Interview with the Tilted Mill boys

Atomic chats with the team behind Caesar IV about the future of the city-building genre.

City-building is coming back in a big way – and not the kind that has you picketing outside your local council, screaming random profanities as members of parliament. If you’re not familiar with city-builders, think SimCity. You get some cash, a bit of control and the power to build your own living city. There’s no direct influence (other than place buildings) – everything is managed by altering subtleties and watching the flow-on effects. It’s up to you to construct intelligently so your fledgling city can prosper. Forget combat or blowing stuff up, city-building is all about leadership and wisdom.
No one did city-building like Impressions, the developer who you could say produced the best titles of the genre. To this day, its Caesar series is known as the greatest example of the genre. While Impressions is no more, many of the developers from the company now work at Tilted Mill, doing what they do best. We thought it a great idea to quiz these guys on the genre’s comeback, as well as the next instalment in the Caesar series.

Atomic: How long has Tilted Mill been around and how many people from Impressions reside there now?

Chris Beatrice: I almost can’t believe it but we are coming up on our 5th anniversary! In the early days at Impressions we would develop and publish six or eight games per year. Now it’s about two years per game.

As for former Impressions employees here at the Mill, there are quite a few… let’s see, in no particular order (just going around the office in my mind), Greg Sheppard, David Beebe, Mat Williams, Tony Leier, Tony Hosier, Jeremiah Freyholtz, Keith Zizza, Mike Malone, Adam Carriuolo, Mike Gingerich, Jim Solomon, Dean Lawson, Chris Harvey, Blair Evans, Jeff Fiske, Peter Haffenreffer, Hans Schroder, Lenny Eusebi, Dennis Rose, and me – that’s 20!

Atomic: What do you believe are the most important ingredients in a good city builder?

Tony Leier: A lot of the fun of a building game is creating the city that you want. So, we make a game with a lot of things you can do and a lot of things that are happening, and give you some overall high level goals. We make sure there are many, many different ways to build a successful city. Having that room to be creative and personalise what you’re doing is one of the most important things in a building game.



The other half of that is to make sure the creation process is fun. There’s an immense amount of work that goes into that in every part of the game.

Atomic: Where do most of the problems crop up in a city builder? The AI or perhaps the interface?

Chris Beatrice: The thing about city building games is that what you are creating is essentially a single, almost living being. As such, during design and development, it is very difficult to get a sense of what the actual gameplay is like, unless all systems are in place and working well. Similarly, if something breaks during development (which is a natural, and continual occurrence), often the entire game becomes nearly unplayable. This means that as designers we need to be able to design and envision the entire experience in our heads. We need to see the end goal even though the developing game may be very far off from that, in the early stages. One thing we experience while developing these games is that as playtesters and other team members are playing the partially complete game, they instinctively come up with ‘solutions’ and suggestions to address problems or lacking functionality in the game, not knowing, or I should say not being able to see clearly that these things have already been accounted for, and that they just need to be patient. Of course we respond to new ideas during development, but with these games you need to keep a pretty tight hold on the target functionality, or you will find the whole thing unravelling. This is one thing Tony Leier is really good about. Often players will feel the game is imbalanced, or in need of some drastic change, when in fact it’s just that one small, though crucial system has not been put in place yet.

Tony Leier: A city builder has a huge amount of interconnected systems and feedback. They are very complex systems. So, it’s a big challenge for us to make sure this complexity is communicated well. And we have to make sure the overall system comes together in the gameplay and fun that we want. And we have to make sure one part of the complex system doesn’t break a different part of the system. Figuring out just what part of the system isn’t working right is sometimes an adventure all of its own.