The following is an excerpt from the Designer Notes for Offworld Trading Company. The game, an economic RTS set on Mars, releases on April 28, 2016, and is available for purchase here.

Unit Selection

Our design intention with Offworld Trading Company is to make a real-time strategy game that rewards thinking over reflexes and adaptation over patterns. We want to make a game that focuses on the macro-level decisions of a traditional RTS but without requiring micro-level skill. In games like StarCraft, a player without high actions-per-minute counts could never compete at a high level. We want Offworld to be a game for people on the other end of the scale, who are competitive and love strategy game but who don’t want to be held back by a dexterity challenge.

It’s amazing that real-time strategy games ever worked at all. Most video games are about controlling one thing – a character, an athlete, a car, a plane, and so on. The obvious reason for this limitation is that input devices are primarily about direction and movement – consider the joystick, the d-pad, WASD/mouse-look, and even tilt controls. More diverse game interactions have been found primarily on the PC where the mouse gives players precise control over unit selection. Grabbing a bunch of tanks and sending them to wipe out an opponent has been the core of real-time strategy (RTS) games since the very beginning. However, unit selection is also prone to error, difficult to manage, and mentally taxing. Coupling this challenge with the other high-level demands of RTS games (scouting, base building, economy management, army composition) while also dealing with intense time pressure makes RTS games sound more like a stress simulator than entertainment for many players. MOBAs emerged from and then eclipsed RTS games because, while players enjoyed the scale and the competition of an RTS, they preferred the vast simplification of having to manage only one character, which – again – is what video games do so well.

However, just because unit selection is so frustrating doesn’t mean that RTS games should die. RTS games are the best place in video games for players who want to think. They require difficult choices between short-term gains and long-term goals. They require reading an opponent’s mind and predicting her moves. They encourage formulating a plan and then learning when to deviate from it. They are endlessly replayable as every dominant strategy has a counter-strategy waiting to topple it. They are the only way to make multiplayer truly work in a strategic game, avoiding the intractable problem of having to wait for one’s turn. Most importantly, real-time games must be played intuitively, by feel and experience instead of the painfully slow analysis possible in turn-based games.

Thus, RTS games should live. Unit selection, however, should die. An RTS game is, at its core, about making strategic choices in a real-time environment, about not just making interesting decisions but also about when and when not to make them. Unit selection is just not a necessary part of that formula and often keeps the player from engaging with the game’s actual design.

Having said that, it took us awhile to get there. Indeed, Offworld actually started as a much more conventional RTS with plenty of unit selection. The player moved Scouts around the map to explore, sent Probes out to claim tiles, used Engineers to construct buildings, moved Pirates to attack building and shipping lanes, and then moved Police ships around to attack the Pirates. In fact, the player even had to set up shipping routes to move the Freighters from building to building, picking up Iron at a Mine, dropping it off at a Steel Mill, picking up the Steel, and then dropping it off at the market – basically, Railroad Tycoon set on Mars.

Micromanaging the shipping lanes was the first to go. The demands of unit management were taking too much player time, turning the game from one about playing the resource market to one about playing the shipping lanes. Instead, Freighters now appeared as soon as a building was full and then went directly to the stockpile at the HQ (and buildings that needed resources were supplied directly from the stockpile). To make up for some of the lost functionality of manual shipping lanes, we added override buttons that forced sending resources to the HQ early or supplying a specific building from the HQ. One concern about losing shipping lanes was that players could no longer make choices to avoid the Pirates by taking a sub-optimal route; however, the immediacy of a shipping lane becoming a fixed, unchangeable part of the map had other advantages – that the map was now defined not just by the terrain but also the vectors connecting buildings to their HQs.

Automatic shipping improved the game experience immediately and immeasurably; players now had time to make higher-level decision, to look around at what other players were doing, and to predict where the market was going to go. Thus, we were encouraged to try to take more and more unit selection out of the game. For example, Pirates now could only be placed on the map but not controlled; moreover, they were temporary, so we could cut the Police entirely from the game as the Pirates would just disappear after stealing a certain number of resources.

Our original model for Engineers was directly from a traditional RTS; the player would train Engineers at the HQ and then move them around the map, constructing buildings on the way. Under this version, players often lost their engineers, which meant they couldn’t place new buildings until they found one. Thus, we took away player control of Engineers; they now appeared from the HQ automatically whenever the player placed a new building on the map and then helpfully disappeared when done working. The only downside was that the player didn’t have to optimize the question of whether he had enough Engineers to cover all of his tiles – which ultimately just encouraged players to build close to their HQs anyway, and we already had other game mechanics (fuel costs, travel times) to punish players for building too far afield.

