April in the Champagne region, vineyards coming into leaf, the sun out properly for the first time that year. We had dragged a whiteboard into the garden. Two middle-aged men, working out how much oxygen a truck could carry.
Pymous is the artist. He has been making things for other people's games for two decades: a Skyrim mod that took Nexus Mod of the Month back in 2013, then maps and nations for Dominions, then art packs for Shadow Empire. All of it alongside a day job that has nothing to do with games and, as it turns out, quite a lot to do with this one. He holds a doctorate in polymer materials science and has spent most of his career designing materials for cryogenic, space and radioactive environments. If you play Shadow Empire, there's a fair chance his work is already installed in your game.
I'm the programmer. I'd wanted to make games since I was a teenager, and then spent twenty years writing software for media companies and grocery stores instead. What finally started it was an accident: two years ago I had a few free evenings on my summer holiday and downloaded Godot to see what it did. Then I made a small game, then another, then Astro Protocol. It came out in February.
We met on Discord six months before that afternoon in the garden, talking about the games we loved. Crunchy 4X, especially Shadow Empire, Dominions, Hearts of Iron and Alpha Centauri. It turned out we had both been building mods for them.
And when the conversation drifted to the games we would make, we turned out to be describing the same one. What we both wanted was a hard sci-fi 4X where the hard part is logistics, the units are ones you designed yourself, and every game is set on a different planet with its own atmosphere, its own biosphere and its own problems. And where everyone plans their turn at the same time, so a game with six players in it is something you can actually finish.
By the time Astro Protocol shipped I knew I wanted to do game development full time. Finishing it in evenings and weekends had taken everything I had. Pymous came at it from the other side: more mods, more commissions, more of his week going into other people's games, until it stopped making sense to treat it as the thing he did after work. Two decades of building for someone else's game, and now he gets to build his own.
Neither of us planned this. We just kept doing it until it was the job. As of last week, we're both on this full time.
We're not ready to announce the game or show full screenshots of it. But over the coming weeks and months I'll write a series of posts about our thinking on each of the mechanics: the planet, the units, the turn, the trucks.
Here's a cropped preview of what the prototype looks like right now.
Subscribe below and I'll email you when the next post is up. And since you've read this far, you're exactly the person I want to ask: what do you wish these kinds of games did differently?
-Zeikko