My name’s Mark Johnson. I’m the creator & developer of roguelike/strategy game ‘Ultima Ratio Regum’ and a PhD student at the University of York.

Ultima Ratio Regum is a ‘strategy roguelike’ game intended to be an (almost entirely) realistic history generator, and a cross between strategy/4x games and roguelikes, in the early stages of development. It is written in Python. Alpha 0.2.x is the latest version - 0.3.x is due out in the middle of 2013. It is inspired by, among other things, Command & Conquer, Civilization, Europa Universalis, Dwarf Fortress, Tomb Raider, Nethack and Total War, and the works of Neal Stephenson, Jorge Borges and Umberto Eco. I have been developing it for nearly two years, and anticipate that at least a good decade remains until I’m happy with it.

Due to the time pressures of completing a doctorate, publishing papers, and developing the game, URR development oscillates much like a sine wave from months of serious development to months of relative downtime. This cannot be helped, but I try to keep people updated on the current state of affairs even when I am focusing on my academic life. These pauses should never be taken to indicate a lack of interest in the project on my part, but simply the cruel reality of juggling rather a lot of projects. If you have any questions, comments, bugs, compliments or insults, I can be emailed at mark at this domain. Ultima Ratio Regum can be found on Facebook, Twitter at UltimaRegum, on Roguebasin and IndieDB, and has been reported on in a number of gaming news outlets.