Ara: History Untold

 Ara: History Untold is a simultaneous turn-based 4X strategy game where you play as one of a multitude of influential historical leaders and a nation through it’s years of development. You must collect resources, build improvements, explore the map, make alliances or conquer neighbors, and eventually amass the most prestige of all the nations in the game to win. Prestige can be gained in almost any play style the player wants to engage in, including trade, warfare, social prosperity, technological advancements, and/or building triumphs.


I joined Oxide Interactive in October of 2020, primarily working on the multiplayer systems for the title allowing for up to 40 nations to play simultaneously in a game. One of the unique parts of Ara: History Untold is that since it is a simultaneous turn-based game everyone in multiplayer takes turns together, significantly decreasing the down time waiting for others to take actions. Over time I started working more on the core game loop and systems, making sure that designers could tweak the game systems in whatever ways they needed to make a fun, fair, and balanced game.

Genre: 4X Strategy

Platform: PC

Release Date: September, 24, 2024

Development Time: 4 years

Development Team Size: 60

Development Role: Senior Software Developer

Key Features I Delivered:

  1. Multiplayer turn processor that housed all of the game logic and could be ran on independent servers.
  2. Gameplay programming on core game systems. One of the main systems was the buff system, which allows game entities such as armies formation, nation leaders, improvements, nation amenities, and completed quests to produce benefits for all other types of entities in the game. 
  3. Exact in-game item tracking so that production of any item or resource could be traced back to its original source and displayed in a list. Especially useful for exact prestige tracking for end game points to show the player where their victory points were coming from in aggregate.
  4. Determinism tracking to make sure that multiple runs through a game from the same state (usually through a save file) would have the same result. This led to fixing multiple issues with multi-threading breaking determinism and reworking those portions of the code.
  5. Achievement integration.
  6. Performance optimization around memory and runtime speed in the gameplay systems.

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2021880/Ara_History_Untold/