Now that Chiron Gate is out and I’ve fixed the urgent bugs, I’ve started working on a new game. The working title is Empire and Legacy.
I’m a fan of strategy games where you control a nation or civilization. Beyond the Chiron Gate was in part an attempt to take one part of those games–the initial exploration stage–and make it into a whole game in itself. Empire and Legacy is also inspired by those kinds of games, but this time it’s about what happens after the game has finished. Usually, if you win the game, the story of your empire ends on a high note, with the empire conquering the whole world or acquiring the most points. But in real history, the story of a nation doesn’t end like that. One way or another, every empire ends.
Empire and Legacy will be a game about imperial decline. You play as the ruler of a Galactic Empire that, at the start of the game, encompasses the whole galaxy. You make decisions that affect the empire in various ways, but the game is balanced such that the empire will inevitably fall. The rot started long before you took to the throne; the empire at the start of the game is apparently prosperous but actually corrupt, decadent, and in terminal economic decline. But you have a lot of control over exactly how the empire falls, and the legacy it leaves behind.
(Because a lot of you will be thinking it: yes, Asimov’s Foundation series is another inspiration for this game. The This and That form of the title is a call-back to the Foundation and Whatever titles of many of those books. Also, I want to say that I’ve been thinking about this idea since before the Apple TV adaptation came out!)
I’m still deciding exactly what stats the game will use to model your empire, but I think a lot of it will be based on factions, each of which has scores representing how powerful the faction is and how much it supports you. As the factions lose power, that’s your empire getting less powerful. As they lose support for you, that’s your empire becoming less politically stable. A lot of decisions will be about pleasing or strengthening one faction at the expense of another.
As well as galaxy-spanning policy decisions, you’ll also be controlling your ruler’s personal life, including some possible romance content as you look for a spouse. (Will you marry for love, or for political advantage?) Of course everything you do is political, and choices about your private life will be a source of events that affect the approval of different factions without greatly affecting their power.
I’m planning for this to be a medium-sized project: smaller than Chiron Gate, but larger than most of my other games. Hopefully it’ll have a total dev time of months rather than years. I’ll take a break from it to release at least one Chiron Gate content update and possibly other small games, but I don’t have any good small game ideas right now.
I’m still in the very early prototyping stage of the new game so there’s nothing to show yet, but I’ll let you all know more as I make progress.