Pharaoh: i want to play this again

I designed many of the Pharaoh campaign missions and apologize if you find them obtuse. :) We had many rabid fans who spent ages figuring out how many “ticks” were in the game loop, what each one updated, and exactly how to optimize city layouts to maximize resource production. Part of the reason that some of the later missions are challenging is because we knew those people were out there and we wanted to give them something to chew on.

I also created most of the missions/adventures in Zeus and remember thinking that we were aiming more for fun than masochism. Pharaoh was more of a grand game, but Zeus was more fun, in my opinion. I do miss the hand drawn art of games like those and don’t find most modern 3D games to come anywhere close to matching the rich style of the artwork from some of the old 2D games.

Holy shit, Clay! This makes you my personal #2 game developer celebrity on the Qt3 boards after @Kevin_Perry.

(@Rod_Humble? @SorenJohnson? Who are they?)

If you have any development stories or insights into the games themselves, I’d love to hear them. What was Impressions like? I’ve never worked at a strategy-centric studio before. I’m curious if that changes the general atmosphere of the studio.

@Clay! You’ve no idea how many hours of my childhood (and adolescence… and adulthood…) you have managed to make me waste building enormous pyramids or whatever.

3D graphics are pretty good now, but there was a period in gaming when 3D graphics first became possible. And I remember watching games moving away from beautiful hand-drawn images, rich in detail and character, to these awful blocky things just for the sake of the 3D. That was a dark, dark time in gaming.

Though I would have liked it if in those Impressions games, you got to see a different ‘side’ of the building sprites when you rotated your view!

You basically just need a single square though, and that’s sufficient to give access to the entire labour pool. I think this is why it was dropped in Zeus - it was far too easy to ‘game’ the system.

I don’t get the Farnsworth reference :(.

The internet allowing such communication is wonderful!

Yes the missions are obtuse, but you know what, gertting that mastaba up was a fun achievement. It took time and effort to figure out, and I enjoyed it.

Failing was half the fun. i think I get why people like roguelikes…

You’ve probably already checked out the let’s plays on youtube, but the game holds up graphically at 1980, probably more but i can’t get it to run higher than that. It looks wonderful

Off I go then!

Yeah, perhaps not true 3d then, but I have missed the odd hex behind a building and forgotten to build a road there.

Impressions was a really well-oiled machine back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I joined the team late in Pharaoh development, as a temp QA tester, but the work really clicked with me, which is how I ended up with responsibility for a lot of the scenarios. There are combat and economic scenarios and if I remember correctly, I created most of the economic ones. I’ve worked many places since Impressions and none of them have been as efficient and engaged as the work there. A lot of that was due to the company leadership; they were great. Ultimately, they stood up for the studio when Vivendi/Sierra started to crack down and that’s what led to the dissolution of the company.

I walked away from it shortly after the two studio heads were fired (they went on to form Tilted Mill) for family reasons. During my time there, however, I worked on Pharaoh, Zeus, was QA lead on Empire Earth for a while (Stainless Steel Studios were just around the corner), and was a junior producer on Lords of the Realm III for a bit. After that, I tried to get back into game dev (in NC) but couldn’t find a job, so I went on to get a public health master’s degree. Eventually, though, I ended up back in the industry - I am the lead data scientist for Imangi Studios now, the makers of the Temple Run mobile games.

If I learned one thing at Impressions, it was that a game dev studio really needs a strong creative design lead who can inspire the team in order to click and function well. When there’s no single person to carry the torch or that the lower-level employees can look to for inspiration, then creative ideas fracture and end up mutating through design by committee. That person doesn’t have to be a rock star, but the company needs to empower them to make decisions. When the Impressions leads stood up for the company and were fired, Vivendi put an uninspiring technocrat in their place and the company lost its mojo. That was evident in Lords of the Realm III and is what led to diminished success.

The Impressions people were a pretty tight knit group, as were the Tilted Mill people, and they all stay loosely in touch with each other through a Facebook group, which is nice.

I assume that leader was Chris Beatrice?

