When I was 13 I got two Game Boy Advance games for Easter: Golden Sun and Advance Wars (I was only supposed to get one, but I guess I was convincing - or persistent). I was in Salzburg for the week and I spent every minute that I wasn’t sightseeing playing these two games. They are still among my favorite video games of all time (Elden Ring is the best) and have stuck with me all this time. I loved Golden Sun because of the story, Advance Wars because of its pixel art and both obviously because of their awesome gameplay.
I first attempted to build a multiplayer browser game like Golden Sun one year later, but the amount of art, story and map making required was too much to handle. A year later I attempted to build an Advance Wars clone, but I didn’t yet know how to code some of the core algorithms required.
That all changed with a final-year high school project. I was still responsible for all the code, and at this point I was able to actually build an Advance Wars clone. I still vividly remember when I discovered the A* algorithm on a piece of paper at the snack tables at school during a lunch break, without knowing it existed.
We shipped it but it didn’t have animations, sounds, single-player or any other basic feature of a real video game. Still, it was a huge accomplishment for me at the time and I learned a lot.
This was one of the reasons I wanted to build Athena Crisis. I wanted to figure out how to make pixel art, music, AI, a single-player campaign and elevate the genre with novel gameplay features such as invasions.
While I focused mostly on the tech and learning experience, the one thing that never sat right with me about all this is that Athena Crisis still effectively is a war game. When you make a video game, you usually pretty quickly get to beating your opponent’s head in as a gameplay loop. In the end, I tried to give the game a strong anti-war message. I don’t like making war games.
