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?

Historically, we've made space strategy games. And from a rendering point of view, space games are much easier to do.  There's no terrain and generally a lot less "stuff" to render.

When Stardock began work on the Elemental games (our fantasy strategy game world), we got a crash course in having to get a lot more disciplined in how we do our rendering.

Below is a short list of lessons we've learned that can be universally applied:

1. The GPU is usually not the limiting factor. It's the CPU.
2. Alpha checking is expensive. That is, it's worth spending some effort to intelligently label whether there's alpha blending in an object so that you're not making the GPU do the alpha testing on the fly. For example, we found that in Fallen Enchantress, a little spider web that appeared in a given tile would eat up 87% of the rendering time for the entire tile.
3. In your shader code, it's especially important to find ways to exit out of any loops as early as you can. This is a good practice in general but you'd be surprised how easy it is to underestimate the performance impact it has.
4. Anything that you paint on the screen that has to blend (on the fly) with other things is going to be expensive.  For example, our sunshine rays in Fallen Enchantress are more expensive to paint that all of the terrain combined.
5. Get and become very familiar with performance tools like Vtune Amplifier and Intel GPA. They're worth it.

There are plenty of much more thorough guides out there, but often times, performance loss happens because of a handful of dumb/inexperienced design decisions made early on. 

If you haven’t read Chris Taylor’s interview with EuroGamer.net you absolutely should.

"There's multiple games that we got almost to the finish line on," Taylor revealed, reluctant to say more because of NDAs, which suggests this happened recently.

"We got a phone call from the publisher and they said, 'We're terminating.' And we're like, 'Yeah but we're only a month away from beta!' And they're like, 'Yeah we're still terminating.' And we're like, 'OK.' "

"One of these days - and it won't be from me - you guys will get leaked through some anonymous source..." he teased (I'm not entirely sure if he was joking). "And you can read a game development contract, and you will - it'll be like the Nazis when they opened up The Ark: all the flesh will melt all down your face."

There are publishers and there are studios.  A game publisher is essentially like a specialized loan shark. That is, they give you an “advance” on royalties that’s enough (but barely) to cover the cost of making the game in exchange for a 20% royalty. Before the studio sees a cent,  that advance has to be paid off.  Oh, and by the way, the publisher may cancel the project at any time leaving the studio holding the bag on unpaid development costs.  It’s a terrible business model for studios.

I went through a version of this myself.

Back in 1993, I signed a contract with Advanced Idea Machines. I wrote a game, from my dorm room, called Galactic Civilizations for OS/2.  They took my game, put it in a box, shipped it to stores and made millions. Me? I didn’t get a cent. They gamed the bankruptcy system (it was a 1 game publisher, I was naïve back then) and I got nothing.

So then, in 1995, we wrote (we as in me and an artist) wrote Galactic Civilizations 2 for OS/2. This time, we published it ourselves and sent it over to Micro Central who in turn distributed it to stores.  It made millions again. But us? Nope. Micro Central didn’t pay us. They filed bankruptcy as well (see a pattern)?

Ok, so we move to Windows and in 2003 we write Galactic Civilizations for Windows and we sign on with Strategy First to publish it. Again, it makes millions. And us? Wait for it…..wait…for it…That’s right….bankrupcty again.  And thus, Impulse was born. Digital distribution would save us.  Because Galactic Civilizations II (and the e-sales of galciv 1) belonged to us and we could make a living on it finally.  It was a tiny loophole in our agreement – Stardock could digitally distribute Galactic Civilizations for Windows. Imagine if GPG had had those rights on Supreme Commander.

Historically, getting paid for your work has been a real challenge. The more leverage your partner has over you, the less willing they are.  Our European publisher of Demigod, at once point, claimed to have not sold a single copy of the game and hence, owed no royalties.  The statistical odds of getting paid for something is relative to the amount of leverage they have on you.

When we worked on Demigod with GPG, I remember visiting them and thinking they had a pretty good gig going. It was like “Man, this shower room is huge! The water is so hot.” and Chris say “Oh, just you wait.” and I turn around and a bunch of guys enter the room. “Who are those guys? I wonder if we’ll be friends..”