Finally, the last controllable unit was the Scout, which the player used to explore the map and discover resources. It was difficult to envision taking control of this unit away from the player, especially since the player actually did have time to micromanage exploration before founding an HQ. However, having only one type of unit be selectable just seemed very strange, and we were afraid that having the player select the first unit set up expectations for selecting latter units in the game. Thus, our first attempt to take away Scout selection was by planting exploration flags on the map that the Scouts would aim towards when exploring, somewhat like the bounty flags that are placed in Majesty. However, every time a Scout didn’t aim for a flag in just the right way made the player yearn for the original selection method. The solution was to cut Scouts entirely and replace them with the scanning mechanic, which lets players simply reveal tiles by clicking on them. This mechanic was simple, effective, and fast, making Scouts completely unnecessary. With that last change, we had removed all unit selection from Offworld.

Offworld Trading Company has been out now for six weeks, and it’s been a fun ride. We’ve seen some great early impressions. We spent three weeks in the top 25 of Steam. We’ve seen popular Let’s Play videos from Northernlion, quill18, Ohmwrecker, and Arumba (although apparently we have to wait until after Early Access to see one from TotalBiscuit). Day[9] spent an entire Friday streaming thirteen games of Offworld to around four thousand viewers. We’ve seen the fans compile extensive strategy guides. We’ve seen players log well over 200 hours of play. I was on the front page of Reddit with an AMA. We’ve seen the metagame go from thinking that Offworld Markets are overpowered, to that Hacker Arrays are overpowered, to them being fairly balanced (with the help of some game updates).

However, the most surprising thing about Offworld so far, at least to me, is how my wife has taken to the game. My wife had, before last month, never played a real-time strategy game or even a tycoon game. Indeed, Leyla had never played any PC games at all besides Civ4, which she obviously tried just because I made it. Civ is, of course, turn-based, so it’s the type of game that a non-gamer can enjoy easily. Offworld, on the other hand, is real-time, intensely competitive, fast-paced, and fairly intimidating for new players. Nonetheless, after first seeing the game, she just kept playing and playing and playing. Soon, I would notice that Leyla was playing when I was away from the house. Then, she started asking each night if, you know, we could play some more Offworld. Furthermore, she got bored pretty quickly with single-player and even team-based comp stomps and began to play online multiplayer. Even more amazing, she got pretty good at it! I’ve attached her multiplayer stats below, and she has been winning roughly 1-in-6 of her games, which means she is doing better than average considering we almost always play 6- or 8-player free-for-all games like this one or this one (which have only one winner).

I should also add that in most of the games Leyla has won, she was using a trackpad; because she is not a PC gamer, she is usually playing the game from the couch without a mouse, which – needless to say – is not the typical setup for competitive RTS play! (I have begun training her how to use a mouse and WASD.) Also of note, we released Offworld 40 days ago today, which means that, with a total of 162 games played, she is averaging FOUR multiplayer games PER DAY. Here is one of the games she won that was saved on my Twitch channel:

On top of all this, Leyla is taking an active role in popularizing the game; for example, she helped setup a multiplayer match with quill18 and Arumba – which she almost won! She also started streaming the game and has developed connections throughout the Offworld multiplayer community. She discovered who the best players are (such as Zultar and Pbhead) and opened dialogues with them to help balance the game and improve the experience with our first few updates. From talking with them, she came up with the idea to start a Twitch tournament for Offworld, both to crown the best 1v1 player and to spread the game via streaming (registration is open until Thursday). Remember, Leyla had almost never played PCs game at all before six weeks ago, so to call these development unexpected is an understatement. I’m both proud of her and overjoyed that she found Offworld so much fun.

UPDATE: Two days after this post, Leyla beat an all-star groups of players, including Zultar, Pbhead, and SMG, during the Mohawk Games weekly stream. The video is up on YouTube:

Today, Offworld Trading Company launches on Steam Early Access! You can buy the game now at http://store.steampowered.com/app/271240. If you want to take a look at the game, we posted a number of videos on our YouTube channel, and I’ve embedded a single-player game below with my commentary.

Also, if you’d like to hear my thoughts on the game’s design, listen to these podcasts from the last month:

• Quarter to Three
• Gamers with Jobs
• The Game Design Round Table

This post is a development journal from our Offworld forum. The game is available for pre-order here.

