Blogs - Allodium

We started Infinitum: Battle for Europe, because we were terrified about what happens in the free to play MMO strategy games segment. The games are not so much games - they are more like complex menu systems, where gameplay is either absent or is faked by animations. This problem is as old as browser games themselves. Think of Bitefight.

The worse aspect still is the way the developers are monetizing these games. Like the energy system and microtransactions that do not let you enjoy a game unless you pay. Think of Dungeon Keeper Mobile - a piece of software that put shame on a game that is loved by many. Don’t get me wrong, there are many games that are free to play, that use microtransactions and people love them like League of Legends or World of Tanks but these are desktop games and we’re talking browser based here. So we saw two problems there: first, lack of gameplay, and second insensitive monetization.
Browser based MMO strategy segment is a crowded place and it is not easy to stand out or even pay the development costs. Sadly, we all need to pay our bills and there and so need to get money for our game. Also, the game has to have nice graphics as we believe Infinitum has, which is again quite expensive. You competition is one click away and you can not afford to chase your prospect player by ugly graphics. The same goes for free to play model. No one is going to pay for a browser game in advance, especially when there are numerous FTP alternatives. All that means you have to go FTP . We just want to be as fair to the player as possible. That is why you do not get any combat upgrades in our game. Yes, you can buy managers who speed up buliding your city, yes we allow players to buy resources for real money and yes, we even provide with an experience bonus for your troops, but no amount of bought resources can replace the skill in combat you need to win. So we made our game “pay to build, fight to win,” hoping to use the FTP model as sensitively as possible.

Then there is gameplay. There is usually no gameplay in browser strategies in the sense that player needs to adapt to dynamic situation, like he has to move units around battlefield, which is pretty much the basic aspect of a real time strategy. Other games either fake it with animation of a battle, make the battle automated or reduce the gameplay to the point where you just click places your unit are supposed to go and that’s it. No, thank you. We created a game where you build your base that produces units and then you deploy those units on a map and control them directly. You need to be aware of different unit properties like speed and range, you can outmaneuver your opponent, etc. Make no mistake - it is not nearly as frenetic as RTSs usually are, but combat actually requires skill that you can’t buy, you need to acquire it through practice.

And that’s it. We are free to play, but do not make you pay to play or pay to win. We offer an actual gameplay, where player reacts to a dynamic situation and needs some skill. We hope to make a difference. We want to be a part of a trend that would complexify current stale segment of browser based MMO strategies. We hope you will try and test our approach on www.infinitumgame.com and see for yourself. Are we delivering what we feel we should, what we just described here?

Before we launched Closed Beta on August 26, we didn’t really know what to expect. Will the players like the game or not? Will we find out about some serious technical issues, will we be overwhelmed by bugs. Well, we made ready for the worse and it didn’t come.

We have distributed about 550 Beta keys and are currently working with about 400 players. We’re having some pretty amazing results. Of course, we’re having bugs reported, but that is why we run the Beta. So far, we have created about 260 tickets from our players’ feedback and are working hard to address them. The most important thing is, however, we’re getting a lot of positive feedback about the new gameplay elements and the feel of the game in general. Players really enjoy the AI element of the game, the visuals and are curious and insightful about the gameplay. We would like our players to send us more feedback though.

Funny thing is: from the 400 players who got the Beta Key a significant percent probably didn’t read the accompanying email. We have suggested that players should found their cities in or around Czech republic to concentrate the action to one particular spot. This should’ve simulated a part of the full map after the game is played by 5,000+ users. Although the Czech Republic and surrounding countries are sufficiently densely populated, some players decided to be on their own for some reason. Like live on Shetlands, Iceland, Spain or Scandinavia. Well, at least the Czech Republic has no free city left :-)

There are some pretty strong alliances and we’re hoping we’d be seeing first attack on a GSA base. We think that a few alliances could easily unite to destroy one.

Stay tuned as we’re currently evaluating the possibility of sending more Beta keys with hopes of getting some more active players to test Infinitum: Battle for Europe.

We were not really posting much stuff on this blog. You might think we were slacking but the opposite is true. We are finishing the game like crazy and we are opening closed beta in a few days. Right now we are adding the last features and alpha testing day and night.

We are still some way to go toward the finished and polished product and this is where you come in. We have tested the game ourselves but now we need feedback from people who see the game for the first time. That is why we are giving away some closed beta keys for Infinitum: Battle for Europe. As the game is far from finished, we do not want to invite everyone. We suppose there will be a lot of initial feedback to process so we will release only a few keys at first. After major issues are resolved, we will gradually invite more and more closed beta players.

If you are interested to see our game, to try it out and to give us as much feedback as possible, just let us know. Request your beta key on our website. It is a great plus if you have already tested some game and if you are used to processing bugs. Please note you will have to be patient while we polish the game, as there will be some bugs and issues.

We will send you your key as soon as we are able to let you have a look under the hood of Infinitum. Hopefully this will be very soon.

Stay tuned!

The map of Europe in Infinitum is huge. It consists of 4000 x 4000 fields and contains 15k cities. We want to create an enormous combat zone and also include all of the European countries. The map spans from Island in the North to Sicily in the South, from the Atlantic coast in the West to the Ural mountain range and beyond. Of course your units are able to operate all over this map in real time. You can just say: “What the heck, France sucks, I’m going to Azerbaijan”. (Editor’s note: France is cool, actually; and yes, we have Caucasian nations!)

If you want to go from one end of the map to the other, it would take about 11 hours using the fastest available unit in the game. You might object, that this is far too quick, but hey, this is not a sim! Besides, things can get much quicker later: you can build an airport in a city to transport your units via air. Water bodies are also taken into account in transportation as they present obstacles for normal units. Only hovercraft can go over water bodies, so island fortress is a real possibility in our game.

One of the most difficult things was to choose cities for the map. We used geographical data to generate city names and positions, and statistical data on population to define significance or more precisely size of each particular city. Our goal was to create somehow even distribution of the cities in the map, but we found out that it is not going to be that easy! Most of western and eastern Europe is fine. But some parts of Europe, like in the north of Europe, in Baltic countries or in Russia. There are cities there, but in clusters with large areas of nothing between those clusters. Also some countries just do not have data about population for most cities. That makes difficult to automatically decide which city is large and which small.

As a result, there might be some funny city choices in the map. We sincerely hope you will be patient with us, until we figure this out. We certainly do want to make everything correct and plan to update the map so that it resembles reality in a way that a strategy game needs. Speaking of which, we won’t be able to do it by ourselves. We hope the players and our community will help us to point out some mistakes in this regard. We plan to publish a web based map browser for you soon. It will show all the cities. We hope you'll like it and point us to some omissions and glithes. Stay tuned, we’re looking forwad to your feedback.

You will be able to hold up to three cities, so make sure the ones you need are there! :-)