Achron Interview: Your Head Will Explode

bit-tech: Why do you think that nobody has tried to make an RTS in this way before? Multi-player time travel is radically different to anything we’ve ever seen before.

Chris Hazard: I think the main reasons are the difficulty and risk of development and that computers had not been fast enough before recent times. When I came up with the idea, I estimated that household computers would not be fast enough until 2003 or 2004. However, it wasn’t until about 2005 or 2006 that computers and consoles started coming up to spec. And even then, it wasn’t until 2008 that I finally figured out some algorithmic optimizations that made the engine scale to larger games on slower systems.

Coming up with the underlying technology was also very risky. If we had a publishing deadline early in the project’s infancy, several unanticipated issues that took many months to resolve might have sunk the project.

BT: You’ve been showing Achron off a bit lately, especially at GDC where we first heard about the project. What sort of reaction have you been getting from people so far? Any offers from publishers, or do you want to keep this strictly as a small, independent project?


CH: The first reaction is usually “whoa”, or sometimes a long string of positive expletives. Second reaction: “I think my head just exploded.” We get that one a lot. It was surreal hearing around 900 people at our GDC presentation simultaneously say gasp.

Usually people want to know about all the paradoxes and advanced strategy right away because they’re not used to thinking like that. One of our playtesters once commented that after playing the game quite a bit, he went around his daily life unconsciously attempting to reach for the timeline – probably not unlike the feeling I get when I forget that printed books don’t have a search function.

We’ve had some interest from publishers already. Additionally, both the military and a defence contractor have expressed interest in using the timeline and underlying technology for training, sensitivity analysis for simulations, and collaborative planning. We’re also in talks with a casual game developer who is interested in licensing our technology to use subsets of it to make a variety of casual games.


We’re going to evaluate all of our options over the coming months.

BT: Do you have an eventual release window in mind?

CH: The earliest likely release is mid 2010, but this depends on a number of factors. The actual gameplay itself is quite developed, arguably even beta. The primary remaining development work is art assets, which are mostly prototypes and placeholders, as well as balancing and level design.

Thanks to Chris Hazard for sparing the time to do this interview. If you want to find out more about Achron then just head over to the official game site to learn more. Or you could just go to the forums and talk about it there.