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Athena Crisis is a modern retro strategy game that lets players jump into battle in command of over 40 military units in turn-based fights. By land, sea, or air, it’s up to players to lead their troops to victory, whether outwitting opponents through strategic building, taking over structures and bases, or simply surviving against all odds. There is even the odd dinosaur thrown into the mix, with a mysterious fog encouraging players to think tactically. Inspired by the classic Nintendo franchise Advanced Wars and developed by Nakazawa Tech, Athena Crisis recently launched its 1.0 version following a community-focused early access period wherein the developers involved the community in numerous ways.
Just before its recent launch out of early access, Game Rant had the opportunity to chat with Christoph Nakazawa, Founder of Nakazawa Tech, about the game’s early access period and how the community helped improve the game. Nakazawa reflected on creating a game from the ground up in Athena Crisis‘ early access and talked about the valuable input of its community during this time in what could be described as a community-centric development approach, something the team also hopes to continue.
When asked about some of the biggest challenges or learning lessons during the Athena Crisis‘ early access period, Nakazawa talked about how the team had to build everything from scratch, including the game engine, gamepad support, AI, design system, animations, and the backend. While Nakazawa acknowledged this wasn’t impossible or overly challenging, Nakazawa added the process of putting it all together to make it fun was “an extremely rewarding experience.”
Nakazawa also mentioned one of the biggest successes or stand-out moments was opening up its source code to community code contributions as a game that utilizes JavaScript, React, and CSS. Furthermore, Nakazawa talked about how the community’s invaluable contributions across various areas enabled the team to release some features early and talked about their community feedback process. As Nakazawa explained:
There were so many contributions to the game that many folks are even listed in the credits. From new unit art, to extremely detailed bug reports, to hundreds of maps and 8 awesome community campaigns. One contributor even helped overhaul naval combat completely to make it more modern and interesting. We got a daily feedback stream on Discord that we could tap into to make the game significantly better during Early Access. We launched the story and campaign maps well ahead of the 1.0 release and were able to improve the narrative as well as the design of each map.
Additionally, Nakazawa expressed gratitude to the Athena Crisis community for taking the time to understand what the developers were looking to achieve and to provide ideas about balancing adjustments, but “without losing sight of the fun.” It’s also a community-driven approach that the developers plan to continue, with the studio regularly sharing community-created content such as community map of the week and beyond in what sounds like a very positive online community to be a part of.
Athena Crisis‘ community-centric approach also aligned with the studio’s plans for invasion maps, creating one of the most open strategy games in the genre and not just making a game, but creating a community. As Nakazawa said:
We always aimed at creating one of the most open games in the genre that invites feedback, criticism, ideas – and even code contributions to make the game something everyone can enjoy. Hearing feedback from the community throughout the process was incredibly rewarding and immensely helpful to the development cycle with
Athena Crisis
. Our community is incredible.
Athena Crisis is available to play on PC.
