It is a hell of a ride, and a bloody lot of work, to develop and publish a game like Rising Empires. It’s also incredibly fun and rewarding. Especially working with AI which has always been what interests me most. But the time has come to talk a bit about why we are here and what I plan to focus on the coming months.
But first, let us talk about the past. The first Rising Empires was published in September 2013 by the Swedish company Hellhound Interactive. Hellhound consisted of my brother Johan and me. By then we had already worked on the game for 1.5 year. Although very popular among hardcore strategy fans Rising Empires didn’t really become the success we had aimed for and mid-2014 we decided to stop supporting the game. High rankings do not put food on the table. A few years later the game was unpublished from Google Play when it stopped working on newer mobile phones.
Now we come to the summer of 2019. Having thought about it on and off over the years and feeling to need for a more serious hobby project I asked permission from my brother to pick up Rising Empires again. He wished me good luck and I started working om Rising Empires 2. Now, I have always said that Rising Empires 2 is the continuation of the original Rising Empires. It is not really a new game, it’s the continued development of Rising Empires.
There are some features with Rising Empires 2 that I am really satisfied with. One of these are the new ‘Observe mode’ which allow you to let the AI play for you. Finally, I could watch the AI play and see how it behaved. For me, this was paradise. There are some features I believe hold more promise and I would like to remake. The corruption system is a good example of this.
And finally, there are a few things that needs to be torn out, reshaped totally and put back again. The thing is that it is not possible to do this with the current iteration of Rising Empires 2. And this is where we start going into the future.
Around 8-9 weeks ago I started working on a new project, we can call it Fate of an Empire. Fate of an Empire are meant to be the true Rising Empires 2. I have basically set myself two major objectives with Fate of an Empire:
- Improve the GUI and add landscape mode for tablets
- Take a detailed look at every major feature in Rising Empires 2 and rework it into my liking.
- Add random events and the possibility to add quest chains.
So far, I have reworked the food and population system and the corruption system. Some of these additions will undoubtedly come to Rising Empires 2 as well. For example, the new upgrade building button. Originally, this was added to Fate of an Empire and when I saw how well it worked I also added it to Rising Empires 2.
Improvements to the observe mode has given me a better possibility to evaluate what the AI is doing, and some fundamental parts of the AI has been rewritten. I want to make the AI as challenging as possible without cheating. A fundamental rule has always been that the AI has access to the same information as the player. It can only react and make decisions on what it sees on the map.
And yes, Fate of an Empire has an improved GUI and support landscape mode for tablets.
As you probably understand this won’t be finished in a week or two… But if you wish to help me with Fate of an Empire by playtesting new features, help me with balancing the new mechanics and such, please send a mail to apps@norberg.one and let me know that you want to become a beta tester for Fate of an Empire.
Please note that when I update Fate of an Empire, old save games may become defunct. If you have a good game going, complete it before updating.
Having said that I would like to thank you for taking your time to read this.
Stay safe in these troubled times,
Peter