-like battle engine), more units, leaders, and limiting the number of attacks in a turn per empire. Perhaps even opening the game up to let the player play with more empires. However… work on Imperium has first priority, so all this is speculation for the future.

In the meantime, you guys do know about Zak’s Hoplites, right? If you’re at all into the ancient period, you really should try it.