Building the Egyptian era

Picking Ancient Egypt as the first era was the easiest design call we’ve made. The studio is in Cairo. Half the team has visited the open tombs at Saqqara. Two of us grew up within an hour’s drive of the pyramids. You build what you know.

The harder call was — which Ancient Egypt?

There’s the Egypt of monumental architecture: the pyramid silhouette, the obelisk, the colossus. Visually iconic. Built into every reference image you’ll ever pull. The problem is it’s exhausted. Every game that wants a desert tomb has used the same five shapes since Tomb Raider.

Then there’s the Egypt of ritual. Less visited. Less iconic. But more interesting once you start digging — the funerary procession, the weighing of the soul, the way the priest-king was both a political ruler and a metaphysical gatekeeper. The trial — the literal Trial of the Ancients — emerges naturally from that latter Egypt. We let the architecture stay implicit and built the design around the ritual.

What that means in-game

The arena isn’t a tomb. It’s a test chamber that the priest-king Akheb built into the heart of his temple. You’re not exploring it. You’re inside it. You can’t leave until the trial is complete or you die. The geometry never changes. The walls don’t fall away. What changes is what walks through the arena gate at you.

This was a hard constraint to commit to. Every reference image we pulled from other VR archery games — In Death, Until You Fall, The Light Brigade — moved the player through space. We wanted to be the one that didn’t.

It works because the enemies carry the variation. Each one is designed to disrupt a different part of the player’s rhythm:

• Dust wraiths disrupt your aim (too many, too fast, you start missing).
• Jackal sentinels disrupt your angle (frontal shield, must side-shot).
• Scarab swarms disrupt your AoE assumption (split on hit — single arrows fail).
• Mummified archons disrupt your safety (they return fire).
• Sun-maddened clerics disrupt your rhythm (forced movement to dodge the ring).
• Priest-King Akheb disrupts all of it (three phases, each with a different lesson).

If you pick the right rewards across a run, every disruption has an answer. If you didn’t, you don’t get to the boss.

The art

The palette is in the color tokens on this site — dark gold against weathered stone, illuminated by magical light. That came directly from a reference set we’d been building for three months: the gold of the funerary masks, the soot-blackened ceilings of intact tombs, the magical green and orange we see in modern reconstructions of how the original paint actually looked when it was fresh.

We deliberately moved away from the bone-white limestone of most Egypt-in-games. Real Egyptian architecture was painted. Vivid. Polychrome. The sun-bleached look was what we got after the paint wore off. We’re showing it before that — when Akheb’s temple was still active, still gilded, still sworn to its purpose.

The medallions you’ll see when you draft rewards — bronze circles with engraved central glyphs — are pulled directly from this. They’re our anchor visual element. When we eventually move into era two, the medallions stay the same shape. The glyphs change. The trial is older than any one civilization, and the iconography crosses borders.

What’s next

The Egyptian era is content-locked. Six enemies, one boss, four objective types. Lore is in. Audio is two passes away from beta-grade. The build runs at 90fps on Quest 3.

The era after this is teased on the eras page. I’m not going to spoil it here — but I will say the move from Bronze Age desert to mounted northern steppes is going to feel as different as we can make it without breaking the game’s identity.

— Mo