I love hearing about studios at the top of their game. Can you tell us what some of those guys are up to now? I liked a number of their Tilted Mill titles (I think Hinterland was probably my introduction to the whole idea of indie games!), and I heard about Medieval Mayor (sad). Are they scattered to the winds now?

Yeah, they’re mostly scattered to the winds and yes, Chris was one of those leaders. Peter Haffenreffer was the business manager and also very instrumental in making everything smooth. I’m not sure what Peter is up to right now, but he used to run the family brewery, which is well known in Boston. Chris works independently as an illustrator, I think: https://www.chrisbeatricestudio.com/

Albert Meranda worked in QA with me and went on to be a designer on the Bioshock series and more recently on the new Prey game. Others are scattered here and there. I know there are a few out at Wizards of the Coast and elsewhere. Charlie Cleveland was a programmer at Stainless Steel and now is owner of the company making Subnautica. I ran into him at GDC last year – super friendly guy. I’d have to poke through the Facebook to see where others are now; maybe I’ll update later.

For what it’s worth, I love their public approach via Trello of project/programming organization, prioritization and public notice/comments. It’s not something you see often and I find it refreshing, but would love to know how that really affected them as a team.

Out of curiosity, and I think before your time, but how did the infamous ‘what is this shit’ in the Caesar III manual slip through?

As a massive, massive Impressions fan, thank you for your work on the games during your time there.

Haha! that was Wayne in the QA dept and happened shortly before I got there. He put it in the manual when he was proofreading because something confused him and then since he was responsible for proofreading, missed taking it out before shipping the final manual. He was teased for it all the time, but in a fun/friendly way. Back then, people didn’t seem to get as upset by stuff like that. These days, he’d probably be fired for it.

I’ve always liked that, too. I should ask @tomchick if he wants me to reach out to Charlie to see if he’d be willing to do a podcast segment about Subnautica. For that matter, I could reach out to Chris, too. They’re both super friendly and I’m sure they would be willing to talk. Charlie’s probably pretty busy at the moment.

Of course! I was hugely privileged to be able to work there and had a blast while doing it. I’m glad you enjoy the games so much. I really enjoyed the feeling of making a game that millions of people played to have fun. In fact, it was that population-level effect on people that drove me into public health. I had a notion in my mind that I’d like to be able to help people at that population level (vs. medicine where you help at an individual level). I still do a lot of public health work as part of a fellowship, so that worked out well. :)

So, just for kicks, I decided to restart my dynasty, mostly because I didn’t like the original name I had, Petyna something.

I am now Tarqha or something.

Whizzed through the missions, upto building the mastaba, but this time i was prepared, or thought i was, and had a real excess of beer, pottery, papyrus etc, and a large city full of happy people, but my kingdom rating tanked, so post mastaba I had to spend 4 years building it up via annual gifts, which was annoying!

That said, it was really quite ryhtmic watching my deben count go upwards and my7 city change. And Ithink I like my storage yards full.

So I’m an hr and a half past my bed time, and have to ge up early, and very nearly started playing the next mission, which is where armies get introduced…

Apart from some lakc of explaining things, and maybe too much info dump, the design is pretty solid and a testament to graphics getting the job done and not being obsolete.

I had one of those idle what if game x had some of game y and z in it? thoughts and decided that this game needs a more robust military (formations etc.), like Kohan, and some fantasy, like Dominions.

Regarding Dominons, Pharaoh is a 1999 game and still looks better hahahah!

Seriously though, Dominions (mad crazy factions, heavy magic and fighting) + Pharaoh (city building) + Kohan (formations, military management) and, just for kicks, let’s through in a trading subgame, as deep as one of those bigfish* games whose name I forget, one of which was you trading in the Caribbean. Shallow as hell but engaging fun.

or Patrician. Lol.

What a chimera!

  • their website isn’t helping jog my memory.

I also consulted my data banks and deduced that, far bvack in 1999, the teenage spotty me that was just getting into video games did not infact play this game in it’s entirety, and played but the demo.

Lack of funds prevented me from buying all the games i wanted that i had demos from, and I only got 2, Battlezone and Age of Wonders, and quite a bit later I got Thief.

