Hey everyone! It's been a while, hasn't it?

Our last blog relating to Antiqua Italia was posted 3 years ago. Time flies, doesn't it? I reckon it's time I update everyone with what's been going on since then. Despite the doom and gloom of our last post about the project, our three man team consisting of myself, Rileydec16, and AdventureShane is still together, and we've still been chipping away at Romecraft related projects here and there. There's even been a bit of work done on the Capua build project. Despite the professional tone we put on in our devblogs, we were always a very small team of friends just building and making textures for our own enjoyment. We received so much attention on this site from our Italia project, and it would be a shame to let it all fizzle out and be forgotten. Consider this post a retrospective look at a very overambitious project, and a cautionary tale to anyone looking to pursue similar endeavors.

Five years ago, we announced the Antiqua Italia project. It was originally planned to be a historically themed roleplay server with a heavy emphasis on simulating the politics and intrigue of the Latin and Italic peoples during the Second Punic War. Shane, one of our two builders, made a very pretty map based on the geography of the Campania region in Italy, and we got to work laying out settlements for players and NPCs to inhabit. In the mean time, I worked on making custom assets for this setting so that we could decorate our world with all kinds of authentic clutter to give it more flavor. Around this time, we began laying out the city of Capua which would be the primary set piece of our map and main player hub. To call Capua large would be an understatement. We laid out a 1:1 outline of the city based on some obscure historical references and maps, and our outline occupied roughly 1/10 of our 4.5k^2 map of the region. Compelled by blind optimism, we began work on building our huge city with the hope that when it was all finished, we'd somehow have a server hosting enough players to occupy it.

The process of building Capua is a story that could have its own blog, but I'm not a builder, and I'm not qualified to get into the minutia of establishing a cohesive style and theme for builds. What I can say, however, is that we did a great deal of work in a relatively small time span. By the first month, we had roughly 20% of the city built, and with that rate of progress, we figured there was no way we couldn't finish what we set out to do. However, our perfectionism began to get in the way of our goals, and we eventually found ourselves redoing entire districts of the city to get them just right, exactly how we'd like them. While most large scale build projects reuse a set of buildings to fill in empty spaces, we did every build by hand, each one being unique from the surrounding buildings. By this point, the work we had done was enough to house a server of roughly 100 players with each player able to occupy their own dwelling in the city while still having plenty of vacancies. That was only one fifth of the city we laid out. Still, we persisted, finding ourselves in a dilemma where we had realized what we set out to do was unrealistic, yet the amount of effort and time we had sunk into it was considered too great to stop and reassess our situation. Moving forward, we decided to drop our original intention of creating a server surrounding this project, and instead focused entirely on finishing the city as a build project that would, hopefully, eventually be our magnum opus.

Not seeing the writing on the wall, we pushed onward with this goal, continuing to build up a city that would never be filled, while also continuing to plot out additional settlements on our map. As the project grew larger and larger in scope, we found ourselves daunted by the situation we dug ourselves into. We had roughly 300 users in a Discord server dedicated to updating people who were interested in our project - one that we could never hope to deliver. Our enthusiasm for completing this city and its surroundings waned, and we became extremely burnt out and demoralized by our situation. Not wanting to admit defeat, we decided to call on volunteers to try and lighten the load on our two builders who were responsible for 99% of the work done up to that point. While we initially had some success in lightening the workload so that our central three man team could focus on the larger scale builds in the city, and we are extremely grateful to the volunteers we had (Quirinalis, Prometheus392, Gnaus, Erostea, Cel_eri, AguilaDB), it didn't last for very long. Lack of direction and project management meant our volunteers found themselves unsure of what they were expected to do, and eventually, our team shrunk down to our original trio. Months passed by, and little progress was made on the project, until ultimately, in the Spring of 2021, we decided to cut our losses and announced that our project was on an indefinite hiatus. In our last Antiqua Italia blog post, we skirted around what the actual problems were, and chalked it up to a lack of builders and an inability to retain permanent contributors. In hindsight, I think this was rather disrespectful to the efforts of the aforementioned contributors, as our lack of retention of contributors was due to poor management rather than a lack of dedication. Regardless, we've essentially kept the Italia project on ice, occasionally putting in some new builds in our free time, and helping out other adjacent projects managed by more competent organizers.

There are several takeaways that I'd like people to glean from this post. If you ever find yourself at the helm of a large scale project, make absolutely sure that you are managing your project wisely. Consider the scope of your project. Is it well-defined? Is it something you can reasonably deliver? Is your team capable of achieving what you've set out to do? There is a fine line that delineates a big ambition from a pipe dream. Failing to deliver on something you've set out to do is soul crushing, and the sunken costs fallacy can lead to a downward spiral of Sisyphean futility. Respect your own time, respect the time of the people around you, avoid overpromising on things. This doesn't mean you should never pursue daunting goals - by all means, seek to achieve great heights wherever possible. But do not place yourself in a position in which you are endlessly working towards a superficial goal that will never be achieved. That type of eternal effort and drive is better spent on your own personal improvement.

As for us, we're still here. We're working on some new things, though to avoid finding ourselves in the situation outlined in this post, we'll keep fairly quiet about it. It's Rome stuff, you'll probably like it. I'll be posting bite sized content on this account whenever I can, and maybe some Italia builds will pop up here and there for people to play around with. I'm working on a proper release of the Italia build pack that was used for Capua, so expect to see that sometime in the future. Stay tuned, and take care.