TFC: The Fertile Crescent

***TFC: The Fertile Crescent*** is a real-time strategy computer game set in the Bronze Age. Developed by Wield Interactive and published by The Knights of Unity, it was released as early-access on 29 March, 2022

## Setting

*The Fertile Crescent* is a historical game set in the Near East during the Bronze Age (approximately 3300 BC to 1200 BC), comprising of the regions of Mesopotamia, Levant, and Egypt. The name of the game comes from the eponymous region Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, the fertile lands between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris which look like the crescent moon.

It is one of the most vital regions of human history as it saw the first emergence of agricultural sedentary human society, compared to the former nomadic lifestyle of hunter-gatherers. The domestication of crops allowed for division of labour and small communities to start emerging. This led to it becoming the origin of sophisticated human societies, the birthplace of the first civilizations, urbanised city-states, and empires, with distinct rich cultures, lavish architecture and large monuments, extensive religions and mythologies, and the first large-scale industry and warfare.

## Gameplay

*The Fertile Crescent* is a Real-time strategy game, which entails controlling and growing a community starting from a nomadic group of people to a major settled power, and defeating the opponents via various means to emerge victorious.

The player directly controls all the aspects of their empire, with absolute control over each civillian, soldier, and building. The player tasks Villagers to gather resources and assigns them to construct buildings, gains knowledge points via various means to unlock technologies to improve their people and society, trains troops and assembles siege weapons, forms alliances with or wages war against other players who control their own tribes and cities, and build grand monuments. The goal of a match is to secure victory via various means as per the chosen game mode, the most common ones being: through military conquest, by completing all stages of a Wonder, by starving their enemies to death, or by compelling their enemies to voluntarily resign.

## Development

The development of *The Fertile Crescent* first started when André from Norway, who had a fascination with RTS since his childhood, and a keen interest in the history of the historical Fertile Crescent and the ancient cultures that emerged from it, started working on the project in 2017. For a time, he was the sole architect of the game. Anders, who had been living in Australia, and had expertise in sound and music, connected with André on Facebook and became part of the project. André continued to be the main designer, the sole programmer, and the art lead until the development of the game became a full-time endeavor and other people joined the project.

The decision to make the game as 2D isometric was an early one, to have a "classic" feel of the first RTS games from before and around the year 2000. The pixel artstyle was chosen both due to ease of making the art and to try something unique in the RTS genre. The game innovates on the traditional RTS models in certain ways, primarily in the way food is handled, while also streamlining other features typically associated with games of this genre.

After further research on ancient Bronze Age cultures and their societies, economy, and commerce, it was decided to make food and Food Surplus be a core feature of the gameplay. Soil fertility and starvation were implemented, which are not usually depicted in the genre.

Early versions of the game were made available for free on itch.io, a website often used by independent game developers to connect with players, which resulted in a community and player-base growing around the game. After taking community votes, further development focused primarily on multiplayer experience. This led to continuous community engagement as players played PvP matches, provided feedback, and hosted tournaments.

After corresponding with the Polish studio The Knights of Unity for a publishing deal, development became more focused and detailed plans were laid. The game was released as Early Access on Steam on 29 March, 2022.

## Content

* The game features Steam Cloud support.
* The game has a random map feature on two map sizes: Small and Large.
* Each match can have up to eight players (each assigned a unique color) and up to four teams.

### Singleplayer

* Currently, the singleplayer content in the game comprises of the Tutorial and the various Game Modes vs the AI.
* The developers have stated that the focus will eventually shift to singleplayer content, with the goal of adding a campaign mode.

### Multiplayer

* The game supports player versus player multiplayer in all the Game Modes, and supports cross-platform multiplayer.
* It includes Multiplayer Co-op.
* It also support spectator mode, where a player can join the match only to view it, and not be able to interact or interfere in any manner.
* The game often has tournaments, some hosted by the developers, others by the community itself.

## Refernces

1. ↑ DEVBLOG #1 Origins of TFC: The Fertile Crescent and Wield Interactive
2. ↑ Behind the Scenes: Origin Story