As many of you may already know, PC development is tricky, to say the least. Broad testing across many different hardware platforms was something we had identified as a risk early on. In January of 2009, our engineering team was still hard at work creating a completely new engine, including a custom renderer, for Civilization V. Once we had everything back together in the new engine, we already had a game that had been refined for almost two years in its Civilization IV incubator. In the end, we were able to run gameplay with both engines for a few months as the swap took place, which ensured as seamless a transition as possible. We needed to keep a very clear interface between gameplay and the engine so that we could do a quick swap of engines without having to halt development on either side. Our solution was to enable a parallel development track for gameplay using the existing Civilization IV engine as the graphics component. Given our schedule, this plan meant that our new engine wouldn’t come online until 18 months before release-far too late for us to start testing these gameplay ideas. We were going to need to create an entirely new graphics engine to take advantage of features we wanted to use from Direct X 11. Two of our major goals for the project were to support ambitious new gameplay changes (one unit per tile, hexes, and so forth), and to elevate our target for the visuals. WHAT WENT RIGHT 1) CLEAR BOUNDARY BETWEEN GAMEPLAY AND ENGINE. It’s been a long road from prototype to final product, and as the vision was implemented, the challenges of delivering new concepts built on a new engine started to present themselves-but never in the places we expected them. We were setting out to create a completely new Civ experience, which got the team excited to bring the design to life. On the art side, the team was challenged to create a completely believable world, and to produce leader scenes composed of fully fleshed-out characters greeting players in their native languages. The entire engineering team had the opportunity to create something unique, built from the ground up for Civilization V. On the engineering side, the excitement surrounding the creation of a new engine to accommodate these systems had an amazing effect. Some of the more exciting features proposed at the time included sweeping changes like one unit per tile, hexes, complex full-screen leader environments, and a new scale involving more units onscreen than we've ever displayed before in a Civilization game. Almost four years ago, John Shafer laid out his vision for the next iteration of Sid Meier's Civilization to our prototype team (which consisted of Jon, seven artists, and the ubermoddable Civilization IV engine).
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