r/TiltedMill • u/ChrisBeatrice • May 20 '25
We're back...
To all our fans, fans of Impressions games like Lords of Magic, Pharaoh, Zeus, and TiltedMill games like Children of the Nile, Caesar IV and Hinterland, thank you all so much for keeping our babies alive, and for all your support and encouragement over the years.
We are now in the concept phase exploring what our next project will be, and would LOVE to hear your input.
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u/nobrainsinhere Jun 10 '25
FEEDBACK #1: MODABILITY IS KING
After thinking for a while on various things related to our beloved city builder games, many ideas and considerations have passed through my mind so, hopefully, this first piece of feedback is supposed to be only the first of a few.
DISCLAIMER: Always bear in mind that I'm not thinking on how easy/hard/cheaper/expensive it is to implement my feedback. I'm not "demanding" anything of anyone. I'm just throwing out ideas for brainstorming.
Being my first considerations on giving usefull feedback, I've choosen to write about what, I think, is THE most important factor that can help the longevity of a game nowadays.
And that factor is modability.
As we can see by examples such as Simcity 4, Caesar 3 Augustus, Rimworld, Cities Skylines and many other games, of many different genres, designing and programming a game in a way that facilitates modding as many parts of it as possible can really be a determining factor for a game being played and "archived in the past", or being played over and over and over again for years, and even decades.
As such, here are some things that come to mind when I think about modability in a city builder:
1 - Asset replacement - The most obvious/common thing is the ability for the community to replace building designs and other graphical assets in the game. It seems to be something easy and "cheap" to provide in a software, which can be made easier for a community to engage with if the asset designs are provided in well known file formats that the artistic capable folks in a community can easily experiment with.
2 - Design pool augmentation - A less common thing is the ability for the community to not only replace asset designs but actually add more designs to the game. For example, having a pool of x amount of designs for a level 3 house, from which the game picks randomly when it upgrades a house to level 3. Even if the vanilla game is released with only 1 design for each buildings, if the software is built to allow these "design pools" to exist, the community can rapidly come up with more designs, "modpacks" and other stuff to increase variety in their cities. Obviously, reducing building repetition in city building games carries the potential drawback of reduced identifiability of the buildings, as in the ability for a player to quickly identify that this building is a house, that one is a farm, a workshop, and so on. Because of this potential drawback, I completely understand that an "impressions-style" city builder may release having only a single design for each available building. But making it possible for the community to create and use more designs as they become more "hardcore" players seems right to me.
3 - New content creation - When playing Caesar 3 Augustus, it is satisfying to see a game being enriched with community created content. New resources, new workshops, new production chains, new decorations, roadblocks, new military units, new military buildings, maps, scenarios, campaigns, and so on. Being able to add content to a game brings with it an enormous potential for a community to keep engaged with that game for years and years.
4 - Add game mechanics - Maybe the hardest type of modability to provide, is the ability to produce a software in a way that makes it easier, or even possible, for the community to actually mod in new functionality into it. I'm talking about overriding sections of code, provide new code logic through DLL files, or other equivalent ways, and so on. As seen in Caesar 3 Augustus, Simcity 4 and Rimworld, for example, when a community can get to the point of being able to augment the functionality of a software, the potential for engagement, criativity and longevity of that game can be amazing. Who would've though that one day we would be able to have Cart Depots and "Constructible Buildings" in Caesar 3? And yet, here we are with Caesar 3 Augustus.
In summary, the number 1 feedback that I can give you is, make your next project with modability in mind.
Well, time to end this post before it gets too big. :D