If you haven’t seen Jon Shafer’s new project, At The Gates, check out its Kick Starter page.

Here’s the basic concept:  The Roman Empire is failing. To those who have lived during the glory of Rome, it may seem like the end of the world. And they’re right – it is the end of their world but it is the beginning of our world.

To my knowledge, no game has tackled this very interesting time in western civilization.  You aren’t Rome. You’re a barbarian. Or more aptly, you are placed in the role of the overlord who will ultimately set mankind on the path that leads to the world we live in today. Of course, you’re not alone. Others see the fall of Rome as an opportunity to carve out their own empire.

For the purpose of full disclosure, Jon’s a friend of mine and has spent the last two years helping Stardock create a better game studio. For years, our company produced and published PC games but they were always in the shadow of our “real” business (PC software – things like Fences, WindowBlinds, Start8, ObjectDock, etc.). So the game studio at Stardock never evolved as a traditional game studio. That’s what Jon came in and helped do that.  Thanks to his help, we’ve delivered two solid hits in a row (Fallen Enchantress and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion).

After Fallen Enchantress came out and was successful, Jon had the idea for a truly remarkable new game concept. At the same time, Jon was the leading voice here on a straight forward proposition: In the age of digital distribution and Kickstarter, can a guy and a few friends make a hit PC game independently?

Thus was born Conifer Games.

I could list many reasons why it’s important that this game be successful. But I’ll only list the one reason it will be successful: It’s going to be an awesome game!

Jon still does consulting with us and Stardockians are helping out on the project in our off-hours.   But think of the ramifications for potential game developers everywhere: If this project is successful, it’ll mean that the market has evolved back to being able to support games that live (and die) purely on their game design and not whether they have a multi-million dollar budget.   This will be a huge win for gamers.

So go check it out. If you’re remotely into history, you will almost certainly like what you see.

Without clicking on the thumbnail, what differences do you notice between the two? Not in terms of what units appear on what. But in terms of general visuals.  One of the things we’ve done with Legendary Heroes is revisit the underlying lighting and shadowing engine in Kumquat.

Earlier this year, we got a visit from Intel who brought forth many new tools that we’ve used to have our cake and eat it too – Legendary Heroes has a faster graphics engine than Fallen Enchantress does. We’ve backported as much as we could of this into what will become FE v1.3 but much of it is unique to Legendary Heroes.

These screenshots show how important lighting is not just in terms of making things "pretty" but in terms of controlling what game elements you want to have stand out.

Here are some screenshots we’ve taken for Legendary Heroes that I wanted to share with you guys:

In this one, we’re showing off the complex shadows. It’s really surprising how much easier it makes playing the game when you can see your units pop better.  This is still early but this is the direction we’re going.

It also shows the updated mini-map. We’re still thinking about what color the base map should be (it’s tan in this screenshot). We decided to stop showing terrain (forests/mountains) since what users mainly want to see is the relative position of units, towns and territories.

This is a fairly big game play change.  In FE, what traits you get to choose from are somewhat luck based.  Here, the player is presented with a tree that they can then choose to upgrade via different paths.

When a player’s faction gains enough fame, two champions will come forward and demand that you choose between them. The eventual goal here is to make sure every champion is very different from one another so that which ones you pick will significantly affect your overall strategy.

This is a screenshot that shows off the new lighting and shadow changes.  We’ve very much gone over to the point of view that we should focus on making the game elements obvious even if it’s at the cost of “art”. 

For example, we got rid of ground cover since it served no game play purpose.  The final game should look substantially better even still.

There are going to be riots about tactical battles. My answer is: Tough. Derek and I are doing them the way we want and not how we imagine other people want them.   They are vastly funner (IMO).  So why do I think some people will hate these? Because the tactical battles get going immediately. 

On most maps, there is melee contact in the first turn. the units aren’t spending 2+ turns trying to run to each other. If you don’t want your archers massacred, you better have melee protectors for them. They’re not going to get 4+ turns of free shots at them. Without melee guards, they’ll be getting hits within a turn or two.

