Hi there! Welcome to what will be a series of blog posts about the development of TFC: The Fertile Crescent! Andr and I will be regularly writing these little blogs to discuss what our goals for TFC are, how we have arrived at setting those goals and about the process of making the game. We will also talk about some of the nitty-gritty details of development, like how our online multiplayer works, our approach to balancing the game as well as discussions about the art, music and sound in the game! We hope you will find at least one of these blog posts interesting and useful in some way :) But before we get to all that, it might be prudent to make proper introductions first. My name is Anders and I am one of two developers on TFC. The other developer is Andr. It was just the two of us working on the game for a long time, with Andr being the main brain behind it all. TFC was originally his idea and he had been working on it for a little while before I got involved. As I was living in Australia, I was looking to connect with the Norwegian game development community as well, and after I posted on a Norwegian game development group on Facebook, Andr reached out explaining that he also was living here and we got to talking. Soon after we started discussing TFC and his ambitions for it. With my expertise being in sound and music, we fairly quickly started collaborating on it and have been working on it together since then. Andr has been fascinated with RTS games since childhood, and was dreaming of designing his own at some point. Around 4-5 years ago, Andr finally decided to start spending some evenings and weekends on realizing this dream. Being talented in several of the disciplines of game development, Andr has been the main designer, the sole programmer and the art lead since the beginning. It is only since we were able to work on the game full time that we started getting other people involved, mainly getting help from our publisher on refining the art. I also got an opportunity to start thinking about game design since then, which has been interesting.
Here is a screenshot of the early version of TFC.
And this is what it looks like now! (UI is a work in progress) Another area of interest for Andr is the Near East Bronze Age, happening from ~3300 B.C. to ~1200 B.C. This area of the world has been nicknamed The Fertile Crescent (hence the name of the game). It forms a Crescent moon shape around the rivers of Euphrates, Tigris and the Nile, covering an area where modern-day countries Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt are located.
Not all maps include Egypt in the depiction of The Fertile Crescent Rarely used as a setting for video games (though we are seeing a bit more of that nowadays, especially in the strategy market!), it is a very interesting part of human history, where domestication of crops allowed for division of labour and small communities to start emerging. As these communities grew, we started seeing several different city-states and empires develop with their own customs and cultures. Civilizations like Babylon, Assyria, the Hittite empire and, as well as the Egyptians and their pyramids, all evolved during this period, trading and warring with each other. As the different civilizations and their cities grow, we also see big cultural and architectural endeavours happen, most notably the Ziggurat of Ur. The Wonder building in our game is heavily inspired by Ziggurat as you can see here:
Left - The Wonder in TFC, right - The original Ziggurat From almost the very beginning, TFC has been available for free on itch.io and we have been very lucky to see a little community form around the game. Not too long after I joined the project, Andr and I started discussing the future of the game. We had established a Discord server with only a few dozen members at the time, and we decided to let the community vote on the direction of the game: Should we focus on online multiplayer or on the single-player first? From that vote it was clear that multiplayer should be the focus to begin with. This helped further grow the community, and we have some very nice and engaged community members who are helping us not only with moderation, but also with organising multiplayer tournaments. Seeing the community play and discuss the game, provide suggestions and ideas for improving the game and uploading videos about the game, has worked as a major motivator for us as we kept working towards some sort of release. As this side of TFC developed, we began talking to The Knights of Unity about a potential publishing deal, which then allowed us to now focus on the game full time. We went on to make a more detailed plan for what the Early Access release of the game is going to look like, including a more robust and interesting single-player experience. We are very excited for everyone to play it when it is ready and we thank you for sticking with us this far, be it since the early days on itch.io or just for reading through this little article. Stay tuned for more blogs in the future where we dig deeper into the different aspects of developing TFC. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us either through Discord or via email boss@minibossaudio.com.