Mazucan

Ancient monoliths battle with rocks and powers over the fate of the natural lands of Mazucan.

The development effort around Mazucan was discontinued in December 2022. Why? In a nutshell, there were some material shortcomings in the game, primarily:

• The goal when playing it was unclear – it was a good example of the notion that if you have to explain the goal past a sentence or two, you might have made it too obtuse
• The player pieces and the enemy pieces were not well differentiated – people kept saying they couldn’t tell which were the player pieces
• The look and feel was very “chunky and colorful” and ultimately wasn’t what I wanted

When I sat down to ask myself how I could correct these things, the game was basically a completely different game. Mazucan was originally a “Chess Alternate” that slowly drifted toward a “Tower Defense” and ultimately was neither and confusing. Making it something that was more immediately understandable resulted in bringing it much closer to a Tower Defense game, so I grabbed some of the code, assets, and concepts and renamed it to “Elevation Tower Defense” and segued to an immediately comprehendible tower defense.

Why should I care if the game is immediately understandable? Its a matter of reaching your audience – I’m not developing games for myself to play and no one wants to have to navigate a lengthy tutorial or user-guide to understand what they are looking at. This is why games today fall into known buckets – card games, puzzlers, tower defense, first person shooter, etc… Fitting into those categories helps players more instantly understand what they are looking at – if you loose that, you loose a large chunk of the audience. This isn’t to say “You should let marketing drive your games”, but it is to say that if you’re going to break the mold, be ready to ask yourself if it’s worth the effort and, in this case, I did not feel it was.

So Mazucan was put on ice and Elevation was born. Perhaps one day I will come back to it.

WITHIN THE LAND
OF MAZUCAN
THERE WAS AN EVIL GOTTEN

IT FOUND SOME STONE
TO CALL ITS HOME
AND TURNED THE INSIDES ROTTEN

BUT NOW THE ROCK
OF ANCIENT TIMES
HAS COME BACK TO THESE PLACES

AND SAVE THEY MUST
OUR MAZUCAN
FROM ALL THAT IT NOW FACES

The story of Mazucan

Mazucan is a real time strategy game – you play stone towers fighting against monoliths turned to evil by a plagues overrunning Mazucan. You will travel a series of realms, battling monoliths and stopping the evil that creates them.

Check in on Twitter or YouTube for weekly updates and video’s from the game as it develops.

Get ready for a lot of rock throwing, smashing, rolling, and stay away from the edges!

Tweets by AaronTamarin

Mazucan is expected to be released in November 2021 on iOS and Android. Desktop versions will be worked on post mobile rollout.