Now, I think most players are going to very much like the changes to tactical battles. First, there’s a lot more strategic variety on each map.  More special abilities come into play and more of the skill will come from how you handle your units rather than feeling like you have to game the “first hit”. Initiative matters vastly more now too.

The tactical battle improvements are my personal favorite change over FE.  FE tactical battles are a form of torture now.

This screenshot is more polish than new.  It’s going to get more polish before release but the idea was to try to begin making each of the path choices more meaningful and fit a more distinct path than before.  To do that, we felt we needed to make sure players had a better understanding of the importance of that choice so that we could justify having these choices have more dramatic strengths (and weaknesses).

Full priced Stardock title releases of the last 5 years as measured on Metacritic.

One of these is not like the others.

Some people were reporting corrupted saves and other problems with v1.20. Others have complained about AI and performance.

So here's the build I made this weekend called v1.29frog. It's from my machine. It's not official but you can complain about stuff here in this post.

Update!

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8051911/FE-129toad.zip

Specifically, I am looking to see if it solves the problem with corrupt autosaves. The AI should be better too but hard to tell if people will notice.

NOTE: You unzip this into your existing FE directory (replacing the EXE already there).

I must confess, I wasn’t expecting one of the best reviews of Fallen Enchantress to come from PC Gamer let alone Tom Francis.  Which isn’t to say I don’t think he’s a good reviewer, he is.  But PC Gamer’s Tom Francis was the avatar for those who were deeply disappointed in our first attempt at creating a fantasy strategy game back in 2010 (that game, Elemental: War of Magic).

Deep down, I had hoped PC Gamer would assign Tom to review Fallen Enchantress. I thought it would be inappropriate to explicitly ask PC Gamer to assign our biggest critic to review the game that represents Stardock’s revisit of this genre.  But they did and he did.

The result, I admit, is shock. Not only did PC Gamer give Fallen Enchantress a positive review, he gave it an very positive review. It’s not that I didn’t think we’d get a fair review, I just didn’t think Fallen Enchantress could overcome the negative impression War of Magic gave many people.

I agree with the review, even on the criticisms (I don’t generally like scenarios, they’re like a checkbox these days but Fallen Enchantress is designed to be played as a sandbox game).

Read the review here: http://www.pcgamer.com/review/fallen-enchantress-review/

Makes us very excited what comes next!

A lot of people would like to see crafting in some future expansion, update, sequel, whatever.

The question is, HOW do you imagine this working?

After we complete upcoming expansion pack for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress (which we expect to announce NEXT WEEK) we have to do some hard thinking.  Specifically, what do we do next? After some trials and tribulations we’ve put together what is, in effect, a Master of Magic style engine (and before someone flips out, I’m not saying FE is just like MOM, I am saying that at this stage, our *game engine* is finally capable of actually making that game which is obviously was not capable of in 2010).

But first, let’s look at the history…

Once upon a time…

After Galactic Civilizations II I wanted to do a fantasy strategy game.  I wrote up a brief treatment and had our lead artist draw a mockup of what it should look like:

Basically, I wanted Master of Magic with updated graphics and multiplayer. 

During this time, Stardock had the opportunity to publish two games – Sins of a Solar Empire and Demigod. Two opportunities we couldn’t pass up. Meanwhile, Impulse was starting to really take off too.

Now, we’re a small company. REALLY small. People are always shocked at how tiny Stardock is. We might possibly be the oldest independent game studio left (20 years old this year) that still regularly produces new games but the entire enterprise is less than 60 people and that includes our main business – consumer software (Multiplicity, Start8, WindowBlinds, Fences, etc.). 

What that meant,  back in 2008 is that the team that made Galactic Civilizations had to be spread out to help out on Sins, Demigod and Impulse. To do Elemental, we hired up.

Elemental (and at this point, it was just called Elemental) was going to be a pretty straight forward game. Build cities, capture shards, learn magic, research tech and conquer the world.

