Vic Davis, creator of Armageddon Empires, Solium Infernum and Occult Chronicles, has announced his retirement from making digital games, moving instead to designing board games.
Cryptic Comet, which is pretty much just Vic Davis and the people he hires to do art and audio, has made a series of novel and deep turn based strategy games. Solium Infernum is particularly noteworthy, placing players as princes of hell competing for the infernal throne. Its systems create a mess of bureaucracy where you're constantly trying to one-up your peers as well as sow rumours and create suspicion.
In an announcement on his blog, Davis stated that "selling games directly from this website has been an increasingly difficult task. My programming skills are so tied to an aging and abandoned development platform that making even a niche title like my previous games is a dubious proposition at best." The 'aging development platform' he refers to is Adobe Director, which was more intended to be used for movie editing than game making, which is more suited to its stablemate Flash.
Davis continues: "So I'm leaving the digital space and moving over to the card board arena where I hope my design skills can shine. It's a natural transition since my games have all been very board-game like. I hope that has been part of their charm. I will naturally continue to support all my customers with tech support and downloads of lost purchases. And I will continue to sell my digital games and suport them for as long as they keep running. God Bless compatibility mode."