Although I have worked on Offworld Trading Company for over a year now, I still struggle to know how to first describe the game. It’s a game about making money. It’s a game about colonizing Mars. It’s a real-time strategy game, but you don’t control units or directly attack other players. It feels like a board game but one which could never exist outside of a computer. Ultimately, it’s all of these things and yet something else too: a strategy game full of simple and familiar elements that are combined in a way never before tried.

What makes Offworld special is that each playthrough is entirely unique. The randomly-generated terrain and resources ensure that each map is a new game board that rewards certain play styles. Further, the best players will adapt to how their opponents play:

• Perhaps everyone else builds powerful Geothermal Plants, ensuring that the power market will always be over-supplied? Just skip power entirely and jump ahead into more lucrative resources like chemicals and glass.
• Spot a market inefficiency, such as the price of water edging above the price of food? Turn off your farms, start selling the excess water instead, buy food directly at the lower price, and pocket the difference.
• Someone claims the only remaining source of aluminum on the map? You can patent Slant Drilling and build a mine on an adjacent tile, trigger a fake aluminum surplus to buy some up when the price drops, or just hire pirates to steal from the blimps on their way to the player’s headquarters.

We have been playing competitive Offworld game internally for over a year now, and every strategy leads to a counter-strategy and then a counter-counter-strategy, until someone finally gets enough leverage to finish the game with a hostile takeover. Lessons from these games have informed my development of the AI, so that it use the same tricks and strategies I have both employed and witnessed. We added teamplay after it became our most-requested feature and were surprised at how well it worked. For single-player, we created a dynamic campaign mode that plays out very differently from the standard skirmish game, making long, multi-hour sessions possible.

We are now taking our next step forward, releasing Offworld on Steam Early Access to expose our game to the oxygen of player feedback. Since last summer, we’ve run a small, private Founder’s Program that put the game into the hands of about a thousand fans who were willing to buy the game based simply on its promise and our reputation. So far, their feedback has been invaluable, and I will be forever grateful to the many who were willing to take a chance on us and our game. However, we need a much larger player base to be able to truly understand our game – enough players to poke at the holes in the AI, to be able to find each other for pick-up games, to help us discover if there are a few degenerate strategies that drown out the rest of the design. In time, players always understand games better than their designers, and if we are to make Offworld the best game it can be, we need to start that process as soon as possible.

I was very excited when I first learned about Steam’s Early Access program because it provides the infrastructure for making games the way I believe they should be made, by connecting developers and players as early as possible. I speak from experience; with Civilization 3, we had no player feedback outside of Firaxis and our publisher’s testing department, which led to some poorly-tuned mechanics and simply bad ideas in the initial release. Afterwards, I spent months and months digging through the forums, developing direct contact with the game’s most outspoken critics, and reworking the core design through a series of major patches. Eventually, we were happy with the final product, but I wish we had that feedback before we released the game instead of afterwards. Determined to fix that problem for Civ 4, we launch a private testing program by inviting notable members of the Civ community to start playing the game over a year and a half before release. Our ability to act early on the feedback these players provided was the primary reason that Civ 4 received universal acclaim upon release.

Thus, Early Access is a tremendous tool for small developers like Mohawk who want to learn more about their games without worrying about the infrastructure, maintenance, or distribution required to execute a widespread public beta program. To be clear, we are not launching Offworld on Early Access for financial reasons; we have enough money already to fund us through our planned release date early next year. We are going to Early Access because we are serious about making the best strategy game of the year, and the only way to do so is to find out what is wrong with our game right now when there is still time to do something about it.

I hope you’ll join us. Pre-order now at http://www.offworldgame.com/store, and we’ll see you online February 12th!

In June of 2014, I posted the rules for Offworld Trading Company on my company’s blog. Of course, given our practice of constant iteration, it didn’t take long for those rules to get out-of-date, so I am now editing that post to keep it up-to-date with the current game. Indeed, as more and more time passes, that original ruleset will diverge considerably from the publicly available version. Thus, I am re-posting the original June 2014 version here as an archived snapshot of the game, which might make it interesting reading by the time we officially release the game. As a reminder, Offworld can be pre-ordered at offworldgame.com.

1.0 Introduction

Offworld Trading Company is a game about the colonization and exploitation of Mars by corporations who have taken to space for a profit. Each company will found a colony on the map, claim territory, construct buildings, produce resources, and then make money by selling them on the open market. Players can harass each other with industrial sabotage, mercenary pirates, and market manipulation. The end goal is to buy out all the other corporations via the stock market, in which each company’s price goes up and down based on the value of their current assets.

