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Comment by joegibbs | Hacker News Reader

I've been making a proper survival strategy game. I made a few games before but they were only about a week's worth of work each, so I don't count them as "proper".

This time I wanted to make a full-on project with professionally-done models, art, music etc. It's a reverse of the 4X formula - rather than starting as a small country and becoming a vast empire over the course of the game you start off heading a vast empire that's on the brink of collapse and you've got to try and prevent that from happening as long as you can.

I've never run a project with this kind of scope - I've been on them but when you're actually making the decisions it's a real change in perspective.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1830290/Fall_of_an_Empire...

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> you start off heading a vast empire that's on the brink of collapse and you've got to try and prevent that from happening as long as you can.

Neat. Reminds me of some of the scenarios in the old Simcity where you became mayor of a big city with _issues_ and had to turn the ship around.

I like the terrain rendering. Is that a prepackaged thing or did you write it yourself?

It's a custom material (since I'm using UE4) - there's small detail (grass, snow, sand etc) with their own normal maps, and that's all filtered to break up tiling and applied to the terrain.

The other part is the macro-level stuff that you see more of when you're zoomed out. I did the landscape using Quadspinner Gaea to simulate erosion based on a heightmap I drew with the basic shapes I wanted. Gaea lets me do a colour map based on terrain features, which I added on top of the small detail, and an 8K normal map which I blend with the detail normals based on the distance to the camera. The normal map adds a lot of little hills and valleys that are normally invisible since they're only small variations in the height map.

The title image is so reminiscent of Age of Empires ;). No harm there. Is it safe to assume that AoE series was an influence?

As it appears to be targeted only for Windows, I will not be able to try it (on Mac). But the premise sounds good and pretty unique!

Best of luck with it.

Thank you! Yeah absolutely it was influenced by AoE, more in a thematic sense rather than the gameplay which is more influenced by grand strategies and Total War.

Come to think of it, there's really no reason I can't release it on Mac since it's Unreal Engine, apart from me not owning a new model that can run it. If the game's a success (hopefully!) it would definitely be worth getting one so I can build for it.

Based on the spec requirements listed in the Steam store, I think you should be able to target 8 or 16GB M1 Macbook Airs. Everything else is above that. And targeting Intel Macs is pointless.

An M1 Air is $1200ish. So it shouldn't be a burden assuming you have outside income and desire :).

Good luck!

$1200 isn't bad! You've convinced me, I'm releasing it for Mac.

Thank you! Can’t wait to try it

>If the game's a success (hopefully!)

Title of the thread: "I don't care if this succeeds"

;) Anyway, best of luck, the idea sounds awesome! I've added the game to my steam list.

I really like the idea and the art looks good.

You have set the release date to Nov, 2022 - when did you start working on it i.e. how much time is needed for a game like this?

Also, how much expirience have you had with UE or any other game engine before starting this project?

Do you do everything by yourself (art, music etc.) or do you buy / use free stuff from someone else?

Thank you! I started in July of 2020 with just the map and no mechanics, and worked on it intermittently until about 6 months ago when I decided to put some actual work into it.

November is the release date because if I don't set one I'll be more likely to get sidetracked, so I wanted to be concrete about it.

I didn't have that much experience with UE, I'd played around a bit in school and uni but I didn't make anything substantial with it, and I did the same in Unity. Everything is custom-made for the game except for a save game system, since UE's save game stuff works well for smaller-scale projects but kind of breaks down when you've got to save hundreds of cities, armies, etc.

I did the environment and static assets by myself, but I'm no good at illustration or music and I got some great artists to do that instead of me.

Wow, the premise of the game sounds really cool! Do you plan on adding a multiplayer mode to the game? Me and some friends have been on the hunt for a new fun mp strategy game for a while

Multiplayer is something I'd probably add post release, I think it would be hard to implement for the strategic world map since the factions are so asymmetrical. If I was going to add it in, it would probably have to be just the tactical battle map.

What is the tech stack behind a strategy game like this ?

It's all done in Unreal Engine 4, which is great because you don't need to worry so much about all the cross-platform stuff. The assets are done in Gaea for terrain, Blender for models, Illustrator for icons and Photoshop for some more texture work

Wait, can you win/expand or is the demise inevitable?

You can't expand or capture any new cities, but you can still win since the win condition is based around completing the storyline and surviving longer is how you progress in the story.

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