This is why Stardock self-publishes. I already know I have a pretty mouth. I don’t need a publisher to whisper it to me.

Stardock has released version 1.2 of its popular fantasy strategy game, Fallen Enchantress. 

Version 1.2 boasts dozens of updates, enhancements and fixes including:

• Significant AI strategy updates based on strategies employed by players
• Spawned resources (like iron, gold, wheat) are more common but seeded further away from starting locations
• Powerful monsters have been adjusted to be less common in habitable areas but more common in the barren lands between factions
• Default number of players increased based on map size
• Lots of UI and gameplay fixes based on player reports and feedback

The full change log can be found here.

Fallen Enchantress is a strategy game set in the world of Elemental. In it, the player takes on the role of a powerful sorcerer who must build a kingdom (or empire) from the ground up. The world itself, however, is already inhabited by creatures of all levels of power who will not willingly give up their domain. Up against the player are other kingdoms and empires who have their own dreams of power. 

Fallen Enchantress has received nearly universally favorable reviews from the major gaming publications such as Game Informer, The Escapist, Gaming Nexus, IGN, PC PowerPlay, Gamespot and elsewhere.

It can be purchased directly at www.fallenenchantress.com or at third party digital retailers including Steam, Impulse, and Gamers Gate.

Screenshots:

Build cities, expand your kingdom across the world.

Train armies and take battle to your enemies

Design your own units based on what resources and wealth you have available to you

Screw it, all future games will just have the word Poochie in it.

Every time we try to think of a name for a future game, pow. It’s taken.

I recently wrote this as a response but I thought it deserved its own post.

If you haven’t heard, Gas Powered Games led by its CEO Chris Taylor, have a Kickstarter project up for a new game called Wildlman.  He recently updated it to make it clear that the Kickstarter project is do or die for his studio and in preparation to see which way things go, he has laid off most of the staff (most of whom can be recalled if the Kickstarter project is successful).

Let me tell you a little bit about Gas Powered Games and Chris Taylor.

Chris Taylor is one of the best people I've ever met. Let me tell you about the man I know and why he deserves everyone's support.

Chris Taylor has run Gas Powered Games in a way that most people claim they wish companies were run.  He has always run GPG as a compassionate person who cares deeply about each person he works with.  

It’s not just a studio. It’s a company that was founded by people who have seen the cut-throat ways of the game industry and decided to do things differently. They’ve made some great games over the years – Dungeon Siege. Supreme Commander and yes, Demigod to name 3.

One of the things most people don't know about GPG is that one of the biggest challenges they've had is that for every game project you hear about there's often a project that got canceled that you didn't hear about.  That is, big publisher X contracts studio Y to make a game and half way through there's some re-org at the publisher and they kill the game.  So what does the studio do with all those extra people?  MOST studios would just lay those people off.  Not Chris Taylor. He would go to heroic lengths to try to keep everyone he could. He'd find some other project for them to work on even if it meant he would personally suffer financially to do it.  He really cares about providing a stable environment for his people. He puts them first over his own interests.

I've seen people online (wrongly) claim that GPG has struggled because of game X or game Y. That's that even remotely the truth.  The truth is that their struggles have come from the games you've never heard of that got canceled by a major publisher leaving GPG holding the bag.  It's the plight of many studios and it's why there are so few of them left.  The fact that GPG has been so successful for the past decade is a testament to Chris Taylor and his management team's skill.  

Chris Taylor is universally admired and respected in our industry because he's an avatar of what our industry *could* be if we treated our employees, our partners and our customers better.  It's easy to stand on the outside and come up with "Well, they did A, B and C!" without realizing that behind the scenes, he was having to choose between terrible terrible options.

I hope GPG is able to keep going. It's non-trivial to put together the kind of talent that Chris has put together over the years. It would be a huge loss to our industry as a whole. 

If you want to learn more about their Kickstarter project, go here.