Déjà Vu

Having worked on our maps for more than four years now, I’m certainly very familiar with some of them. Development of a game with such depth has caused us to make major changes a number of times over the years, changes that caused the balance of all existing maps to be thrown out the window. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve gone back to Australia, the first map I ever did, and started over the balancing of the eleven production commodities. Since the maps and the game engine where works in progress we had to leave some things for later on. Preset diplomacy between regions is an example of an element that is only now nearing a functioning stage. However, this means once again returning to maps that had previously been set aside to flag any pre-existing treaties or state of war. Can’t have North and South Korea making nice on the first day, just would not be realistic.

Since we are nearing completion of the project, there was a need to go back to most of the maps for finishing touches anyway. Most needed some boat that was previously unavailable in the equipment list or to mark a technology we recently discovered they should have pre-researched. It is nice that our map work in some cases is getting to the quality control stage and getting away from the hours of mind numbing drudge work. It’s just not much fun looking up the crime rates for the Ivory Coast or the life expectancy for residents of Nepal.
But at least we still get to spend some time playing the game testing new features and looking for bugs. Our test game this week got off to a slow start thanks to a misplaced “S” in a line of George’s code which was messing up multiplayer. We made sure he heard about that one for a while :)

-- Chris