Imagine you’re an Egyptian craftsman, hired to paint frescoes in a freshly carved tomb. Precise drawing requires good light, but oil lamps in the chamber would leave soot all over your hard work.

So how... about electric light?
A stone relief in the Hathor temple at Dendera in Egypt depicts what some have interpreted to be the very first electric glass bulb with a tungsten filament.



However, the Egyptologists argue that this ‘bulb’ is in fact a stylized depiction of a lotus flower (very common in the art of Egypt), spawning a snake (filament) inside it. The snakes coming from the lotus symbolize fertility, linked to the annual Nile flood.

If so, then why were tombs clean of soot deposits? Did the painters use mirrors to light them or some other way? What do you think?

Tell us what you think about posting interesting facts about Ancient Egypt, if you like this formula, we will write some more every few days!

@wikimedia.org

Author: Maciej Paprocki

- so it's high time to get new screenshots! We are working on a new UI, for now we are showing you how the main screen and message panel look like, there are still many new features hidden under the icons next to the date, but we will write about it in the next posts!



On the screen below you can also see a grey granite quarry, a building that is unique because it will be quite rare in the game.

We hope that next year at this time, if everything goes according to plan, we will be at least at the end of the campaign production, and the game mechanics itself will be polished in close cooperation with our players.

As we wrote earlier, it was a very intensive year, which ends with a happy cooperation with the publisher. Thus, since December the production of the game has significantly accelerated, thanks to which at least one new building out of more than 70 available in the game is being built every day, not including the monuments!

The most difficult task now is to completely organize the game code, because probably, as you can guess, we didn't take special care of this mess during the production of the prototype, at the same time we implement various optimizations. This is the most important thing to do in the near future, but we still have a lot of time so we plan to complete the next milestones.

In addition, as always, we are constantly trying to improve the quality of graphics and this time we present a completely changed visual appearance of the desert areas.



Next in the queue is the water shader, which is currently also being recreated from the beginning and >all< textures of green areas, which we will show later but some of them can already be seen on the graphics from the header.

In the next year we will also change the name of the game, because the current one was treated as a working title, which could possibly be changed to something more marketing-friendly in the near future. Only when we manage to carry out this process will we start making the first full gameplays available, because that's the starting point for preparing the game for release and trying to get the players interested in this title more widely.

If you want to read something more about the game, I encourage you to read the interview with me. The interview is in both Polish and English.

Interview on Gameplay

As some of you noticed, according to the deadline written on Steam, there should be specific information about the release date of the game. We can say straightforwardly that the game will not appear this year and although it sounds like bad news, in practice it is completely different. Why? You will find out more about that in the next part of the news.

Despite the fact that this is not the end of the year yet, we would still like to summarize all the events that have taken place so far. The game has been developing for more than two years as a side project developed by one person after work hours in the free time. The most important part of programming was created over this long time, a specific graphic style was developed, the whole game design document was described and a working prototype was created.

Usually indie games are rather small productions, especially those made by one person, but in this case it was supposed to be different, which results from the simple assumption that we want to present Egyptian history in a fresh and contemporary way, maybe also in some sense innovative, and this means a huge amount of work, which we are not afraid of.

It wouldn't be possible if we didn't finally find a publisher who would support the whole project, and thus help transform a small one-person project into a large, fully-fledged game that will have to face the demands of the market and all the fans who actively support the development of the game all the time.


The game is still prealpha, playable and basically playable at the moment, but there is not quite enough of it to release it on the market with a clear conscience, even in the early access version.

That's why we decided not to release the game yet. The appearance of the publisher means that with such support we can now focus exclusively on the production of Hard Ancient Life, as well as enriching the game with elements that due to the high costs we hadn't planned at all before and are now within our reach. This is a big chance for the game to become something even better than it was originally intended, and we don't waste such opportunities. We promise that it will be worth waiting a bit longer.


First of all, from December a lot of new information will start to appear, we promise to inform more often about the progress of work, there will be a real video gameplay and at the end of Q1 2019 there should be a long-awaited early access version as soon as we solve all legal problems. By then, we will certainly be able to expand this early access to such an extent that most things will work right away and the gameplay will be at least a bit enjoyable.

We hope that the reasons for postponing the release are understandable for you, we look forward to your comments, thoughts, hints and expectations regarding the game on the Steam forum and in the comments below!

In this episode we will show you as always a quick preview of the production cycle - this time the pottery maker and additional effects when constructing the building!

the release should soon follow the deadline set on the Steam. We will write a message about it soon, as well as what to expect in the near future and what the work on the game will look like.

We hope that we will also be able to boast of great news, but we ask you to keep your thumbs up for a while!

https://youtu.be/8AVMCKruado

We're coming back now with more frequent sharing of shorter game materials - short videos look better from games such as city buildings. In today's video you'll see the production cycle of bricks - the full sequence is not shown here (we won't show all of them to leave you something to explore), but you can definitely see what it's all about.

https://youtu.be/GOLv91tyt2Q

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Recently a full documentation (game design document) has been created, in which all elements of the game have been described. The document was created quite a long time, because the game is not a small, simple game, but quite a complex project. We hope that it will allow us to establish cooperation with the publisher in the near future.

Besides, the work on the game itself focused on the struggle against optimization and general preparation for the game release in early access, but about this there will be another separate information, in which the whole publishing plan will be described.
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The attached graphic shows how the various events that the player will encounter during the game will be illustrated.

Inhabitants have their own needs, such as access to a cultural centre or entertainment.

There are 17 additional levels of residential buildings. This means a completely new model, the behaviour of the inhabitants and other needs to advance further. Satisfying these needs results in a progression to the next class and expanding the needs for new ones.

https://youtu.be/-GW5nvCqsxM

We have discussed the pyramids so far, so in this post, we will present another type of monument - Isis temple of Philae from one of the final missions of the late period campaign, last such large monument built before the fall of Egypt.




As with the pyramids, temples will need to be built step by step. The player will witness the construction to which he will need to deliver huge amounts of stone, wood, paint and lamps, and will also need to employ a huge number of workers.





The island of Phile was located at the height of the first cataract on the Nile, which was a sacred place of Egypt. According to ancient Egyptians, the island was the first piece of land to emerge from the waters of Chaos. In ancient times on the island of Philae was built a temple of Isis during the reign of Nectanebo I, king of the XXX dynasty. During the Greek and Roman rule, the temple was extended by the Trajan kiosk, the portico of Octavian and Tiberius.




A very interesting feature of this temple is a square closed on both sides with a colonnade, which on one side begins with the temple and on the other side with a small kiosk as a place of rest during cult ceremonies.
The passage between the two 22.0 m high pylons leads to the interior of the temple. The pylons are decorated with reliefs showing King Ptolemy XII killing his enemies.



In the courtyard, on its western side, there is mammisi – small chapel - from the times of Ptolemy Euergestes II and Ptolemy XII. Behind the courtyard, after passing through the second 18.0 m high pylon, the main passage leads to the hypostyl hall. Inside the sanctuary there is a cryptic nave surrounded by several rooms.