Never quite sure how to introduce a new project or product but I figure I’ll just dive into it with the what and why.
Annhexation is a historical 4X strategy game that is designed to be complex enough to have interesting choices but simple enough that you can hold it in your head and complete a game in an evening. A simple, complete game. Buy it. Play it. Done.
I think the 4X genre has lost its way. This idea seems to have taken hold that the direction of travel should be ever increasing complexity and levels of “simulation”. More systems. More numbers. Which, to me, ironically makes the whole thing feel less real and more like a spreadsheet.
At the same time the genre has dived deep into the well that is paid DLC. Adding units, empires/civilizations, and game mechanics. Stuff that really ought to be in the base game if that’s what you feel the game should be. And if you don’t then what’s the point of it? Maybe I’m a crusty old gamer but for me I want to buy a game and have a complete game - designed with shipping a finished product in mind. A simple transaction.
I think these two things go together and feed off each other and it’s led to a series of games that are progressively less interesting, less fun, and that I just bounce off. It was in the last bout of me trying various newer 4X games that I just gave up and decided to fill the gap I couldn’t seem to find.
For me part of the golden era of PC gaming was the 4X genre in the 90s: Civilization and Masters of Orion being the standouts. I’m eternally grateful to Civ 2 for filling a void: I’d just moved across the country to a new town and didn’t really know anyone. My first time living on my own. And my parents bought me a copy of Civilization 2 as a going away gift. And boy did I play that game a lot. A LOT.
The result of all this is Annhexation. It’s pretty much systems complete and end to end playable at this point and I’m planning on opening it up for “early access” soon - mostly because I need help balancing it, stomping out bugs, and hopefully spreading the word that its something worth playing. The AI is rough at the moment but I’m spending limited time on it as I didn’t want to be iterating it over a changing set of underlying systems.
The game is going to be free to play online in your browser during early access and on an ongoing basis. No cheap tricks - yes you’ll have to login, yes I will offer you the chance to sign up for updates to this and other projects, no I will never sell your email address, no I will not collect your personal information, and no I will not serve advertisements. I don’t even want your password - I’m using a “mail you a signin link” approach. I hate all that shit. Honestly the business of modern gaming, and tech in general, has become this cancerous plague of abusive extraction that I want as little to do with as possible.
So what will I be doing?
I’ll be capturing some basic metrics like visits to the site, number of players, etc. And I plan on taking a copy of completed or abandoned game states so I can learn about what works and doesn’t work in the game. But these will not be traceable back to players - literally will take a copy of the game state and drop it into a big anonymous bucket for analysis. Basically I’m capturing the absolute minimum I can to help make the game fun and, yes, hopefully a bit of an audience who might be interested in other things I create.
There will be a paid commercial version that will hopefully be available on Steam and the iPad that will support full offline single-player (no login required) and online multi-player (realtime or asynchronously). I guess in some ways this is my riff on the shareware model that was also so prevalent in my golden age of PC gaming.
And overall I guess this is my riff on that golden age. Back when gaming was, you know, for the players rather than for sociopaths in suits.