INTRODUCTION
For those who are not familiar, or have forgotten, what were your responsibilities in the development of CTP?
I was the Lead Programmer and head mop pusher.

Lately we have been hearing some old CivII team members say that more or less they are bored and tired, for now at least, in working on Civ games. How long have you been working on CTP now? Does it become boring?
Personally, I find that doing a sequel after doing a new game engine completely from scratch is really gratifying. The first time out, you're sailing through uncharted territories, unhampered by legacy code, and that's great. With the second game, you already know the ropes, and you know what you liked and didn't like about the first effort. It gives you a huge headstart towards extending and refining what you created the first time out.

I've been working on CTP for coming on 3 years now. It hasn't become boring because there's so much possibility in a world-building strategy game. You can draw from the entire course of human history. As computer game technologies evolve, so will world-building strategy games.

THE PAST 12 MONTHS
Upon reflection, what is the one thing you would most have done differently on the project given the opportunity?
I'd have worked more from the assumption that our theories needed to be proven valid before we committed to them. Getting the game in a fully playable state as early as possible would have given us the tools to evaluate our gameplay theories earlier.

In the year since CTP's release, how would you categorize its success (or lack thereof)?
I think that CTP has been a phenomenal success. It's sold around half a million copies worldwide, and that's a remarkable achievement that is only accomplished by a small percentage of PC games. That means a lot of people playing and enjoying our work, and there's nothing that feels better to game developer. Our critics in the US held us up to very high standards, following in the footsteps of computer gaming luminaries Brian Reynolds and Sid Meier, but considering that we were rookies in the genre, we accomplished a lot.

Some civers did not like CTP, while others are still spending hours on playing it and making (some excellent, we must say) mods for it. How do you explain this?
We departed from the traditional Civ 1 mechanisms in a number of ways, and broke with traditions as much as we adhered to them. As a heavy duty Civ II player myself, there are aspects of it that, while quirky, are just part of my Civ II gameplay style, now, after hundreds of hours of play. CTP was never meant to be Civ II, and in some ways, breaking with the familiar aspects of a previous title can offend some players who've grown fond of certain play techniques. We sought to provide entirely new and interesting play mechanics in CTP to offer completely new ways to rule the world.

Speaking of MODs: have you tried any of the mods which tweak the AAIPs files (Awesome AAIPs, Medieval Mod, etc.)? In general has the team tried out any of the mods?
Yes! In fact, we're very impressed with our MOD-makers' ingenuity and creativity. As the Lead Programmer, I'm happy to see that people have been picking up on the trail of breadcrumbs we tried very intentionally to leave behind. Extensibility was very important to us programmers, and continues to be important moving forward.

TECHNICAL
We were hearing before the release of CTP that you would be able to get into the AI dll's. How did this not work out in the end?
In fact we DID release the API for the AI DLL and provided some sample code for a very simple AI. Interested parties should contact me for more details.

Are we ever going to be seeing any update in the SLIC documendation or even an official 1.21 Patch to solve the Scenario Pack feature bugs?
Most likely, no. Our whole team is working towards CTP II right now, and SLIC has been significantly reworked to make it more powerful and easier to work with (can you say 'interactive GUI based debugger?') In fact, SLIC has been more closely integrated with actual game events, so that just about everything can be augmented in the scripts. More details will follow.

THE FUTURE
Has the team used the forums for suggestions on the patches, as well as now for CTP2, or are we posting in vain? :)
We've taken the fan feedback VERY seriously. The Apolyton group have been great at giving us very cool suggestions for CTP II. We went to your site to gut check our own assumptions about CTP II and I was happy to see that our own priorities are very closely mirrored by the priorities of our fans.

This time around, what are the priorites for the Programming Team in the development of CTP2?
We've been developing CTP II carefully, ensuring that we have a stable, playable game as we've gone along. There were some key technologies in CTP that we felt didn't pan out as intended, and we've completely replaced a few parts of the engine. We've also gone further in the extensibility arena, opening up even more of the engine to others. We're not offering a DLL API for the AI this time, but we're offering a lot more flexibility with just about every aspect of the game engine.

Is CTP2 being built on a "next generation" version of the engine that fuelled CTP, or something entirely different? In either case, can you elaborate?
There are aspects of CTP II that are TRULY revolutionary, and we feel are right on the cutting edge of turn based strategy. There are aspects we left untouched. We're not extending the visuals where it's not warranted (sorry, no first person Direct3D/OpenGL engine in CTP II ;-)) but making targetted changes to enhance the playability.

What has been the driving force to produce a sequel to CTP?
The world-building strategy genre is very popular, and there is a good opportunity to build up on our success on the first game. Also, we still see fertile ground for extending the state of the art in world building turn-based strategy. More than half of our current team are CTP1 vets. We like CTP.

IN CLOSING...
And, finally, a compatability question: Will the CTP2 AAIP files be able to work with the CTP1 ones?
They'll be similar, but different. The concepts and techniques applied to tweaking the AIP's for CTP1 will still be valid for CTP II, but the syntax and value ranges will be different.

INTERVIEWS HOME