2.0 Components

2.1 The Map

The map represent a section of Martian terrain that has been opened for commercial development. This map has been divided into hex-shaped tiles, each of which can be claimed by players. Some tiles, such as mountains, slopes, and canyons, are marked as unusable and will never contain any resources. Also, each usable tile has one of five height levels (Very Low, Low, Medium, High, and Very High) which means that the map is a collection of plateaus. These plateaus are useful for connecting buildings together into rail-based networks that allows the transportation of resources without using Blimps. Tiles also have a wind level (Very Weak, Weak, Moderate, Strong, Very Strong) and ice content (Normal, Permafrost, Ice), which determine how certain buildings perform.

2.1 The Resource Deposits

Each tile can contain deposits of the primary resources (Water, Carbon, Silicon, Aluminum, and Iron). These deposits are classified into four different resource levels, which each have different yield rates:

• Trace (-75%)
• Low
• Medium (+50%)
• High (+100%)

Also, some tiles contain a Geothermal Source, which is required for the Geothermal Plant.

2.2 The Colony

Each player founds one colony to start the game, which stretches across multiple tiles, all of which need to be usable and of the same height. All resources underneath the colony will be mined although at only a quarter of the rate that a normal building would produce. A geothermal source will produce energy but, again, at only a quarter the rate of a Geothermal Plant. The colony will contain the player’s resource stockpile, which is where resources are taken from when sold on the open market and deposited into when bought. Each colony also consume life support (Water, Food, Oxygen) which have to be bought on the open market if they are not in the stockpile.

2.3 The Buildings

Each claimed tile can contain one building, and the different types are listed here:

• Water Pump (mines Water)
• Ice Condenser (creates Water from ice content)
• Hydrolysis Farm (turns Water into Food)
• Electrolysis Reactor (turns Water into Oxygen and Fuel)
• Chemicals Lab (turns Fuel and Carbon into Chemicals)
• Elemental Quarry (mine Carbon and Silicon)
• Glass Furnace (turns Silicon and Oxygen into Glass)
• Goods Factory (turns Carbon, Silicon, and Aluminum into Goods)
• Metal Mine (mines Aluminum and Iron)
• Steel Mill (turns Iron into Steel)
• Solar Panel (creates Energy from height level)
• Wind Turbine (creates Energy from wind level)
• Geothermal Plant (creates Energy but requires Geothermal Source)
• Patent Lab (can discover patents)
• Engineering Lab (can improve industrial production)
• Pleasure Dome (produce money from population)
• Hacker Array (can create artificial shortages and surpluses)
• Offworld Market (can sell resources offworld)

Each building (except the Ice Condenser) consumes Energy when active.

2.4 The Units

Units cannot be controlled directly by the players and are instead generated automatically based on player actions. Each unit consumes Fuel, and Blimps consume more Fuel depending of their cargo. The different unit types are listed here:

• Drone (claims tiles)
• Engineer (constructs buildings)
• Blimp (ships resources)
• Pirate (steal resources from Blimps)

3.0 Turns

Offworld is a real-time game, but the game system itself is updated in turns. Every turn, buildings produce resources, the colony consumes life support, and various other event might occur. The game has five different speeds which determine how fast the turns occur, but the default speed (Normal) is set at one turn per second. In single-player games, the player can change the game speed (and also pause the game) whenever desired.

4.0 Scans

Before founding a colony, the player will spend some time exploring the map. Each tile will have one of three visibility states:

• Fogged (tile and resource deposits are not visible)
• Revealed (tile is visible but darkened, resource deposits are not visible)
• Visible (tile and resource are visible)

Most of the map will start the game as Fogged, but each player will begin with a small section of the map Scanned. The player can then perform scans on specific tiles to reveal more of the map – each scan will set all tiles within a radius of 2 as Visible and all other tiles within a radius of 6 as Revealed. The player will acquire a new scan every 4 turns. Once the first colony is founded, the map will slowly reveal itself automatically to all players.

