That may seem a simple question, but it is something we considered a lot during early stages of Citadelum development. How to make the best game for beginners in a genre that is so demanding. Accessibility is key for us, and we do not only mean different control schemes, font size, keyboard shortcuts and other custom options. These are taken care of, but we want to make a strategy / city building game that can be played by anyone.
The keys for making the best game for beginners reside in tutorials, user interface, learning curve, difficulty curve and also PC specs.
Tutorial in a city building game.
If you already played our Steam Next Fest demo, you know how this tutorial works. That is something we learned from experience, as Citadelum is our third game in a row in the strategy genre (after One Militar Camp and Prison Tycoon Under New Management). We wanted the basic instructions to feel organic, so we created a group of advisors, as any consul in ancient Rome should have, that tell us about the basics.
The idea is giving a sense of story to these basic instructions, and at the same time introduce characters that add to the game narrative. Of course, following these simple objectives works for beginners in the strategy genre, and also for experts, remember you can disable them anytime you want.
Finally, we understand that anyone can forget about the basics , so we are giving players the opportunity to go back to the tutorials whenever they need them. You will learn to play Citadelum by playing Citadelum.
User interface.
Again, our experience in city building games gave us some ideas on how to design and deploy elements on the screen. You will have immediate access to a minimap, building menus (with icons that make them easier to understand for newcomers) and also the possibility of changing between the three layers of gameplay: city building, map exploration with trade and battles and the gods in the pantheon.
At the top of the screen you can consult time, resources and population. Some of these tags allow the player to customize which elements want to be displayed. Finally, you can select the speed (also a way to make it accessible to every type of player) and check your settlement level.
Learning and difficulty curves.
How difficult is a strategy game? It depends. And not only depends on game controls, or the huge possibilities of building. You have to keep balance in resources, money, health and happiness of the citizens, and then, of course in objectives and number of strength of your enemies.
This may be the hardest and longest part of the development, as we are making constant adjustments according to our QA team and also the feedback we get from users. But, after having a great setting such as ancient Rome, detailed graphics and deep mechanics, this is what makes the game fun to play. We want to give the player an absolute sense of control, but at the same time, we are giving him something challenging. This is how our campaign mode works, the difficulty resides not only in battles, resources needed, requirements from the gods, the senate or the population, it is also based on what Rome asks from you.
Citadelum will also have a sandbox mode, to let the player build a huge city, evolve and experience the rising attacks from barbarian hordes, the needs of a huge population and the management of every aspect of the game unlocked from the beginning, including the favor of gods.
PC specs.
Finally, we are also going through optimization to make Citadelum work on most settings, not only high end PCs. This is another element we take seriously. Although you have the opportunity to zoom in and watch what’s happening inside every building, and then zoom out to our settlement view and even further to a map view and the pantheon, and we have tons of characters and buildings… you will still be able to play with your 5 year old computer. You can check the recommended PC specs on our Steam page.
Just as a reminder, our previous game was also fully playable with Steamdeck console, and we are aiming to do a better experience even this time. And you can make adjustments to the game in order to make it work on less powerful machines.
That’s how we are making the best strategy game possible for beginners and experts alike.
