Everyone loves a good underdog story. How the weakest competitor, or the one no one has ever heard of, manages to carve a niche for itself among the big boys. And that is precisely the case with Abylight Barcelona. It has been that way since we started developing games for Nintendo Wii and DS, such as Afterzoom, and we still have that feeling today, during the development of Citadelum, the city building game set in Ancient Rome.
A small indie studio.
Abylight Barcelona is a small team, even for an indie studio. At the moment we have less than 15 people in the team, including not only programmers, designers or producers, but also artists, QA, marketing… Among all the team members we share the essential tasks to develop and publish video games.
That’s why we feel so honored when our work is compared to the best strategy games, such as the Caesar saga, Anno or Age of Empires. The fact that Citadelum has been placed among the most played strategy titles (and with the largest community of fans) is a privilege, which obliges us to give our best in order not to disappoint this huge community of followers.
How has a small indie studio managed to place itself among the best strategy games of all time, at least in the perception of gamers? In the case of Abyligh, the answer is simple.It has been a learning period, which has taken us through three management games, during a period of more than 5 years of uninterrupted work.
Learning from previous games.
Abylight’s first contact with management and strategy games was a commissioned work. We put all our resources into the realization of Prison Tycoon Under New Management, a management game based on a classic franchise. With our work we learned some keys that would serve us for later releases in the strategy genre, such as the importance in the balance phase of resources and objectives, the attention to detail in the graphical aspects, and especially, the importance of taking into account the feedback from the community.
The second game developed by Abylight in the construction genre was One Military Camp (released in 2023). OMC was already an important step forward in the mechanics introduced, in the technical aspects and especially in one of the hallmarks of our developments: the strategy in different layers. In this base building and strategy game, the player could zoom continuously, from the interior of the buildings to the general map.
Thus, inside the camp, city building mechanics were developed, while on the map, the player could carry out a series of conquests, as if it were a classic board game, in the style of Risk. Risk is a game that combines strategy and dice rolls, and that development fit perfectly in our game, where no violence of any kind was shown.
Another aspect we made sure to maintain was accessibility since One Military Camp had to be a game for all kinds of fans of the genre, from veterans to a newcomer. Of course, the support of our community of players was also crucial for the game to take its final shape.
Citadelum: Our most ambittous game to date.
Finally we have reached our latest development, Citadelum, which finally places us next to works made by much larger studios and with more resources. For this game we wanted to keep our personal seal, the strategy on three levels (the city, the map, where battles and trade take place, and the pantheon, where the gods await us).
To keep up with the great strategy games we have already mentioned, we bet on a macro management of people and resources in the camp, and a historical setting, such as the final period of the Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire, which was recognizable to the players.
And of course, we listened to our community again. What were your favorite games? What is the historical setting you would like to bring back? How do you rate the difficulty in control and the options of such a deep game?
In Citadelum you can find three different game modes, a campaign that goes through different moments and historical locations, battle mode and a sandbox mode, which allows you to grow your settlement without limits. It is also the first game developed by Abylight Barcelona that adds the possibility for players to create their own scenarios through mods.
