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Well the teaser campaign is proving to be a bad idea. But now we have more concrete details about the game.

(http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/arcadamia/Site/by_Mousechief_files/ArcadaTitleLogo.png)

Our website went live this morning at: www.arcadamia.com.

(http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/arcadamia/Site/by_Mousechief_files/splashWeb.jpg)

And we sent out another press release.

'arcada mia' - Sophistication, now with pictures!

22 September 2010 - Mousechief, Co. (multiple I.G.F. finalist and highly awarded developer of 'Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble!' ) reveals preliminary artwork for their next game. (image URLs below) In addition the thematic image, Mousechief clarifies prior descriptions.

Because the game is so original, until the demo is released, description, even pictures will be inadequate. But that won't stop us from trying.

We tried relating 'arcada mia' to earlier works. The natural assumption has been, "Oh, it's that kind of game!", which will lead to broken expectations. So this time we'll declare our game (especially its core mechanic) is not like any of these:

   a) 'Civilization' by Sid Meier
   b) 'Puzzle Quest'
   c) 'Oregon Trail'
   d) 'King of Dragon Pass'
   e) 'Passage' by Jason Rohrer

...but 'arcada mia' has qualities of each of them:

   a) The game presents a vast sweep of time and discoveries that influence culture.
   b) A central, casual mechanic, deep enough for core gamers, drives a narrative.
   c) Strategize to survive events across time.
   d) Navigate narrative challenges with interesting choices that rarely repeat.
   e) Story emerges from play actions during each generation's lifespan.
   
Finally, 'arcada mia', is a casual game of rare sophistication*.

To date, casual games have been wrapped in fairy tales and comic books, because few understood that games can be fine art. Not to lessen the greatness of many existing games, literary interactive storytelling is difficult to make accessible and engaging. Perhaps, as Hemingway helped break literature out of stuffy tomes, a casual game will emerge to bring fine art to a ready audience.

In 'arcada mia' story emerges from play like a monument emerging from bricks which emerged from clay and straw. Your tactics set up little stories. Choose ways to resolve them like a mason sorting bricks to build the monument of your family legend. In turn, stories reward or challenge. They influence tactics.
*Full disclosure: not exclusively sophisticated, because life is more livable with a dash of mischief.



'arcada mia', Raise a dynasty to master the ages.

(Begetting around: Early 2011.) Visit 'arcadamia.com' for more info and images.

Hit an important milestone this week. All major features are now functional in the game. Time to start testing, tweaking, polishing, adding minor features, and writing LOTS of little stories.

Art has started to trickle in.

Had to slip downers into the composer's tea.  The flood of music was overwhelming, and pretty darn good for first cuts.

I took 'arcada mia' to Pacificon for it's first user testing. The tutorial was surprisingly effective. No one failed to gain the first objective. (non-trivial) There were: crashes, dead ends, and miscommunication of the game model, to be sure. The best news was, out of four women and four men, one said it wasn't his kind of game. The others said they really enjoyed it.

Fish in a barrel? Likely, but two were visitors from Philadelphia, not attending the con. Happy day.

Way better than average, that's for certain! Congrats on the positive response. :) Even though the thread is still a teaser, at this point.

UPDATE: instead of appending our more recent info to this thread. We swapped out the old press release with the new one. We hope this one gives a better idea about the game. A brief description of the core mechanic is available on the website:

www.arcadamia.com

That looks pretty interesting.

this does sound very interesting. I love the artwork.

really looking forward to this. The mechanic reminds me of some story game RPGs. Are you going to set up an email subscription/RSS for this?

george,

that's a good idea. I'll try to find some spare cycles to implement, but things like that often slip by me. I'm scrambling just to keep up with the story writing needed.

This sounds really cool (I went and read the description on your website) -- I'm really looking forward to trying it out.

supershigi,  here's something you might find interesting, we recently made a music announcement for our game. Here's the mp3.

http://arcadamia.com/Site/by_Mousechief_files/ZigguratTiers.mp3


You can read the release here:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/64918/arcada_mia__a_Medley_of_Ziggurat_Tiers.php

what's with all this marketing talk and 'press releases' and 'teaser campaign' and all that business?

this is tigs  ;)

:-) Yeah, tigs got ALL kinds! Don't it? :-)

Either I've grown tired of completely rewriting the tutorial, or user testing really has settled down to predictable (and good) results!

Lots more tweaking ahead, but hopefully this one is for keeps.

Onward to story writing! (for nearly a month and a half before GDC)

Added enemies and allies to the core game. Added an initial graveyard for ancestors. Came up with a couple fun slogans:

"The only game where your family's graves are achievements."

"Not all of your ancestors were nice people."

The artists completed the game wheel for the Copper age.

Was adding heroic legends for the last two weeks. Have three more to write for the ruling social track. Then a few more romance tales to wrap up the copper age stories.

I'm looking forward to making the next internal release to the other devs, later this week!

If only the game was ready...

Another, ~200 stories left to go!


Thanks. We'll try our best to blow it, but not blow it.

O... Oh!!!

So tis' here the place to find the latest news on this :) Just found this forum yesterday. Was previously haunting arcadamia.com (and mousechief site too) practically everyday. Fu fu...

Somehow I thought that the game was already closed to the finishing touch, hence the 'early 2011' (which translates to me as the first quarter of the year) and was getting worried that there are no news around about it.

Glad to see that it's being worked on :) Good luck to you and the team. Am very much looking forward to it.

