Fire and Darkness

Fire and Darkness is a real-time strategy video game played from a three-dimensional perspective. The player controls one of two factions, and their main mission is to defeat the enemy faction to secure the planet's resources.[1] To accomplish this mission, the player spends resources (defined in-game as terajoules) to build combat units and facilities used to engage in war against their opponents, or to produce more resources. According to the demo released by Singularity Software, five planets were featured in the game, and both factions shared the same type of combat units and facilities.[2]

The game incorporates a player-controlled camera system that can be rotated and zoomed at will; this allows the player to view the world from above, from the ground, or anywhere in between. Combat units (both ground units and aircraft) have inertia incorporated into their physics programming, although it lacks polygon-level collision detection for every object.[3] The player can make their units move anywhere in the map, given that Fire and Darkness is not designed using a grid-like system like other contemporary games such as Warcraft II.[4]

Fire and Darkness was developed by Singularity Software, an American studio composed of seven individuals.[1] David Scherer, Adam Stubblefield and David Rosenthal started working on the game as early as 1996, with Mark Feghali helping them craft the networking engine featured in the game. Ari Heitner later joined the team, focusing on the game's user interface, sound code and scenario design.[5] Ian Dale served as the main artist of the game, and Austin Huang provided the music.[5] According to Scherer and Rosenthal, the game was done within three years, with the team mostly working in summer given that all of them attended either high school or college.[6] According to Next Generation magazine, no money was spent producing the game.[6]

Despite its three-year development cycle, Fire and Darkness was not completed, and therefore never released.[7] David Rosenthal commented after winning the Seumas McNally Grand Prize that the game was "sitting on a hard disk taking up bits".[7] However, Rosenthal mentioned that he thought about developing a port of the game as a multiplayer real-time strategy game for tablets.[7]

Fire and Darkness became the first game win to the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival of 1999.[8] It also received the Audience Choice award.[8] Next Generation named it a "kind of hybrid between Myth and Total Annihilation".[6]