Hi again Age fans!
We’ve been lucky enough to meet with some more people on the team making Age of Empires: Definitive Edition! This time it’s Matt Pritchard, he’s the Director of Engineering for the game over at Forgotten Empires! We got a chance to chat with Matt, and ask him some questions about his time working on the game. Read on below to see what he has to say, and keep an eye out for more interviews with the team coming soon!
- What did you work on for the game?
Well, I am officially referred to as the “Director of Engineering”, but that doesn’t quite paint the whole picture. My involvement started with the creation of the original game over 20 years ago at Ensemble Studios, where I was deeply involved in many aspects of making the original game. For the Definitive Edition, my involvement, along with that of other core people from FE, started with the earliest proposals for revisiting the first game in the series.
As the Engineering lead, I oversee all of the programming staff and make and review most of the significant technical decisions, such as the upgrading of the code base to 64-bit, changes to the renderer, improvements to the pathfinding, what art features we can implement, and a myriad of other technical details. As a link to the game’s past with knowledge of the original development and design, I am involved in many of the design decisions, such as what enhanced gameplay features to bring in (like Attack Move), changes to the game rules, and so on.
- What was it like working on such a classic widely known game?
I’m already used to working on high profile titles from my time at Ensemble Studios, as well from experiences at Valve and other developers, so I already understood that there would be a lot of fans with high expectations. In the case of AoE:DE, it was a lot like coming home again after a long trip away. We at FE had a quote we repeated throughout the development of the game, which I think summed up our feelings about working on it: “This game is a Love Letter to our fans, and a tribute to the original team that created it”
- As you also worked on the original game at Ensemble Studios; What was it like working on this, compared to working on the original Age of Empires?
Since I got to revisit code from the past, some of which I wrote, I sometimes found myself reflecting on how my programming skills have improved in the intervening decades. One of the biggest differences compared to working on the game in the 1990s is how much more powerful our computers and tools have become. The powerful ‘developer machine’ I used when originally making the game was a 166mhz Pentium with 16 Megabytes (not Giga) of RAM and a 1 Megabyte 2D video card driving a 17-inch monitor. A full build of the game took about 15 to 20 minutes to complete. When we made that build again at the start of the DE project…it took about 20 seconds.