I found Mousechief games during the Witch Yarn's time, am not sure if it was the after finished or before finished stage, but enjoyed the demo nonetheless, and then Mousechief was working on DHSGiT. I forgot about it after awhile, then found my back thanks to my sis who bought the game :D She doesn't buy nor play much games, but when she does it means that it's the absolute best. Enjoyed that one lots too :) Much thanks to Mousechief for all the fun.

And so here I am, looking forward to Arcada Mia, it's in the genre (am assuming that it is along the line of simulation?) that I like and civilisations' progress and culture is something of a fascination to me :D

So yeah, hoping to play it one day ;) and hoping to see more news about it :D Again, good luck to you and the team. As, Mr(or Ms?) Verdon said, "My mind is ready to be blown"


[edit] Err... please excuse my fanlike enthusiasm. And many apologies if this is not the place to do it. But, but... >< I can't help it!!!

An embarrassing admission: I removed the word 'early' from the arcada mia site a few days ago. Basically, the game is on a perpetual six-months to ship track, until I get a handle on all the writing necessary. I'm making progress, but I can't predict how long the rest of the work will take.

The good news is, the core game is very close to feature complete. There's about a month of work to add the last major bits. Then time would be spent on testing, balancing, and polishing, until it's truly ready. That work has taken a back seat until the writing progresses.

I apologize for my earlier optimistic ship date, as vague as it was, it wasn't even close.

Today I reached 4000 actual lines of story script! Whew, a few more stories and I can move on to the Bronze Age, and I can put the devLog meter at 50%

I also tweaked the game engine for a 30% - 50% speed boost, just enough to allow the game to ship. Was worried that I'd have to dig much deeper to get sufficient speed.

:) Don't worry about the 'early', mostly I was just worried since there were no news about it around.

And that's a really good news about the core game. Hopes that it will have a smooth road to a perfect finish.

4000 lines... *__* that's... a lot to write and all before the Bronze Age. I am kind of tempted to ask how many 'ages' will the game have. And if it will complete at Iron Age... but that'd be kind of spoiling the fun, so I won't actually put those down as questions :D

Good luck with the rest of the writing. Looks like it'd be at least September before the game is complete?

Very interesting! I very much look forward to trying it out  :handthumbsupL:

Whew!  Today we finished the initial story scripts for the copper age. There are now over 5700 lines of scripts. (distinct from game code). Next up: testing, some game balancing, a little polish, and we'll release a build to the developers by early next week. Then we'll update the progress image to 50%!!!

50% !!

Finished the first pass of stories for the copper age. Cleaned up the 'special surprise' and got it working. Played and debugged, three days full. Built a release for the other developers.

Next: write the Bronze age stories and work on a debut video for introducing the game experience. Maybe figure out where the ghost peers are coming from - darn bugs!

see ya in a few months,

Made such nice progress in the last two weeks, had to pipe-up about it. Been writing stories for the bronze age, surprisingly quickly.

12 romance stories
3 uplift stories
18 discovery stories
8 rite of passage stories

Having settled the special formats and constraints already, they were much easier to create. Still, lots more ahead:

30-60 'guide' stories
12-20 heroic stories (which are long stories broken into 3-5 interactive parts each the length of a guide story)
4 challenges of the age (same size as heroics)

I'm finding I run out of creative steam by Thursday afternoon. So I work on code Fri. and on 'other things' (like the debut video and maintaining older games...) over the weekends.

If I can manage 4 guide stories a day, Mon. thru Thus, I'll be more than happy.


wish us luck!

Good to hear you're making good progress! /cheer

Not quite done with the first pass of stories for the bronze age. Writing the heroic legends took a bit longer than expected, and I doubt writing them in the future will take less time.

My next big milestone is to create a playable alpha that I can send out to journalists. This requires the game to provide the 'full' experience as I imagine it. Which means, the game must include crossing from one age to the next via the narrative.

I'm thinking of cutting the special powers gained for making discoveries, and enhancing the effect of having a monopoly over making tokens for a new technology.

Conversely, I'm thinking of adding a new feature. (will I ever learn?) This feature would procedurally generate narrative of conflict and cooperation within a family, and affect gameplay appropriately.

much to think about...

Still more to do. Next up, write 30 initial 'guide' stories for the bronze age. I'll pass, for now, on writing the challenge stories for crossing from the bronze age into the iron age.

Then back to coding, full-time, until 'arcada mia' is ready for journalists and the IGF.

Okay, now you TIGers can see what I've been working on. Because it's a new kind of game, pictures really don't convey the fun of the game. (there's nothing to compare it to) But they are still cool pictures.

Feedback on our updated webpage would be appreciated.

http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/arcadamia/Site/by_Mousechief.html

Here's the imagery that inspired the look for 'arcada mia':

(http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/arcadamia/Site/by_Mousechief_files/amMCinspirationHalf.png)

Here's the splash screen:

(http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/dnlds/amSS_1.jpg)

Here's what the game looks like when you first start:

(http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/dnlds/amSS_2.jpg)

Here's what the game looks like once your family has climbed the social tracks:

(http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/dnlds/amSS_3.jpg)

Sorry for the necro, but (a) I am really, really looking forward to this game, and (b), I'm really curious, will this be desktop only like your other games, or is there some kind of tablet/mobile voodoo in the works?

It'll ship first on Mac and PC as downloadable. If the the game is successful, I think it would be great to try selling it on pads/slates. The interface translates easily to touch controls.