Below is the full announcment regarding the ending of support for Foundation.

Foundation Support Page CLOSED 20th July 1999



The End: Now that Foundation is no longer commercially available and the games publishers - Sadeness - are no longer available, I - regrettably - have to bring further development of the game to a close. There will be at least one more update as I clean up a few last rough edges but Foundation has come to the end of the road. I will do all I can to release the game in FULL in the near future so if you didn't get the chance to buy the game, watch this space! (Sorry I can't comment or give any information regarding Sadeness. I wish I knew, trust me!)

Problems: Over the past six months I have been working on various projects for Amiga, PC and for a popular 'game console'. I've not had much time for further Foundation development despite the fact that I did have some more major features to implement. The lack of spare time for Foundation and the total stoppage of royalty payments (which ended in 1998) has given me no alternative but to prioritize my efforts in an attempt to survive for a brighter future.

Foundation 2: There will not be a sequel to Foundation but I am making plans for a technical successor to the game. I'm currently looking into the Specs and limited developer information for the upcoming Amiga MMC. I'm working on a plan to design the perfect networked strategy game for the new Millennium. I will certainly salvage a great deal of concepts from Foundation but there will be many ruthless design changes in order to bring things upto the necessary standard.

Time Scale: As mentioned earlier, I have some existing project commitments and some deadlines to keep to. This new strategy game will remain in the planning stages until the end of 1999. The Amiga MMC will make development MUCH easier that it was when Foundation was first created. There wont me a wide range of specification problems and I wont be developing it on a 16Meg, 40Mhz system! So the rough time scale I have in mind is approx. 1 years open development.

Design Philosophy: I have no strong desire to create a high-tech super-3D real-time strategy-fest affair. I prefer to setup some basic strategy ideas in a clean good looking environment with an easy to use control system. I can imagine very large maps with complex terrain including hills, cliffs, rivers, bridges, walls etc. Each map would require a great deal of design which is not easily achieved with random map generation. The pace of gameplay would be faster than most strategy games; players would enter and leave the map as readily as they would in an FPS game such as Quake or Unreal. Typical games could last from 10 minutes up to half an hour although length of play wouldn't be heavily restricted. (I don't have the space to list a full design spec here. This is just a rough philosophy for the game; more details will appear at a later date)

Ideal Situation: The ideal way to develop this game concept is to bring the game up to a playable beta version after approx. 8 months work. There would then follow a period of open testing and development until a restricted demo version is released. From that point on, there would follow at least 12 more months of FULL TIME development as the game would advance based on user feedback. I will make no effort to hide the fact that this game will be aimed at the popular PC systems as well as the Amiga MMC. The potential userbase is many times bigger than that which Foundation could have reached and so the commercial viability of the project should provide better support and longer development time.

And Finally: I understand that I have given very little info away so far and this new game wont see the light for quite some time. I just wanted to clear up the situation regarding Foundation development and my plans for a brighter future!

Thank you,

Paul Burkey (burkey@bigfoot.com)
Foundation moved to The Foundation Homepage

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