5.0 Colonies

5.1 Founding

Once the players have scanned enough tile to discover a good place to found a colony, they select a colony type and then place it on the map. Once a colony is founded, the player receives their initial claims, money, and resource stockpile. Players who found later will receive more claims. The four different types (and their bonuses) are listed here:

• Expansive
  • Double production from tiles under the colony
  • One extra claim at game start and with each colony upgrade
  • Recovers faster from EMPs, Power Surges, and Mutinies
• Scientific
  • Conversion Buildings can use resource deposit on their own tiles (for example, a Hydrolysis Farm could use Low Water to create Food).
  • Double production from Trace resource deposits
• Scavengers
  • Uses Carbon instead of Steel to construct buildings
  • Receive a free Pirate after each colony upgrade
  • Learn about news events earlier
• Robotic
  • Colony does not consume life support
  • Units use Energy instead of Fuel

5.2 Upgrading

Each colony starts at population level one and can be upgraded four times. Each successive upgrade costs an increasing quantity of resources, and each upgrade increases the life support demands of the colony. The benefit of each upgrade is that the player is granted new claims:

• Level 2 Colony: +3 claims
• Level 3 Colony: +4 claims
• Level 4 Colony: +5 claims
• Level 5 Colony: +6 claims

6.0 Claims

The players receive a set of claims upon founding and upgrading their colonies. Extra claims can also be gained from random events, bribed via the black market, and won in claim auctions. When a player initiates a tile claim, the colony automatically creates a Drone unit, which then moves towards the tile and claims it if no other player gets there first.

7.0 Buildings

7.1 Construction

Building can only be constructed on claimed tiles. The player purchases buildings by spending resources, and then a Construction Yard immediately appears on the chosen tile. The colony create a Engineer unit which travels to the tile and constructs the building.

7.2 Production

Every turn, buildings produce resources. Some buildings create resources directly from resource deposits (the Elemental Quarry creates Silicon and Carbon from the corresponding deposits). A few more create resources based on the tile’s ratings (the Wind Turbine creates Energy modified by the tile’s wind level). Others convert input resources into output resources (the Glass Furnace consumes Silicon and Oxygen and produces Glass). Buildings can be turned off if the player determines they are not profitable.

Adjacent buildings of the same type have increased production rates – two adjacent building receive a +50% bonus while three get a +100% bonus. Higher numbers of adjacent buildings receive no additional bonus.

7.3 Shipping

After resources are produced, they are shipped either to other buildings or to the colony. If one building produces a resource required by a second building and if these two building are connected by an unbroken string of claimed tiles, this resources is instantly transported to the second building via rail. If no such building exists and if the first building is instead connected to the colony by an unbroken string of claimed tiles, the resource is similarly transported to the player’s resource stockpile.

If, instead, the building producing the resource is not connected to either a building that requires the resource or to the colony, the resource is stored within the original building. Once the building accumulates 20 units of the resource, a blimp is created which transports the resources directly to the colony. Players can choose manually to ship resources early before they reach 20 units.

Finally, buildings which require resources can also be supplied from the colony. For example, a Steel Mill that is not connected to a Metal Mine on an Iron deposit will receive shipments from the colony. If the building is connected to the colony via an unbroken string of claimed tiles, the resources will travel instantly via rail. Otherwise, a Blimp will ship Iron from the colony to the building.

7.4 Engineering Lab

The Engineering Lab allows players to research technologies that increase the production rate of specific resources in all corresponding buildings. For example, Improved Water Pumping increases Water production at Water Pumps by +25%. The bonus affects the building’s output but not the input, so Improved Food Production will mean that a Hydrolysis Farm produces more Food but does not consume more Water. Each technology costs Chemicals to research. The four levels of research possible for each technology are listed here:

• Improved: +25% production
• Efficient: +50% production (+75% cumulative)
• Optimal: +75% production (+150% cumulative)
• Super: +100% production (+250% cumulative)

7.5 Patent Lab

The Patent Lab enables players to acquire patents that can change how their company operates in fundamental ways. Each patent costs Chemicals to discover and becomes unavailable to all other players after the initial discovery. The different patents are listed here:

• Nanotech: When deleting buildings, the resource cost is refunded.
• Superconductor: +50% Energy from buildings connected to the colony.
• Energy Vault: Can store up to 100 units of Energy
• Virtual Reality: Doubles revenue from Pleasure Dome
• Perpetual Motion: -50% Energy consumption
• Water Engine: Units use Water instead of Fuel
• Slant Drilling: Buildings can access best resource deposit in adjacent tile
• Cold Fusion: Buildings use Water instead of Energy
• Teleportation: All buildings and colonies are considered connected
• Thinking Machines: Buildings adjacent to colonies are protected from sabotage

7.6 Hacker Array

The Hacker Array allows players to trigger artificial shortages and surpluses which can alter the price of specific resources. For example, a Food Shortage would increase the cost of Food. The cost of shortages and surpluses go up each time they are used by the player. These artificial events are indistinguishable from the random events that occur naturally during the game.

