Ambassador - An Independent Real-Time Strategy Game

My name is Matthew Lyles Hornbostel. Y'know, the artist responsible for setting up TriumphantArtists.com, and a whole bunch of other websites with crazy indie digital art projects, games, videos, and so on, almost all of which is free for the public to enjoy. I'm one of those eccentric "starving artist" types who just loves making stuff and wants to keep making art projects regardless of whether I'm paid to do so. Well, about nine months ago, I started working with a team of three ace programmers - Phillip Trevino, William Holtkamp, and Anshul Verma, to make a game we could enter into the 2009 Imagine Cup. It was one of those projects I felt good about, one I thought could result in a good family-friendly, constructive, creative, visually impressive and fun gaming experience.

We envisioned a deep, dynamic realtime 3d game in the vein of "Civilization" or "Sim City", in which you take control over a struggling country and bring it from failure into success. It was idealistic and ambitious, and we were excited about it. It was supposed to be a great indie strategy/simulation game for the PC and Xbox 360. I modelled a wide range of 3d objects from trees to buildings to animated people, and crafted various polished menus and other graphics elements. My programming team worked to make the game shine technically, running 500,000+ polygons smoothly in realtime on a laptop, implementing dynamic movable menus, an advanced tile system, economic simulation, shadows and effects and thousands of lines of code so complex that I can't possibly understand how they work. We had some tricky challenges along the way but we pushed our way through them. Our game, "Ambassador," was aimed for the PC and Xbox 360, and it was showing a great deal of promise.

After we moved from the Imagine Cup to Dream! Build! Play! our team essentially decided that this game wasn't right for that competition, so we effectively stopped developing "Ambassador", or at least the programmers did, in favor of our current (and conceptually clever) other game design ideas. Personally, I'd love to see Ambassador finished after Dream! Build! Play! is over, but the view of my teammates is that it isn't worth finishing it, that it isn't worth it to get the game onto the Xbox 360 market.

I'm not going to accept that. I'm not going to accept that after all the work we put into this game, that it's going to just sit on our hard drives and be inaccessible to the world. I've shown this game to people. People are impressed. People want to play it. I've been asked, "when is Ambassador coming out?", "When will it be finished?" It's one of those projects that people have been waiting on and hoping to see finally done. Like "Traveler's Enigma", or "Duel 2030", my friends and even people I barely know are asking me about this game. It's clear to me that you all appreciate the work we've put into this project, and that you're anticipating the chance to play it, and I'm grateful for your support. So I'm not going to say to you that you'll never be able to play it, that there's no hope of "Ambassador" ever reaching the Xbox 360.

"Ambassador" is tantalizingly close to being done, and yet, maddeningly, it's not quite there. Unless I can mobilize the programming gurus to apply the finishing touches (at some point), I'm worried that it never will be completed.

Screenshot of "Ambassador" mid-game. Click on image to enlarge.

To me this is a mistake; there is a more important venue than these game development competitions. Namely, you guys, the gaming public. I want you to have a finished, polished, playable game to play. I want you to be able to play an improved "Ambassador" with more stuff in it, more scenarios, more buildings, more features, more fun - on your Xbox 360.

There are buildings that I've modelled that easily could be - but aren't yet - in the game. There's loads of code for people and roads and cars that is nearly, but not quite, done. There's a process for getting "Ambassador" to work on Xbox Live that could be done - but it hasn't been. And so on...

But that's not happening. It's a shame.

Do you want to play our game?

Go ahead and look at the gameplay video, the graphics, the screenshot I've posted. Want to try it?

The current version of "Ambassador" will run on your PC, and it's pretty stable. It has one scenario (Nigeria) and a sandbox-style World Editor. It's playable; you can build buildings, research technologies, keep tabs on your citizens, resources, and objectives, move the view around smoothly, go through menus, win, lose, and so on. And all of it looks and sounds good, as I've put many hundreds of hours into making the detail-rich graphics elements visible in the game. There are a few bugs in the game, texture glitches, and so on, but they're mild. I've never seen the current version cause Windows to crash or freeze.

Essentially, this game is shovelware; I thought about selling it and splitting the proceeds among the team to motivate them to finish making the game, but that's not really fair to you, as this is an incomplete game. Even charging 96 cents (my original plan) seems wrong to me. So you'll be able to download the game for free.

"Ambassador" requires that the freeware XNA development software - Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition - be installed on your computer. You'll be able to run the game through that program. Aside from letting you run "Ambassador," that software will also let you run "Jungle Cavern" - one of my early game development projects - for free, and if you're a programmer, it's also the base of a very strong game development toolset for making your own games, and running "Ambassador" through Visual C# will give you access to a bunch of efficient code to study if you want to see how a computer program like this works.

The game is presented "as is", and if it doesn't work for you, sorry but that's not my fault. Here's how to install the XNA development tools and use them to play "Ambassador" and the various parts of "Jungle Cavern". Basically it's a matter of downloading the game files - through this link, unzipping them, downloading and installing the free XNA toolset: Visual C# and XNA GameStudio, then opening Ambassador/Ambassador.sln (in the unzipped Ambassador.zip folder) in Visual Studio C# 2008, and either hitting F5, or the green "Start Debugging" button. At which point the game will run.

Go ahead and enjoy the game!

Unique visitors:

If you want us to finish making this game, please enter your full name (and, if you're willing, email address, and maybe a brief comment) in the petition below, as a way of saying, "I want you to finish this game".

You can also contact me (Matthew Hornbostel) or ask questions at my business email address, matthornb@triumphantartists.com