At the time of writing, it has been two whole years since the launch of Imperator. It would be remiss of me to let such a momentous occasion pass without any acknowledgement, so in time honored tradition, I shall begin the trawl through our early development archives to find some anecdotal and/or interesting snippets 
I will not be covering anything to do with upcoming content, so fair warning - if you were expecting that, you can safely skip this post.
For me, the journey on Imperator began in Content Design - putting together the map region by region while working remotely from the UK. Of course, there is a vast amount of work done on games before and during this stage, although such work is often less visible.
For many months, everyone in the world was Egyptian. You can also see that a great deal of work went into figuring out the likely state of the coastal lowlands later on in development. The question on why Dogger Bank is not submerged in this early screenshot remains... unanswered.
At one point we tried more organic looking sea-zones; but didn't feel this added much aside from making sea boundaries more confusing. You can also contrast this Sicily with some of the changes that have occurred to the region in Magna Graecia (and beyond).
The 'important' nations are added. Icons are shamelessly borrowed from other games! Wars were quite interesting to observe when the map was as empty as this, and as the AI began to undergo development.
This is one of the earliest concept spreads we have for the 4 (now deprecated) 'power' types. Interestingly, you'll see that whereas we shipped the game with the 3rd concept style, the UI rework that came with 2.0 was strongly influenced by the first and earliest concept here.
At some point, something fairly vital disappeared from the game.
A before and after - this should be a testament as to the incredible talent of our art team.
One of our most troubling and long-standing bugs was trying to discover why certain large greek nations would end up looking like swiss-cheese in our overnight runs. This persisted for several months. The culprit, is transpired, was the Olympics event. It would target and send governors to the olympics, who, rather than travel alone, would transfer ownership of the capital state of their governorship to the country holding the Olympics.
The olympic event has proven to be responsible for causing or identifying numerous issues and bugs over the course of development. Without it, we would also not have realized that babies born to mothers in country A would instantly arrive at the location of their father in country B, presumably by means of some mediterranean child cannon.
The OG megacity.
Severe Bordergore Warning
If you thought the Imperial Challenge CB could lead to bordergore, you ain't seen nothin' until you've experienced pre-release builds.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, this is all material from before the release of the game. After the release, a huge amount of work was put into changing and developing core features and mechanics.
The 1.1 Pompey patch snuck in under the radar a little, but had some pretty cool features - my favorite of which were the sadly rare volcanic eruptions:
The 1.2 Cicero update is still one of the most comprehensive overhauls of core system mechanics I can imagine in a live game; perhaps comparable to the Stellaris or Imperator 2.0 updates.
Regardless of the continuous debate around reception and fanbase, the 1.2 update, to me, signaled the point at which many things fell into place about what Imperator was going to be. The defining and unique identity as a Civilization Builder. The pop simulation and expansions to the granularity of the administrative process (cities, settlements, trade etc) organically led to a design to tie more and more of these systems together into a very neat and interconnected simulation - culminating most recently in the 2.0 update.
The Religion (1.4), Culture (1.5), and finally Warfare (2.0) updates were each built successively upon the foundation of their predecessor - the warfare update could not have existed without first having a robust and diverse population cultural management system, for example.
Ultimately, I feel the game has made great strides towards where I wanted it to be. I see great fondness in the words of our dedicated fans, for the experience that Imperator offers them, which is an experience that is unique to it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of the successes and hard work you see in our live game and in the anecdotes/screenshots above has been created by a passionate and talented team, the membership of which has changed over the years in development, but whose collective ability to adapt and overcome still inspires me.
There are so many things to say about the development of Imperator - many tangents I wish to follow, from the UI rework down to details about AI, feature implementation, and funny bugs - but I'd be here all day. Instead, you'll have to make do with the meandering ramble above!
I'll do my best to answer any questions below, with the obvious caveat that I won't answer anything about future features/content/development.
You can also track my own metamorphosis from keen, naive, eager content designer with hair, through to autocratic Imperator (with no hair), here:
I will not be covering anything to do with upcoming content, so fair warning - if you were expecting that, you can safely skip this post
.For me, the journey on Imperator began in Content Design - putting together the map region by region while working remotely from the UK. Of course, there is a vast amount of work done on games before and during this stage, although such work is often less visible.
For many months, everyone in the world was Egyptian. You can also see that a great deal of work went into figuring out the likely state of the coastal lowlands later on in development. The question on why Dogger Bank is not submerged in this early screenshot remains... unanswered.
At one point we tried more organic looking sea-zones; but didn't feel this added much aside from making sea boundaries more confusing. You can also contrast this Sicily with some of the changes that have occurred to the region in Magna Graecia (and beyond).
The 'important' nations are added. Icons are shamelessly borrowed from other games! Wars were quite interesting to observe when the map was as empty as this, and as the AI began to undergo development.
This is one of the earliest concept spreads we have for the 4 (now deprecated) 'power' types. Interestingly, you'll see that whereas we shipped the game with the 3rd concept style, the UI rework that came with 2.0 was strongly influenced by the first and earliest concept here.
At some point, something fairly vital disappeared from the game.
A before and after - this should be a testament as to the incredible talent of our art team.
One of our most troubling and long-standing bugs was trying to discover why certain large greek nations would end up looking like swiss-cheese in our overnight runs. This persisted for several months. The culprit, is transpired, was the Olympics event. It would target and send governors to the olympics, who, rather than travel alone, would transfer ownership of the capital state of their governorship to the country holding the Olympics.
The olympic event has proven to be responsible for causing or identifying numerous issues and bugs over the course of development. Without it, we would also not have realized that babies born to mothers in country A would instantly arrive at the location of their father in country B, presumably by means of some mediterranean child cannon.
The OG megacity.
Severe Bordergore Warning
If you thought the Imperial Challenge CB could lead to bordergore, you ain't seen nothin' until you've experienced pre-release builds.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course, this is all material from before the release of the game. After the release, a huge amount of work was put into changing and developing core features and mechanics.
The 1.1 Pompey patch snuck in under the radar a little, but had some pretty cool features - my favorite of which were the sadly rare volcanic eruptions:
The 1.2 Cicero update is still one of the most comprehensive overhauls of core system mechanics I can imagine in a live game; perhaps comparable to the Stellaris or Imperator 2.0 updates.
Regardless of the continuous debate around reception and fanbase, the 1.2 update, to me, signaled the point at which many things fell into place about what Imperator was going to be. The defining and unique identity as a Civilization Builder. The pop simulation and expansions to the granularity of the administrative process (cities, settlements, trade etc) organically led to a design to tie more and more of these systems together into a very neat and interconnected simulation - culminating most recently in the 2.0 update.
The Religion (1.4), Culture (1.5), and finally Warfare (2.0) updates were each built successively upon the foundation of their predecessor - the warfare update could not have existed without first having a robust and diverse population cultural management system, for example.
Ultimately, I feel the game has made great strides towards where I wanted it to be. I see great fondness in the words of our dedicated fans, for the experience that Imperator offers them, which is an experience that is unique to it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of the successes and hard work you see in our live game and in the anecdotes/screenshots above has been created by a passionate and talented team, the membership of which has changed over the years in development, but whose collective ability to adapt and overcome still inspires me.
There are so many things to say about the development of Imperator - many tangents I wish to follow, from the UI rework down to details about AI, feature implementation, and funny bugs - but I'd be here all day. Instead, you'll have to make do with the meandering ramble above!
I'll do my best to answer any questions below, with the obvious caveat that I won't answer anything about future features/content/development.
You can also track my own metamorphosis from keen, naive, eager content designer with hair, through to autocratic Imperator (with no hair), here:
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