8.0 Resource Markets

8.1 Local Market

Once the colony is founded, players can buy and sell resources freely on the open market. If Food is $20, then a player can sell one unit of Food for $20 or buy one unit for the same price. However, each time a resource is bought or sold, the price goes up or down accordingly. Thus, if a player decides to purchase 100 units of Food for $20, the price will go up during the transaction so that the final price will be more than $2000. Resources bought and sold are added to and take from the player’s stockpile at the colony.

Energy is a special resource because it cannot be stockpiled. Instead, it is automatically sold to the local market at the current price. If a player is instead losing Energy, it is bought automatically from the market. Similarly, life support resources (Water, Food, Oxygen) is also purchased directly from the market if the stockpile is empty. If the player also has no money, the automatic purchase increases the company’s debt, which has a very negative effect on its stock price.

8.2 Offworld Market

Offworld prices are set randomly at the beginning of the game and stay constant throughout.

With the Offworld Market, players can sell resources offworld, often for prices higher than on the local market. Each offworld sale requires 100 units of the resource and 20 units of Fuel. Thus, if the offworld price of Food is $500, the player would lose 100 Food and 20 Fuel and then earn $50,000.

9.0 Time of Day

Each turn, the game clock moves forward, which affects a number of buildings. All of the production buildings (except for the Wind Turbine and Geothermal Plant) turn off between 22:00 and 06:00. The Ice Condenser and Solar Panel also have lowered production during the hours of the early morning after 06:00 and the hours of twilight before 22:00.

10.0 Auction

Every day at noon, an auction can be triggered. The auction is open to all players and is timed. Bids are in increments of $500, and the time limit is extended if a bid is made close to the end. Four types of auctions are possible: a new claim, a specific tile, an unclaimed patent, and mercenary pirates.

11.0 Sabotage

The identify of the player triggering each sabotage event is hidden and not revealed until the game is over.

11.1 EMP

An EMP freezes buildings within a radius of 2 from the targeted tile for a period of time. Buildings closer to the target are frozen for longer.

11.2 Power Surge

The Power Surge freezes a number of buildings for a period of time. The surge starts at one tile and then travels randomly to adjacent tiles with buildings.

11.3 Underground Nuke

The Underground Nuke lowers resource deposits by two levels. For example, a High Iron would be reduced to a Low Iron. Resource deposits can never be lowered below Trace.

11.4 Dynamite

Dynamite destroys a building, reducing it to rubble. The owning player can repair it for half its normal construction cost; a Drone unit will automatically appear at the colony and travel to the tile to repair the building.

11.5 Mutiny

A Mutiny allows a player to capture another player’s building for a period of time.

11.6 Pirates

Pirates look for Blimps to shoot down and give the lost resources to the player who hired them. Pirates will stay on the map until they have captured a total of 60 units of resources.

12.0 Black Market

The Black Market is where all sabotage items (except for the Pirates) are purchased. Also, the player can bribe claims on the Black Market. The Black Market is initially closed for a specific number of the turns after a player founds a colony; the number of turns is lower for players who found their colonies later.

Each time items are purchased from the Black Market, the price is doubled for all players in the game. Also, each player is locked out from the Black Market for 60 turns after a purchase.

13.0 Stock Market

Each player’s company begins the game with a stock price of $5, and that price goes up and down according to the value of its current assets (money, debt, resources, buildings, colonies, and stock shares). Shares can be purchased in increments of 1,000, and each company has 10,000 total shares. If no more shares are available for purchase, a player can buyout the other players’ sharing by purchasing them all together for double value.

Once one company controls all the shares of a second company, the second company’s owner is removed from the game, and all the buildings, colonies, and patents belonging to that company are given to the first company. The game ends when only one company remains.

This year marks my thirteenth in the industry, and I have created two games (Civ3 and Civ4) which I consider roundly successful. Unfortunately, both games came from my first five years; projects from the following eight years were all either executed poorly or cancelled outright. How did I lose almost a decade of my professional life?

To answer that, I need to start in October 2005, with the release Civilization 4. The game was critically praised (94 Metacritic, highest ever for a Firaxis game) and hugely profitable, selling over 3 million copies on a modest budget. It won Game of the Year awards. The soundtrack, which I selected and edited, was acclaimed. The theme song, “Baba Yetu,” won a Grammy, the first ever for a video game. One mod, Fall from Heaven, developed a large following of its own. Civ4 was that rare project in which everything that could go right did go right.