I’m making up for lost time!!!

Pharoah is the defining game for me, and nothing has ever clicked as much (despite other games dwarfing it in time spent since then). Very cool that you were part of it.

@Clay, seeing as you mentioned subnautica

So, last night, I replayed one of my missions because I thought I could get a better score (I did) then I had a choice of 2 missions (Oasis and something else) so I did one, and then the other, and then the follow up (Saqqare-build your first stepped pyramid) which comes regardless of chosen preceding mission.

Now, some 1999 era design reared it’s head, and not in a good way. The victory conditions could stand to be made considerably clearer, and a modern game would probably do so.

In Saqqara, one must build the pyramid, and fill it with a bunch of goods, but the bit about the goods isn’t stated in the victory screen.

Figuring this out took me about 3 in game years, and I thought the game had glitched lol.

Still, mostly my fault for having this be the 4th mission in a row and it being 0200 in the morning and restarting it about 3 or 4 times (messed up my imports and exports.)

My final city had 5500 population, 50000 debens in the bank, 5 full granaries (overproduced pomegranates, and was exporting game meat) a surplus of copper (and enough weapons to field 2 active Infantry companies, and enough stockpiled for 3 more) and a booming papyrus and linen industry.

One thing this mission really taught me is planning your residential blocks not too far away from your industry blocks. i did have empty industry and unemployment at the same time, simply because the available workers were too far away in distance, despite being connected by road.

There was a moment, that sort of golden aha moment I think all gamers hunt for and which all game designers want to have in the game, where things just kind of fell into place. I saw a tutorial for buildings blocks, and managed to adapt it for irregular shaped terrain, making a sort of zigzag instead of a rectangle, plus was able to deduce that if a = 2 then b = 3 etc.

One thing I haven’t been able to deduce is what effects the temple complex additions have.

Another weird UI thing is that when your troops are requested elsewhere, you must first visit the military overseer, allocate a troop for foreign adventure, then visit your political overseer to dispatch it.

2 mildly fiddly things that would be refined in a modern take on Pharaoh.

also, tool tips, because everyone loves tooltips, and a more detailed breakdown, although reducing a temple to + 5 favour might have made things too spreadhsheety lol.

Anyway, not since AoW3 (and D:OS2 at the beginning) has a game managed to get it’s hooks into me so deeply.

Design is pretty simple, but so many interlocking parts.

I can see why peeople get frustrated though. Like, “why is my granary burning even though there’s a fire house right next to it?” (answer, fire house might not even be manned, fireman might be going the wrong direction…)

In practice, you can often supply labour to industry by a single block of houses. The labour supply is global, only access to it is local - and doesn’t need many houses.

Oh hey…you won’t beieve this, but i think I saw that in a faq somewhere (I mean i must have done, I doubt I’m quite clever enough to figure it outon my own), but…

I was (re)playing a mission (the original Mastaba mission, because it’s great practice at managing debt and creating a housing block, and creating a logistics chain.) I managed it today with just one housing block :)) today, and the idea hit me, “what if it’s a global pool?”

So I built a couple of houses, with a physician and water supply, and everyone was much easier…

Yeah, one problem with the design of labor in Pharaoh is that how it works is very unintuitive.

I’m coming up against the problem of food distribution. I seem to have enough food coming in, going to storage yards and often staying there, then granaries and then bazaars, but I had the strange situation of a half full of food storage yard linked to a housing estate but empty bazaars (2 bazaars) and housing that thus couldn’t evolve.

That SY was quarter full of pots and beers, both of which made it to the bazaar…

Thought I was being clever having all 3 in one place.

I have a nagging suspicion bazaars retrieve food only from granaries?

Also, I had an idea for the mad chimera of a game I outlined earlier.

City building as per pharaoh.

Family dynasty and intrigue as per crusader kings.

Overland trade routes and campaign map. Your city being just one in the kingdom after all.

More control over trade caravans, manually outfitting them.

Ability to send your troops and trade caravans across the map.

Combat to be like field of glory 2, including a naval component.