Discoveries menu Now, let's continue to talk about game menus. Same as in Predynastic Egypt it's called "Discoveries", but this time it will include more than just technological breakthroughs.
Before and during the construction of pyramids Egypt developed very actively, and people made a lot of new discoveries. But starting from the III dynasty the pace of development slowed down so much that during next 400 years or so there were almost no changes at all. For our game, it meant we need to find a filling for about hundreds of turns. On the other hand, there were a lot of important things happening in different spheres of Egypt. For example, Pharaoh, how always considered to be a god and couldn't be seen by mere mortals, becomes a public figure. For Egyptians, it was an extraordinary event! Or another example, in the sphere of religion a new concept of souls multiplicity was born. These and others processes were as important as technological discoveries, so we decided to unify them in one menu. There are some more examples of technologies and discoveries from the new menu: Traditional technologies: Marine expeditions
Glass treatment technology
New discoveries: Pharaoh publicity
Concept of souls multiplicity
The most difficult part of the menu development was to sort out all event from game designers' database. They had to be divided into three groups: challenges, game events and finally discoveries. Each group had to contain comparable events, so that, for example, a creation of writing wouldn't be compared to some less significant event. As a result, we selected 69 discoveries, and almost all of them already complete, except the last three. This number of discoveries allowed us to perfectly spread them from the beginning to the end of the game. After the selection was over, next step is to create a description of the discovery and then to draw an art. And when it's done, it's time to define the bonuses for each discovery. Concerning the appearance of the menu, we decided to use the same concept as it was in Predynastic Egypt because everybody seems to like it and we got many positive reviews about it. All of the discoveries are presented as a long strip divided into three rows. In Predynastic Egypt, we used papyrus as the background, as if all of the events from the menu were just a long list of Ancient Egyptians deeds. This time we decided to change the background. Memphis was a big settlement, so now all characters from the pictures are living in houses and working in workshops.

Each little picture should clearly represent the essence of discovery, and this task wasn't simple. We even had to refuse a few ideas, simply because we couldn't get the image right. In other cases, the images our artist created didn't fit the historical truth and he had to change it. This happened with the "taming of cats" discovery. As the most of us do, the artist imagined ancient Egyptian cats to be no different from the modern cats so he drew the First Version of the picture. After consulting the scientists we found out that ancient cats were still half-wild animals who only lived near humans because they found it convenient for themselves. So the Second Version of the picture present cats in the right way. Taming of cats: Ver.1
Ver.2 (historical)
On the opposite, people on our pictures are drawn in the historically accurate way, when even the size of a pictured person matters - the bigger this person pictured, the higher position in the society it has. So from our pictures, it'll be easy to understand, who is who. The new menu has one more new feature. The first three discoveries are already made for the player by default. These discoveries are "Tribe", "Permanent Settlements" and "Agriculture". We decided upon it because we wanted to let the player better understand the situation at the beginning of the game. In general, don't you think that discovery menu resembles a comic a bit? Our artist worked hard to picture various situations and characters with vivid mimic. How about we play a game? I'll give you a few images, and you try to guess which discovery they represent? They will not be the most obvious, but also not the most difficult. Let's try! Write your suggestions in the comments! Those who already know the answer, please let others guess! ;)