I started the project from scratch, wrote every line of game and AI code, grew the team over two-and-a-half years, and shipped the game two weeks ahead of schedule. I gave everything I had to give to that game; my only regret was that I did not have the stamina left to contribute meaningfully to the expansions.

Six months later, after the patching process finished and my energy level returned, I needed to decide what to do next. Firaxis (or rather, the new owners, Take-Two) offered me the chance to lead Civ5, which I declined as I couldn’t make the radical changes necessary to justify a new version. In contrast, I was overflowing with ideas when Civ4 began as Civ3 had been an incredible learning experience. Most of these ideas were now explored, so I didn’t have much left to give the series.

I did, however, have plenty of ideas for new strategy games, which I was very excited to make. I had proven myself as a designer with Civ4, and it was time to make a game wholly of my own. I pitched my favorite idea, and it was rejected. I floated a few other ones, and they were declined as well. The company couldn’t afford to put resources into a new project with Railroads! in full development, Revolution beginning to ramp up, and Civ5 looming on the horizon.

Ultimately, Firaxis was in a bind. Because developments costs were rising and the window for PC retail games was shrinking, new IP had become increasingly risky. Furthermore, the company had a wealth of proven IP from Sid’s back catalog to develop, so the opportunity cost of producing new IP was huge. (In fact, between 1997’s Gettysburg and 2013’s Haunted Hollow, Firaxis released no new IP, with the possible exception of SimGolf, which was certainly original but also traded on the Sim brand.)

My pitches had all been for smaller projects, with budgets between one and two million dollars. The problem was that, at the time, no distribution method supported games of that scale. We only needed to sell a few hundred thousand copies to break even – a very reasonable goal with the company’s reputation – but the retail channel didn’t support such projects. PC games had to either sell millions in a $50 box, which was only viable with a large budget, or sell in a $10 jewel case, which was the shovelware market. Steam had just begun reaching out to third-party publishers – by 2007, only id, Capcom, and Eidos were on the service – so digital distribution was not an option.

Today, of course, things are much different as a market exists for games of all prices, from free to $60, and of all budgets, from less than $1m to more than $100m. Digital distribution, microtransactions, and platform diversity have altered the landscape of the industry, and it is likely that if I was pitching a game inside Firaxis under today’s conditions, we could have made it work. At the time, however, my only option was to hang on as a creative director, giving advice to the active teams while prototyping games which might never come out.

In fact, if I had known then what the next six years of my career would be like, I would have likely stayed at Firaxis and assumed that something good would come of it. I loved working there and still love the company, but I am only human; I felt that my work on Civ4 had earned me the right make a game of my own. Being denied that hurt, and I made a perhaps hasty decision to go.

I interviewed at the companies I respected most – Blizzard, Ensemble, Valve – and settled on joining Maxis to work on Spore. Will Wright had amazed developers and journalists with the surprise reveal at GDC 2005, and joining the team meant working on one of the highest-profile games in the industry. I have compiled my thoughts on Spore in a previous post, and despite the game’s flaws, I can’t say I regret working on it. The team was inspiring and immensely talented, and I wanted at least to ship something before too much time had passed. I joined to finish the project, and the game was done 18 months later.

The other reason I joined Maxis was that they wanted to support my future projects; if I proved myself with Maxis, some interesting opportunities existed post-Spore. Unfortunately, the game underperformed, and EA’s stock cratered shortly afterwards. (The two events, of course, were not entirely unrelated.) The company laid off a chunk of its workforce and retreated from new, risky IP towards fewer, safer titles. The chances of me pitching a new, innovative strategy game inside of EA, one which I could commit to fully and protect from compromise, dropped to zero.

I was at a crossroads again, and I didn’t know how to make a game my way inside of EA. I actually spent the months following Spore’s release pitching a browser-based strategy gaming company to various venture capitalists in nearby Silicon Valley. At the time, asynchronous and free-to-play games were hot investments, and the best way to control my next project would be to found a company to build it. Unfortunately, my vision was too niche for the VC’s – I wanted to make core strategy games that would grow from player modding – and I couldn’t find funding.

Instead, I found refuge at EA2D, a browser-based gaming studio at the Redwood Shores campus. Their main team was building Dragon Age Journeys, a Flash-based spin-off with tactical, turn-based combat. Mark Spenner, the studio’s GM, gave me the opportunity to prototype the web-based Strategy Station for a year, which was essentially the same project that I had unsuccessfully pitched to the VC’s. I built three different moddable strategy games that could be played online asynchronously, using the Google Web Toolkit as my browser engine.

