This is how everything started, and some of the things that happened along the way, until the official launch of Imperial Ages.

The Idea

The start was done by Alex and Mars, two friends with a heavy background in meeting for coffees, juice and beer. Due to a common passion for computers and games and the fact that they were friends, they ended up working frequently together on different small projects started by Alex, Mars being the one that worked on the graphic parts (avatars, logo’s, page layouts, etc).

About 1 year and 9 months ago, in June 2006, when they both returned from college to their hometown (Botosani, Romania), Alex had the idea of starting a bigger project, that would keep them busy in the long run. And because Alex had around 6 years of playing browser games behind him, that project ended up being a browser game. As the programming knowledge they had wasn’t even close to enough to take on such a large project, someone that had no idea what he was getting himself into a programmer was needed.

Could You Make A Browser Based Game?

The first thing that needed to be done was finding a programmer good enough to take on the huge task and at the same time to be someone they knew and trusted. Someone willing to invest time and stress over a long period of time without being paid. The choice was one of Mars’s roommates from college, an ASP programmer with about 1 year of experience behind him. The question was “Could you make a browser based game?”. Raywall answered yes, and joined the team.

Around August 6th, 2006, the first ideas were put down on paper, and the game that would become Imperial Ages was slowly taking shape. The first sketches that they started from were based on their experience at playing browser games in the last half a decade (Hattrick, Travian, Dark Galaxy, Tribal Wars, Utopia, and many others). The goal was to create a game that they would love to play themselves (though as it happens, admins can’t play the game because it wouldn’t be fair to the players … ohh .. the irony). Each idea and aspect of the game was discussed and turned, countered with arguments and argued over, until both Mars and Alex agreed on the best course of action. Even so, mistakes were made and more than once we had to rethink some part of the game because it couldn’t be done or because new arguments against it were thought of. Around 90% of the game mechanics is thought of by Alex and Mars, cu ideas and suggestions from anyone that cared to give their opinion.

One to me, one to you, the rest to the programmer

Like any team work, tasks are split among the members of the team, according to their own knowledge of the subject.

Alex & Mars – game mechanics and writing down on paper every single part of the game, thinking of every possible action and consequence and how it would affect the gameplay.

Alex – game promotion, support (he’s the one answering emails), forum admin, blogging the game progress, game manual (yes, he knows, he’s trying to finish it), making sure the game will make enough money to support the server costs and maybe the team as well someday.

Mars – the graphic part of the game, or coordinating those that work on it. He’s also the one doing the html files with the graphics, so Raywall can see where everything has to go in game. Over 100 static pages were created (every tab and game option has at least one static page to describe it). He’s also the one that adapted the VBulletin template for the forum to look like the game, and in the future the template that will be used on the front page and the blog).

Raywall – the most difficult tasks – creating the game engine, the map, thinking all the processes that power the resource gathering, transforming the battle from paper to code, and fixing most of the bugs.

Tony – the programmer behind the alliance, user profile and options, statistics, messages, reports, and in the future the VIP system.

Meet Tony

As it was to be expected, Raywall started to realize just how big the task was, and thought of bringing someone new to the team, that brought some extra knowledge in certain areas . Tony was the choice, and he is the second programmer behind Imperial Ages. He was Raywall’s team mate from his work place, and seeing what his friend was working on, offered to give a helping hand. And so, 3 became 4 and the game seemed to have much better chances of being finished.

At his job, Tony is specialized on user groups, group rights, message systems, so he fitted right in with our group. His tasks included working on the VIP system, statistics, ingame message system, user profile and the ally chat.

In the end, everyone did something that complemented another member of the team.

The nameless game becomes Imperial Ages

There was no name for the game in the beginning, and for months we’ve looked for a suggestive name, that had the .com, .net and .org domains free. As the game advanced, new ideas appeared, but none that would satisfy us.

Different variants were tried, from names that didn’t mean anything, to latin translations of terms like war, battle, sword, but nothing was good enough. Since we already knew we wanted a game with multiple ages, Alex had the idea of putting Ages in the title, and after a few combos were researched, we finally settled on Imperial Ages.

Spicy pizza for everyone – The Imperial Ages team reunited

Although Tony had some time of working on the game already, Raywall was the only one that knew how he looked. There were IM discussions, conferences, but never a face to face. So, for the first meeting, Alex and Mars travelled to the city of Suceava (45 km from the city where Alex and Mars are), for pizza and beer, to explain to the programmers one of the most difficult aspects of the game, the battle.

It took one week to think the battle through, a lot of arguing, calculations and checking if everything was indeed ok, but in the end, Alex and Mars had a 10 page document, explaining every single part of the battle and how it should behave in different situations.

Needless to say, it wasn’t that easy to explain those 10 pages in just 2-3 hours, eating and drinking at the same time. In the end, it was agreed that Raywall was the one that will take care of the battle. Without a doubt, he can tell you now, that the battle was the hardest thing he had to do in this game. At that same meeting, Alex showed the others the first ideas on how to promote the game, written on “just” 4 pages of text.

This was about a year ago, on March 11 2007, and at the time we were hoping to launch the Alpha server a month later (blame the optimism on the beer consumed at the meeting).

The Alpha Test

What was thought possible within a month, proved to be more difficult than expected (took 7 months actually). In all this time the game went through a few different graphics, starting from some sketches that you couldn’t understand to something just as awful looking, but at least you could understand what was there. Then followed a more radical change in the graphics, and a version close to the current graphics was born.

After the third delay of the Alpha server, somewhere in June 2007, we finally gave up on setting new launch dates and concentrated on fixing the bugs, errors and getting ready the graphics and the things that were missing.

To Follow The Path: Look To The Knight, Buy The Knight, Change The Knight

We all wanted a logo for the game that would represent it well. And because nobody had the talent needed to make it from scratch, we decided to buy a template and modify it to fit our needs. We found a nice template that looked medieval and had a great looking knight in the middle. After we bought the template, we found out that the image was taken from another game, so we paid for the template because of that great looking knight, but we couldn’t use it. So we bought a separate image of a knight that looked decent enough, and Mars proceeded to modify the template to fit our needs.

The VBulletin license for the forum was bought somewhere in August 2007, and Mars worked on modifying a free template to the version that can be seen on the forums today.

Around that time Raywall was close to finishing the battle system. Something that was supposed to last one month, transformed of 5 months of work in his spare time.

Anyone Got An Aspirin?

During the summer of 2007, Mars started talking with someone that knew how to work in 3D Studio Max and directing him on how to build the village and the 20+ buildings of the game. It took quite a bit until we got something that we were satisfied with, but it was done eventually.

The Alpha server was launched on October 14, 2007, and it was buggy, but that was to be expected. It was our first real test of what we’ve been working on for a year.

Do You Like The Swords Logo?

December 2007 got us a nice gift, the new game logo with two swords over a shield, laptop stickers for Mars and Alex and coffee mugs with the game’s logo. Best … gift … ever!

Soon after the map was done and many of the bugs found in the Alpha were fixed. The game looked decent enough and the official launch seemed closer than ever.

The Official Launch

We announced the official launch for March 24, 2008, but it took us two extra days to get it ready, and it was open for registration on March 26. Imperial Ages was finally launched.

Short Recap

In 1 year and 9 months:

7-8 delays of the launch date for the Alpha
3 major changes in the graphics department
3 major changes in the game mechanics
dozens of changes to the battle system
a team of 2 became 3, and then 4
1 delay for the official launch