On August 15th, Mother’s Day, we were to visit the offices of Triumph Studio’s, creators of the Age of Wonders series. The date was nice and the weather was reasonable. Everything seemed to be great for a development office visit, but that was without counting CyruzB of course. At around 11 AM, I received a message on my cell phone to say that he had woken up sick and that his toilet contained some not-so-good-looking substances due to him emptying his stomach in it.
A short visit on irc and AlterEgo was more than willing to replace CyruzB as my companion on this trip. Instead of 12 o’clock we would depart at 13:00. With just over one and a half hour of driving towards Delft in The Netherlands we should still be able to make our appointment at 15:00 without any problem… or at least: so we thought.

We were hardly on the highway and we already got stuck in a traffic jam. For several kilometers we had to sit in my car, driving forward with the blistering average speed of less than 5 km/h. After over an hour we finally got past the works that were blocking the road and we were off to Holland. Since we had lost quite some time I decided to not respect the speed limit and make up for the lost hour. Until the border, everything went fine but once we reached Breda we got stuck in yet another traffic jam. Apparantly some bridge was burning up (yes, apparantly bridges can burn), causing all traffic in both directions to be rerouted to another highway… which directed us back the way we came !

Fortunately, I knew the road a little and managed to get us back on track. I can tell you about the following traffic jams, the wrong directions, etc etc but to make a long story short: 3 hours later we arrived at our destination… finally !

Once we entered the building, we got greeted by Lennart Sas, one of the bosses and co-founder of Triumph Studio’s who brought us to a room where we were welcomed by Onno Bos from Take 2. A refreshing drink and we were ready to take a look at where the people from Triumph spend their days working hard.

Lennart, who’s also one of the designers of Triumph Studios was so kind to introduce us to the other designers and coders which were very occupied with doing what the average nerd does on the internet on a working day (looking at movies which are not quite politically correct, you know the drill ;p).

One thing we immediately noticed is that this studio doesn’t have a clear hierarchy. They work like a group of friends who have loads of fun together and meanwhile make a game. One of them was altering some eyes, another taking a look at the characters and one of the coders was checking his source… work and play seem to go nicely together here.

Still we didn’t see the entire crew here as they’ve got several freelancers working for them. For instance the sound is being taken care of by someone in the States who does both the sound effects and the voices. These freelancers are also necessary to cut development costs as they don’t need a person for sound fulltime.

The game was presented to us and our first question immediately popped in our mind: what type of game is it actually ? Lennart told us that it is a hybrid of Turn-Based Strategy with Real-Time Strategy and filled up with a sauce of Role-playing. The game itself is real-time but the fights are turn-based. The Role-Playing part is the choices you need to make in the creation of the character with all its adjustable good and bad sides.

Further details we’ll leave for the review, the one thing we’ll say about Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic is that the graphics are extraordinary beautiful and that the editors which is released for the community to create own scenario’s looks really easy to use. Easy to use doesn’t mean that the possibilities are limited though, a “Lord of the Rings” mod is already a work in progress and even the people from Triumph Studio’s seem very impressed with it for as far as it’s finished. They’re of course happy with these developments by fans because it obviously prolongs the life of their game.

Something that was also told to us was that the new game from Triumph Studio’s is already in first stages of development but that they haven’t decided yet what it will be. They’re working on a new engine apparantly but haven’t decided even the type of game they’re going to make. Further inquiries were a bit futile therefor because it’s hard to answer a question to which you don’t know the answer yet. The only thing they wanted to say was that they expect the development cycle to something like two years, much like the previous development times they had. Anyway, we wish them a lot of success with their coming work :)

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