I released the games with little fanfare; in fact, I never once mentioned the site on this blog although I did talk about it on one episode of Three Moves Ahead. In some ways, I was afraid of publicity or success; I didn’t know how to make the site viable, either scalable technologically or profitable financially, but I was sure that few decision makers inside EA would share my vision. I decided to make as much progress as I could on my own and hope for the best. (I rationalized that they couldn’t kill a project without a development team.)

The site never grew beyond a few thousand users although it developed a dedicated audience in Japan, with some players finishing thousands of games. (Here’s a popular Japanese blog dedicated to the site, and here’s a video of Kingdoms, the most popular game, being played with the Japanese language and art mod, which replaced the human soldiers with bunnies for some reason.) I didn’t know how to justify asking for resources from EA for such an odd project, and when it became clear that EA2D needed a success to justify its existence, I preemptively killed the project myself. (I did attempt, unsuccessfully, to take the project outside of EA, so that the Japanese community could continue playing. An independent Strategy Station could have served an enthusiastic niche audience, but I had created a personal pet project inside of EA, one inappropriate for a company of that size.)

The potential success EA2D needed became Dragon Age Legends, a loose sequel to Journeys, built within Facebook. Social games were hot, hot, hot in 2010, and I wanted to see if I could make one that respected core gamers yet took advantage of the new format. The results were mixed. The game actually tested quite well within the company, especially among the executives – CEO John Riccitiello and Games Label President Frank Gibeau both had very high-level characters and spent not a little money on the game. Nonetheless, the friction of the energy model, the core gamer hostility to free-to-play, and the mismatch with the Facebook audience ultimately doomed the title.

For myself, I genuinely pursued the project as an interesting experiment, but the game was clearly not what I would have developed if I controlled my own destiny. Sadly, I did not even try to make the games I wanted to make within EA. I was unwilling to engage in the politics necessary to pitch them, doubtful they could be approved anyway, and afraid of how they would be handled if they were approved. I was, essentially, giving up before even trying.

The summer of 2011 was probably my lowest point in the industry. One of my favorite sites, Rock Paper Shotgun, lambasted Legends for its business model, and the game’s audience had dwindled down to 20,000 daily active users. The game was not the success EA2D needed to support future projects, and the group became BioWare Social and began to bleed talent. I had no idea what I should do with myself inside EA.

Enter Zynga, or – rather – enter Zynga East. Brian Reynolds and various other refugees from Big Huge Games had founded a Zynga studio in Baltimore to make social games, resulting in the hit 2010 game Frontierville, which included a number of important genre innovations, such as the energy bar and story-based quests. Zynga was flush with cash, and Tim Train, the studio’s GM (and Brian’s old BHG business partner), recruited me with the promise of developing a browser-based game on my own terms. They wanted to carve out a protected space in their Baltimore studio in which I could prototype safely.

I worked at Zynga for less than 18 months, and it was, needless to say, an interesting experience. I was indeed given the freedom to work on the game of my choosing; it was playable within a few months and was quite popular around the office. In some ways, however, I had too much freedom. Since the game had little oversight outside of Baltimore, the game had no real political support. I did not push the game through the greenlight process as I was afraid of executive interference, so it lingered on as a mystery project, free from both the negatives and the positives of the company’s attention. Thus, when Zynga East wound down after CityVille 2 performed poorly, the game was easy to cancel.

Ultimately, I was given incredible freedom at Zynga, but the project was likely doomed from the start. However, the only person to blame is myself. When leaving EA, Zynga was the easy option for me to take – the pay was good, the personal risk was low, and I was making the game that I wanted to make. The problem is that the game I most want to make is one that actually ships, and excuses about external forces are just excuses. I joined Zynga knowing that I would not have control over my game – at any moment, it could be altered drastically or cancelled outright.

Looking back at my post-Civ career, I compromised the games I wanted to make with what my employers were willing to fund. With Spore, that compromise meant finishing someone else’s game. With Strategy Station, that compromise meant working without a team. With Dragon Age Legends, that compromise meant turning an RPG into a social game. With Zynga, that compromise meant making my game under the shadow of indifferent management. I was giving up before I had even begun.

Well, I am giving up on giving up. Only one option exists if I care about making games my way, one which will demand much more of my time, my energy, and my security. I have a backlog of game ideas, more than I will ever be able to make in one lifetime, which means that I am already running late.

It is time for a change.

It is time to go independent.

Follow the story at mohawkgames.com.