Goodbye Free Cities XL. Hello Free Cities: Rebirth.
Added 2020-10-27 20:03:17 +0000 UTCThere is a final release of Free Cities XL (FCXL) with additional UI tweaks slated for release in the near future. This is the final planned release of FCXL.
Why are we killing the FCXL project just as the team is growing?
1) Free Cities is built upon a javascript based web engine designed for branching story delivery. Free Cities was already stretching the limit of the engine's ability to process weekly turns, as well as it's ability to reliably save when a player had a large slave pool.
2) Free Cities is an old, open source game that the modern version has been touched by many many hands. While this certainly means there's a lot of content in the game, there is no consistency to the quality of code, no code standards, and a lot of hard coded and hacked systems that were not designed to be expandable.
3) Free Cities has a lot of limitations caused by it's build environment, that would make delivering the game we want to build far more difficult then it should be, and lower quality than we would like.
What's the plan now?
For the past week and a half we have been working on back end systems, game design documentation, and front end UI to begin building a first alpha of Free Cities: Rebirth. The goal of this project is to try and be as true to the source material as we can, while expending upon both the story and gameplay to bring to life a Free Cities game that is fresh and new.
Free Cities: Rebirth (FCR) will be turn based.
FCR will contain customizable 3D models of Characters, and a 3D arcology.
FCR will have similar slavery systems, with greater player choice flexibility.
FCR will have greater depth of Management, Research, Military, and Diplomacy.
Lastly, FCR will be significantly larger in scale then Free Cities.
Please note that the attached video is simply the current prototype of the launch screen, and is subject to change.
