As the sixth entry in the reknowned series of city-building games, Anno 2205 took a leap even further into the future than its predecessor Anno 2070 and puts player into the role of a corporation leader to compete with other corporations in a race for technology.
Whereas previous entries introduced players to new biomes likes deserts or underwater areas, Anno 2205 not only introduced arctic regions, but also finally left the bounds of the earth and let players colonize the moon and ultimately build space stations in open space.
Anno 2205 marked a turning point for the series to take it into a completely new direction, the biggest change being that instead of having the choice between playing a series of campaign maps and playing endless sessions on random-generated maps, the game now focused on predefined maps players unlock at their own pace and manage all of them at once. A big focus in this multi-session approach was on taking the known trading system and transfering it to a global level, exchanging goods and resources between the concurrent maps.
Naturally, this required a complete overhaul of all the game systems and their underlying design philiosophy. A new engine was created from scratch, which took years to build, and with it the entire technology changed. Upon joining the team I started working with the producers to plan the production of the game's UI and create a roadmap for building a new UI team. Simultaneously I took over the responsibility to work with the programmers to integrate Ubisoft's Flash-based UI middleware into the brand-new engine and define our technical workflows.
Once we had our team and framework in place, we went into a long phase of revamping the game's UI and gameplay, with a strong focus on simplifying the highly complex simulation gameplay and streamlining features wherever we could. Leaving no element untouched, the goal was to provide the experience of being a corporation executive managing a global network of metropolises - in a lite version with quick access to all relevant high-level data in an easy-to-digest form.
Next to developing the game's visual design and creating style guides, I focused heavily on the implementation and scripting side to allow programmers to focus on the game code and our newly hired UI Designers to implement changes on the fly without UI elements losing their functionality.
The process took many iterations until we arrived at the final result, which is super light-weight in comparison to previous versions, and had us experiment with many other potential features, such as a touch-screen-compatible UI and a companion app that later became its own game.
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