Review Fix Exclusive: Inside ‘Circle Empires’

Review Fix chats with Edvin Aedma: Producer/art director of Circle Empires, Producer/game designer of Shortest Trip to Earth, Writer/developer of Teleglitch: Die More Edition and Mihkel Trei: CTO/developer of Circle Empires, who discuss the game and how they’d like it to affect the RTS community and more.

Review Fix: How was this game born?

Edvin Aedma: Circle Empires concept came from a combination of Mihkel’s work as graphic designer and indie game developer. After about 20 strategy game prototypes the next one was carried by an idea from a famous designer: start the design process by drawing a circle. We wanted to have randomly generated conquerable areas like in Heroes of Might and Magic and join it with RTS gameplay like Age of Empires or Starcraft. Circles allow exactly that. Creating a simple scheme for conquering area after area and generating random content easily. It saves the player’s brain power.

Review Fix: What was development like?

Aedma: Mihkel (the developer) had been working on the game over a year before approaching me for cooperation. Together, we decided to completely overhaul the old graphics and invite more collaborators, Including Interactive Fate, a separate independent game company that created all the new graphics.

Review Fix: What makes this game special?

Mihkel Trei: The entire world is made of circles, each with different loot, resources and enemies. You expand your empire circle by circle. CE also provides a very intuitive and direct dive into fast-paced action.  We’ve focused the entire game on tactical/strategic battles and units, so the players won’t have to spend too much time on building structures or working out a detailed economy. In Circle Empires, you find yourself commanding massive armies very quickly.

Review Fix: Why do RTS games still matter?

Trei: A time-tested genre wouldn’t suddenly start mattering less, but it will change. RTS genre is here to stay – and evolve. Circle Empires is part of that evolution, in a distinctive way.

Review Fix: What games outside of the genre influenced this one the most?

Trei: The idea of conquering world biome-by-biome is greatly inspired by Heroes of Might Magic random map generation. It’s very natural and easy to follow idea that you start from a grassland and need to choose if you expand by taking over the swamp or desert next to you.

Review Fix: Any fun stories or wild moments during development?

Aedma: At one point, we hired several external artists to improve the graphics… the new graphics turned out to be worse than originals, for a fairly high price. At some point, I realized that if we do not ensure good graphics soon, the entire graphics update plan would be in grave danger. I made a decision to create the needed graphics myself, with the help of Interactive Fate, the other game dev company I’m working with. It was also a pretty fun experience taking an hour to record various death screams for unit death sounds… I consider myself a decent death-screamer now.

Review Fix: Do you think preserving older gameplay mechanics in new games is important?

Trei: Preserving something only because it’s old is only a valid reason if we mean preserving in museums and history books. Because if a bad game mechanic is old, it shouldn’t have more rights to be participating in players’ lives than a bad game mechanic which is new.

Ultimately, players determine the current, but ever-changing judgment if a specific game mechanic is bad by voting with their feet (wallets, brains, life seconds).

Review Fix: What’s your favorite memory as a gamer?

Trei: One of my recent favorite memories is a series of 15 duels between the developer/CTO of Circle Empires and myself, in a totally unrelated strategy game. Our powers have been super-equally matched, so each match has been a truly brutal struggle! We are great friends and this makes even the fiercest of battles extremely merry (especially if you’re winning!).

Review Fix: Who will enjoy this game the most?

Aedma: CE will be most enjoyed by people who enjoy sending large numbers of tiny warriors to death & glory. One could also label Circle Empires as a RTT (real-time-tactical) game since it’s very much combat & expansion focused.

Review Fix: Bottom Line, why must someone play this game?

Trei: CE engages a really cool part of your brain which seems to reward many with adrenaline and determination to conquer the world.

Review Fix: How do you want this game to be remembered?

Trei: As a nice little game that allows you to conquer the world circle by circle while commanding massive armies of fierce little warriors.

Review Fix: What’s next?

Aedma: If the players like what they see, they can expect all kinds of wonderful follow-ups. At least that seems incredibly logical. I myself am also dedicated to developing a space roguelike called Shortest Trip to Earth.”

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