I’m writing this from the plane. I tell ya, air travel is a lot more tolerable with WiFi and power outlets.

We got to talk about Elemental: Fallen Enchantress along with plans for Elemental: War of Magic coming up.  Got a lot of good questions. 

And of course, we talked about Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion which is the first really big “expansion” to the Sins of a Solar Empire universe. 

There was also a big announcement regarding Impulse::Reactor Free to Play.  There’s a pretty good chance this will show up in War of Magic as an option.  Right now, the plan is for the DLC to be $0 on it so that we can try out the system in real world conditions. If people are liking it, we’ll see if there’s interest in some additional DLC that we wouldn’t normally give away so we can find out from our fans what things they like about it or don’t like about it.

One of the reasons I’m passionate about Free to Play and DLC (DLC has gotten a bit of a bad rap – deservedly so imo but the concept is still awesome) is I would like to see the base price on PC games go down. Way down.  That doesn’t mean gimping the base game.  Rather, it means setting up a system where people can keep expanding the game without having the overhead (which is a lot) of marketing and distributing it.  I think a lot of people would love to see new little things released for GalCiv II over the past couple years. But we had no means to do it other than releasing an expansion pack which drives the cost way up.  The concept is still developing but I do think PC games need to have a lower sticker price one way or the other (see Minecraft for an example of doing it right).

I also participated in a panel regarding failure. That is, what tends to cause game projects to fail. 

This was one of my slides.

Since I was talking to developers, the goal was to help Indies avoid the trap we fell into.  When you’re a small indie shop, you can get away with an adhoc development system like we had in Galactic Civilizations.  But War of Magic had 18 people directly involved (not counting shared resource personnel).  That’s why when people say “They should have delayed it” that the response is no, it wouldn’t have made a difference. This sort of thing could have gone on for years. The team thought it was ready for prime time. 

So in my session, the magic number I gave was 7 people as the maximum number before you have to really go after it as a software engineering exercise. Some would argue you should do it with 3 people and I wouldn’t argue with that.  I’m saying that with 7 people, our collaborative, easy going development ways still worked and beyond that they felt apart into chaos.

And so now you know why we brought in Derek Paxton and Jon Shafer.  Great designers. Derek’s job before Stardock was an enterprise level project manager. So now all things go through him. Even my requests have to go through him. 

During the tour I answered some other interesting questions such as why we refused to allow War of Magic to be re-reviewed (a few sites offered). My answer was that that would set a terrible precedence. Sure, War of Magic is pretty decent now and it’ll keep getting better (I’m itching for v1.3 and we haven’t released v1.2 yet).  But the day you make it generally available for money as a “non beta” is the date I think reviews should start and once done, they’re done.   Plus, it would be horribly unfair to all the smaller indies out there who don’t get media coverage. I remember being one of them. 

Ok, about to land, so off I go.  Have fun! Sorry for typos.