Now, Stardock’s game studio didn’t run like a normal game studio. That is, there was really no such thing as a producer or a designer. You either coded or you did art. We had titles but they had no real meaning.  Design was handled by the person who was implementing an “area” of the game (for example, GalCiv II did not have a visual tactical battle display in its design, the person who was assigned to code “resolution outcome” wrote that).

And we had a lot of ideas.  Why stop with Master of Magic’s design elements when you can also throw in Magic the Gathering concepts, Total War, Civilization IV, Ultima, etc.

Slowly, things began to morph as people had more and more ideas get presented.

The spell system got more sophisticated.

The tactical combat design scope grew.

And the reality was that all this stuff just didn’t mesh together.  At one point, we even had underground dungeons.

So when Elemental came out, it was extremely buggy (we had spread ourselves too thin – we had no redundancy) and the individual components just didn’t flow together.

Fall From Heaven

When we looked at what went wrong with Elemental it became clear that we were just wearing too many hats. No one owned the design. No one owned the look of it. No one owned the engine design. We needed to bring someone in who would own the project and enforce their will.

That’s what Kael, the designer of Fall From Heaven was able to do.

Kael (Derek Paxton) didn’t just have great game design skills, he was a senior project manager at Novell.

Originally, we had planned to do two expansion packs:

War of Magic – Fallen Enchantress and War of Magic – Forge of the Overlord.  But it was decided that we should do a more ambitious overhaul to the base game and this became Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.

Fallen Enchantress

So with Fallen Enchantress, we ended up with a pretty good fantasy strategy game (if you don’t already have it, GET IT!). We have lots of ideas on how to improve it but the important thing is that we now have a fantasy strategy game engine that is capable of doing whatever type of game we’d like.

And that’s where we’re at. What do we do next? I can tell you one thing, it will not have the word “Elemental” in it.  Why? Check this out:  [Google Search Results]

That isn’t to say we’d scrap all our work and start over with a brand new design and recreate the millions of dollars in art assets.  But it’s not going to be tied to Elemental. But this assumes that our players want us to continue making this style of strategy game at all.

After all, there are some exciting fantasy strategy games in the offing – Age of Wonders 3 I suspect will be announced soon and Eador: Masters of the Broken World looks excellent. Are there enough people who want Stardock to keep making fantasy strategy games of this type to justify that effort?

[Quick aside: What do I mean by “this type of strategy game”?]

Personally, there are two key differentiators in fantasy strategy games that help me define what sub-genre they belong to:

1. Am I building an empire via starting new cities on a largely empty world (ala Master of Magic)
2. Am I fighting battles strategically (Fall from Heaven) or fighting them tactically (ala Master of Magic)

And specifically, the question is: Making fantasy strategy games that involve tactical battles, city building and RPG elements? That’s the niche I think we have here. I don’t think we’ve nailed down the perfect blend yet but that’s what time and experience exist for.

And that is what we’d like to hear from you.  Do you like what we’re doing enough to keep Should we continue it forward (and don’t answer “Make Fall From Heaven” its future isn’t tied to this). Also, before someone screams GalCiv III the future of GalCiv is not tied to anything we do here.

Go here to answer:

https://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Discuss in the comments.

I’m missing the link now but a indie developer once posted that he had to stop reading his own forums or else he’d never work on his game.

I know how that is. I don’t think most forum users have any inkling how demotivational carping on the forums can be. I can’t even count the number of times where I was geared up to work on a new update to a given game over the weekend only to have all desire to open up the compiler snuffed out when I went onto the forums to see what things people wanted me to put in.

It’s not that developers have a problem with criticism. In fact, we crave constructive feedback. What we really don’t like is hyperbole. Even though we can say to ourselves “this guy is just speaking for effect” it still takes a toll.

For those of you who have played a lot of FE, how are you feeling about v1.2? We put quite a bit of time and effort into making the AI smarter.  Are you seeing a difference?