Categories: Common
      Date: Sep  1, 2009
     Title: Thanks for 10.000 downloads!

We just wanted to thank everybody for our first 10.000 demo downloads on Xbox360! To celebrate this, we put together a little bit of design history of Megalopolis. Read More...

Megalopolis gone gold for the Xbox... but it really all started out like this:

"Hey, there is this Imagine Cup thing going on, guys, should we make a game for it? They have a theme: environmental sustainability." - "Say again?" - "And when does the contest end?" - "In about a week..."

So we sat down and thought about an idea. I drew fantasy maps for my roleplaying group at that time and so I had a copy of the LotR map lying on my desk. I stared at it and then I tried to envision trees falling, cities growing, a civilisation building, all that stuff. Then I thought, I want to make growth of civilisation uncontrollable as in real life. I thought about environment and came up with the obvious: power plants, cows, wheat, buildings. But I was not much of an artist at that time so I decided that the gameplay should better be good.

(The first version of Megalopolis - which was coded, designed and built in less than a week)

The first version had circular influence spheres and was only built for Windows using XNA 2.0. There were coal, wind and nuclear power plants, watertowers as well as trees, corn fields and cows. The objective of the games was to make as much score as you could within ten minutes. The only natural disaster that occured was a wasteland that grew with every few thousand carbondioxides emissed. 

We could not believe that we made it into the second round with our little crappy game. But hey - never look a gift horse in the mouth...

With daily stuff going on we forgot about the Imagine Cup. But someone in the team suddenly said: "Hey guys, what's with this Imagine Cup - Second round?" - "Well, didn't we decide to leave that?" - "No, we just forgot..." - "How much time do we have?" - "Four weeks." - "Let's do it!"

Once more... this time everything should be planned better. We wanted more levels, I wanted upgradable buildings and Bombenleger wanted more catastophes. There were also to few options to influence pollution and growth (read Carbon dioxide emission). So I came up with eco factories and shopping malls. A game named Megalopolis just needed more buildings in it, I always loved radial menus, none of the competition made it for the Xbox and there was a new XNA out...

After nearly four weeks of insanely hard work and very little sleep we were somewhat proud:

(The second version of Megalopolis - which was coded, designed and built in less than four weeks)

Oh, and did I mention slums and the robo voice? They too made their first appearance in Megalopolis 2. And we even had "time" for a 30 page design document! No wonder noone of us remembers with this lack of sleep.

Weeks went into the land and nothing exciting happened. Then in July 2008 we were invited to the finals in Paris, France. Wow! So we really did it! We made it as one of six teams to the final round of Imagine Cup 2008. 650 teams competing with us. For a short period we were truly happy.

But at the Imagine Cup dark clouds drew together. We didn't make it to the Top 3! Most other competitioners had 3D graphics... that had to be the point.

So once more... we evolved. Dreama always wanted to make 3D. I had done a little bit of modelling for Attic Attack, but I had absolutely no plan of texturing. So we asked around and asked two more people to join our ranks on their spare time (one of the music and one for texturing and tweaking the models). The gameplay was decidedly good enough and only needed minor tweaks. All the GUI had to be redone to improve the overall looks, the robot was given a story and we thought about longetivity and decided to give the player bit for bit of the technology and a free play mode. Different landscapes, more islands, more graphics. The beast was born!

And you guessed it already: Microsoft told us we could be in the first launch of community games on Xbox if we could make it in time.

After 4 months developing with lack of sleep, broken friendships, learning how to handle 3D problems and texturing we awaited the launch of Community Games on Xbox360. And as it finally started we were very dissapointed. Germany was not included in the launch! The team was crushed. We hoped and waited and tweaked here and there. And only a few weeks ago along came a silent update for the dashboard that only a few noticed in Germany. And we could finally release our game MEGALOPOLIS!

Thanks for reading!