So, after long planning, I finally started working on my Ascendancy remake. I’ve had this in my mind for a very long time.
Ascendancy was one of my favorite childhood games. Unfortunately, it was almost completely inaccessible to me. When it was released, I had no computer that matched its requirements. Ascendancy required a 80486, a decent SVGA system with sound card. In 1995, our family owned an 80286 with EGA display with all its 16 colors.
A friend of our family had a copy of the game, but they lived far away in a distant city. So I could play Ascendancy for 1 week each year when we visited our friend.
When I finally got a system to run Ascendancy, it was impossible to obtain a copy legally in my country. I couldn’t even get the demo version: when I downloaded it at school (we had no Internet at home), one of the floppies got damaged. Had no luck getting a copy from my friend either.
This limitation led me to trying remake of the game from scratch, only using my memories of the game. Needless to say, as a kid, I didn’t have the skills or the tools to succeeded. I’ve had a few demos made in Turbo Pascal and later in Borland Delphi using standard Windows graphics and later DirectX. I never reached playable status, but made some impressive demos and learned a lot along the way. This struggle made me the software engineer who I am today.
And finally, decades later, I managed to finish a very simplified version of my own 4X creation: Betelgeuse Brawl. It’s a very simple 4X game, an extremely stripped down mix of Ascendancy and Imperium Galactica for iPhone, but it was fun to create and was fun to play too.
A few years later, The Logic Factory guys created their own iOS version of Ascendancy, fixing lots of issues of the original title. It did not last long though, and as of today, the game is not available officially for any platforms. The Logic Factory website is finally down for good. I think it’s a sign that we can’t expect Ascendancy II anymore, neither will the original title be re-released on modern platforms with the fixes they made in the iOS version.
Over the years I did not stop playing the original MS-DOS version of the game, however these days I clearly see its weaknesses. I was looking for some fun open-source project to join or start, so why not start working on an Ascendancy remake?
My goals:
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I want to have fun and progress fast: I won’t use any technology stack that requires a steep learning curve, even if that is more suitable for game development and looks better in a CV
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The fun part: I want a programming experience similar to my childhood – it doesn’t mean I’m going to use Turbo Pascal, but I want quick build & run & fail cycles
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I want to mimic, but not recreate the original Ascendancy experience first. Some minor fixes may come on the way, but big improvements are planned for later, when the base game is playable
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I’m not going to do reverse engineering (see the first point). Tools to read most of Ascendancy’s binary file formats are already available on GitHub, and lots of information is presented as plain text files. This means, the experience would not be 100% accurate, at least at first
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I’d like to have a decent AI (to fix the famous issue of the original Ascendancy). I’ll implement a classic game AI with a decision tree, but I also want to use the project to experiment with machine learning, another never-realized goal of the original developers
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I’d like to implement minor interface changes to make the game UI less frustrating
So, welcome to my blog, thanks for reading, see you soon!