Getting Empire Builder off the ground

Every year we came home from GenCon with a list. Games we'd played or watched over the weekend and promised ourselves we'd make time for. Empire Builder was always on it.

And every year, the list would slide right on by. Work, family, life. The list always loses.

"Surely there's a digital version"

In late 2022 we had what felt like an obvious thought: we play video games all the time, so why couldn't this be one of them? Surely someone had already made a digital Empire Builder.

A quick search turned up nothing. I shrugged and wrote the idea off.

My dev partner, Derek, did not. He went looking for whoever could make that game happen, half expecting to learn it was already in the works, and half wondering whether it was something we could do ourselves. There's a longer story there, but the short version is that he found Darwin's Toys and worked out an agreement that everyone involved felt good about.

Just like that, a couple of guys who couldn't find a free weekend to play a board game had signed up to build one.

A team of two

Derek and I were, and still are, the only developers and artists at Zombie Possum Games. I don't see that changing anytime soon. Then again, I'm sure plenty of successful studios started as one or two people who were certain they'd never need to grow.

Building a digital version of a game we already loved seemed like a gentle way to step into game development. An established game comes with a lot of built-in advantages, and the biggest one, we figured, was that we wouldn't have to design the rules.

They were already written down for us!

The rules are already written (aren't they?)

They were. Across multiple editions, released over decades, with contradictions and wildly varying levels of readability.

If I'm being honest, it was kind of a nightmare.

Empire Builder is played competitively at conventions around the world. There's an entire organization, the Train Gamers Association (TGA), built around it and games like it. The rulebook we worked from was 8 pages long. The errata document that came with it was 18 pages.

So "the rules" turned out to be a conversation between three groups: us, Darwin's Toys and the TGA. Add a healthy dose of hubris, the misplaced confidence of two developers who were sure they knew how the game worked, and you get a lot of collisions between what we built and what the rules actually said once the errata weighed in.

There was a lot of rework.

Starting before the ink was dry

I started building systems before the contract was even signed. I didn't need every hard-and-fast rule nailed down to know what the map looked like or how trains moved across it, so I dug in.

That's where the next hurdle showed up: the engine.

We chose Unity mostly because it was the only modern engine either of us had used. I'd been dabbling with it for over a decade. Derek had never touched it, but he's an accomplished C# developer, and by the time we got serious, Unity had good support for modern C#.

Knowing C# and knowing Unity turned out to be two different things. Derek came from years of building software for larger companies, and I think he'd admit that some of those habits and patterns don't translate directly to Unity, or to games in general. Today he's every bit as strong a Unity developer as I am, at least in everything this game touches. That didn't happen overnight.

The hard part, for me, was not assuming every disagreement meant he just didn't get it yet. There were plenty of grumpy late-night conversations that bled into grumpy early-morning ones.

These days we're more like a cantankerous old married couple. We mostly argue about money. That, and he refuses to put the toilet seat down.

Data first, because one map was never the plan

One principle we adopted very early: drive as much of the gameplay and map information through data as possible.

That came straight from our ambitions. We never wanted to make just the Europe map. We wanted (and still want!) to release all the major Empire Builder maps, and the only realistic way for two people to do that is to keep each map's specifics out of the code.

The catch is that the moment you have data, you need tools to manage it. From day one we were producing map data and map-specific artwork, and eventually sound, all of which needed tooling to maintain.

I'd argue our tooling could be better than it is. But in any project like this, internal tools are the first thing to slide to the back burner when there's a player-facing feature waiting to be built.

What came next

That's the beginning: a list we never got through, a search that came up empty, a partner who wouldn't let it go, and two developers who thought the hard part (the rules) was already done.

It wasn't. And the hardest problems were still ahead of us: building multiplayer for a game no off-the-shelf networking solution fit, watching our engine's licensing go sideways in the middle of development, and learning what it really means to build a game alongside another company. More on those soon.