Microsoft Office YTD Video Downloader. Adobe Photoshop CC. VirtualDJ Avast Free Security. WhatsApp Messenger. Talking Tom Cat. Clash of Clans. Subway Surfers. TubeMate 3. Google Play. Biden to send military medical teams to help hospitals. GameStop PS5 in-store restock. N95, KN95, KF94 masks. But as the old adage proved, it's as much about who you know as what you know and Tony Goodman, the business brains behind Ensemble, had an old acquaintance keen to help out.
Tony was an old friend from many years earlier, recalls Bruce Shelley. When he and colleagues at his business applications company were thinking about getting into game development, he started calling me up and asking pretty detailed questions about the process of creating games. Eventually he asked me to get involved.
At first Rick Goodman, Tony, and I met regularly on the phone to discuss the design. Then Tony got more involved in building the company, leaving Rick doing most of the work with me helping him.
Those games were definitely the biggest influences," says Rick. There were elements of those games that I liked and some that I felt could even be improved. I liked the epic scope of Civ and the random maps, but I really wanted our game to be multiplayer.
I liked the graphics and action orientation of Warcraft, but I felt that a historical realistic' game would have a broader world-wide appeal.
I think the single greatest influence and resource available to any designer is all the games that already exist," says Bruce. Our games originally derived from several classic games and then began to derive from our own creations. We did a lot of research and conceptualising because it took a while to get an engine together to build a prototype.
Angelo Laudon did a fantastic job as our lead programmer making that happen. From the first prototype the game just continued to evolve through playing, adjusting, recoding, and so on, over and over. Overtime, the vision changed, says Rick, as development progressed from the conceptual stage to the implementation stage. It's safe to say that few of us had any real experience creating a computer game, so we had no idea what we were getting ourselves in to.
As a result, the game charted its own direction, much more so than any one team member charted the direction for it. Our philosophy was: as long as the game was becoming more fun to play each day, then we felt were on the right path.
Considering Ensemble's speciality was business software, it remains something of a minor miracle that development on their first ever game continued with few real problems. With much of the team receiving on the job training, and veteran Bruce Shelley's skills centred on design rather than coding, neither he nor Rick Goodman can remember any significant problems.
If I had to choose one major challenge during development it would be the performance of our 2D graphics," says Rick. The engine was relatively slow and we recognised this early on.
So Matt Pritchard went to work rewriting it. His idea was. I had no idea if such a thing was even possible As the game neared completion, with Microsoft now on board, the problems of having 12 races and numerous units and buildings and technological advances in the game became apparent.
Balancing the gameplay would be a huge undertaking that Ensemble recognised they would have to get right early on. To our credit we started the play balance process eight months before we shipped," says Rick. We used every minute of that time to attempt to balance all of the civilisations and all of the units in each civilisation.
We had never done such a thing before, so we didn't know how to go about doing it. Therefore, we just had everyone play multiplayer games every day from February to September of We did a pre-game briefing and a postgame debriefing. Then, I made play balance changes to the game and we played again the next day. I think we played a total of about internal play-test games during this period, not counting the Microsoft test team's parallel effort in Redmond.
That Age Of Empires wasn't quite the Life Sim game they'd signed up to publish didn't seem to worry Microsoft as it soon became apparent during months of testing both at Ensemble and Microsoft HQs that it would be a huge success, with forecasts putting worldwide sales at the half a million mark.
In fact, the game was so successful that the first shipment totally sold out, leaving Christmas shelves across the US empty of stock. We had no idea at the time, but, in hindsight, AoE turned out to be a real blessing for Microsoft as well as for Ensemble Studios, says Rick.
Microsoft was suffering badly in the minds of gamers and in the press. Even we felt the splash damage before the game was completed. At one point, before the game shipped, we wondered whether the Microsoft name might actually have a negative connotation in the minds of gamers.
We only realised how successful the game was after we ran out of copies during the holiday period in and it went past one million copies sold. Recalls Bruce. It was continuing to sell really well at that point, there was a huge fan community around the game, and it was clear it was appealing to a broad audience.
The response greatly surpassed our expectations, although we knew the game was good. It was at this point that Rick Goodman, the game's leading architect, decided to leave the studio he helped create. Open the Game and Enjoy Playing. Strategy defined Investigate your inward strategist and take innovative roads to overcome and outsmart any rival. The revival of a classic This remaster of an ageless exemplary will have you as eager and anxious as ever as you re-visitation of , the year the establishment started.
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