Progress Report – September

Still struggling to find time to keep the blog updated, as you have no doubt noticed. Well, such is life sometimes.

Work on Imperium has been very scarce for a period. The main reason is that Pirates and Traders has been occupying most of my development time. When you have around 75,000 users downloading a game, you get a fair amount of e-mails, comments, and feedback; I try to respond to everyone. It’s also not a “complete” game yet, in the sense that I’ve added everything to the game experience that I originally envisioned; I still haven’t implemented Crew members, Port attacks, or any of the major adventure storylines that I have planned for the game. Add in all the excellent ideas that have been proposed by the active players (both on the forums and in mails), and I probably have work in this game for at least another six months – if not more.

I would be lying if I said that I haven’t considered simply dropping the Imperium project over the past few months. However, I have done so many endless iterations over the basic ideas, that I am loath to not do something with it. I still think the world lacks a good Ancient strategy game, and while the concepts I am working with now are much simpler and more streamlined than my original vision for the game, I still like the ideas and the design and think they are worth playing. Thus I still plan to try and split my development time between my mobile and desktop projects for a while yet, and see where I stand at the end of the year.

So many games to create – so little time to create them in.