Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I've been working on a kind of strategy game called Fall of an Empire (https://fallofanempiregame.com), it's a bit like a mix between Crusader Kings, Total War, Mount and Blade type games (just the overworld, not the battles), but rather than expanding you're trying to prevent an empire from collapsing.

It's a ton of work, especially with the number of systems - you've got combat, resource management, settlement development, food managment, espionage, diplomacy etc - these all need to play together well. And then you've got to add in the storyline, graphics, marketing -but I think I'm making pretty good progress.

I'm still using Unreal Engine 4 because I started work on that version and I haven't needed to upgrade to 5 since it's been released. I've got a free prologue that I'm releasing on October 1, so now until then is a lot of polishing to make it work well.

So, you thought that Attila wasn’t dark enough?

In all seriousness, there’s a constant nagging in TW community for more historical games. Pharaoh didn’t cut it for the wast majority of players. You could capitalize on that, the genre would benefit from that.

They recently released Pharaoh: Dynasties which is pretty much a complete overhaul of the base Pharaoh game, and is pretty much what the game should have been.

They gave everyone half their money back, this free upgrade, new factions, bigger map and a ton of changes. Overall its been a big push from their side to keep the player base happy.

But yeah, there's obviously a big market for historical games, from city builders, combat, etc. and I'm here for them all.