It was on December 26th that Fallen Enchantress reached a place where I wanted to play it (over playing SWTOR) rather than having to play it.  This is something that never occurred for me in War of Magic (it was always “must work on this”). And in fact, the last time I got to that point was with Dark Avatar (Galactic Civilizations II series).

I must admit, one of the things I’m enjoying the most is how easy it is to mod and tweak things.  You think having access to the source code means you have full control. That’s nonsense. Pouring through millions of lines of code to find out what determines say how fast a unit swings in tactical battles is non trivial.  By contrast, in FE, all that kind of stuff is in XML so I could speed up everything to suit my preferences (which I hope will become the default because I prefer fun speed animations over “realistic” speed animation).

Another area of fun has been tactical battles. Because they were so terrible to start with (imo) I get to see big improvements with relatively little effort.  For example, units would get focused on their initial target no matter what. I fixed that with 1 line of code.  The AI not using spells in combat was caused by a rand()% design rather than a calculation on what the best move would be. I’m a very lazy person so I prefer to hand things off to the machines to tell me what should be done rather than trying to hard code it (i.e. feed a function all the conditions you think are relevant, have it crunch it and come back with what it should do).  As a result, tactical battles are much better already even if they still need a ton of work AI-wise.

That said, for NON-Brads of the world, assume this game will suck and make you get a horrible disease rand()%DiseaseTypes.size();

Fallen Enchantress has been a long road, but rewarding road for us.  A year and a half after the release of War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress is Stardock’s largest game endeavor in its history. My part in its tale includes the new computer AI and complaining – my traditional role on game development here.

In recent years, the number of hours I could dedicate to those endeavors got smaller and smaller. That changed when we sold Impulse to Gamestop this year. Impulse had slowly come to take most of my day to day time in recent years.

And so, Fallen Enchantress has been a real joy to work on. And I apologize to all of you for the long wait as we have…indulged ourselves a bit with it. Free from any sort of economic constraints, we’ve been able to do things that, from a business point of view, ridiculous from a turn-based PC strategy game point of view.  But the end result is that we’ve made something that we’re really proud of.  I hope players see what we see – a strategy game unlike any other.

That said, you should assume it’ll be horrible. Keep those expectations low. LOW I say!

A general overview: Bringing Game Design to Stardock

Lead Designer and Producer Derek Paxton has combined both his Fall from Heaven experience and his years of professional project management experience into our game design philosophy – starting with having a game design philosophy. 

Designing games is something that I always disliked quite intensely.  I much prefer to work with other people’s designs and take them to what (to me anyway) seems to be their logical conclusion. 

The basic requirements of Fallen Enchantress are as follows:

1. It is a strategy game that takes place in a very very hostile magical world
2. That magical world has a rich history but also wants to kill you.
3. There are several other factions who want to dominate this world but are also struggling against the world.
4. Your tools are magic, technology, diplomacy, and questing.

Derek’s leadership on the project has ensured that the team has been focused on these 4 things.

To support Derek’s mission, I have been helping enforce 4 engineering requirements:

1. Stability. At all times, the game must be rock solid. No “fixing later”. Beta != crashy.
2. Performance. Games that are slow aren’t fun. Coding should be looking at being as efficient as possible.
3. Memory. Where is every byte of memory going? Can those running 64-bit get more? (answer: Yes)

Now, these points are a gross over simplification but they cover many logical sub-components to make these things work (game balance, good AI, lots of in-game lore, an interesting campaign, a tutorial, etc.).

With that out of the way, let me show you where things stand today. Below you will see what would have been in the public beta had it gone out as originally planned as well as some discussion of what will be changed prior to Beta 1 in January.

Part 1: The Tutorial

Besides a campaign and the sandbox mode, there is an interactive tutorial.  Having a tutorial allows us to justify having a bit more depth to the game since not all of it can be “self explanatory” and not everyone will read the manual.

 

The tutorial also includes optional video demos for each step of the way.

 

Part 2: Character Creation

When you create a sovereign, you can either assign it over to an existing faction or create your own custom faction on the spot.

Your character has magical proficiencies that set them on the path to become more powerful in a particular path of magic.

Look out for Tar-Froglar. In future games, I can play against him too which is kind of fun.

I don’t know what the limit is on the number of players. I do know it’s enjoyable putting a dozen or so on a tiny map and watching mayhem. The maps do have a default # of suggested players. But we don’t force people to abide by that.

Part 3: Early Game & Economics

When you enter the world of Elemental, a backstory is generated based on your sovereign and faction choices.

 

The economics are deceptively simple. There are only two local resources: Grain and Materials.  Grain becomes food. Materials aid in production. People need food and provide taxes, research, and to a lesser extent, some production. 

You can set your tax rate which in turn will affect your tax income at the expense of productivity in the form of unrest:

Tax rate set to none:

 

Unrest is only 10% so I’m getting 1.1 research per turn, 138 food and 37 production (but no gildar).

Set taxes to oppressive and you get this:

Ouch. But I’m making money.

 

Part 4: Other players

This is where fantasy author Dave Stern has come in. Woe be it to anyone who wants to translate this game. There’s a book’s worth of material stuffed in here with combinations for every faction vs. every faction with multiple displays based on game states.

Diplomacy comes in the form of treaties and trade.  The trading part is fairly straight forward.  The treaties, by contrast, is something we’re hoping to keep adding lots of because they’re pretty cool. A treaty is just a contract. A treaty can be that for N gold Umber will attack Capitar. Or for both parties to share 1% of their research or to have a N% chance that loot will be shared – basically they’d get a copy of the same loot, these aren’t zero sum treaties).   How many we’ll get in by the beta versus release versus 3 years from now remains to be seen.

Part 5: Champions

Champions are central to success in Fallen Enchantress.  By late game, a Champion is an army unto themselves.

Champions can be found in their own encampments. They’ve already allied themselves either with the Kingdom or the Empire. The only question left is which faction of the Kingdom or Empire they’ll sign on with.  The more powerful the champion, the higher your recruiting ability must be.

Champions almost never die, even when they fall in battle. If they are defeated, they are brought back to the nearest city where they recover and typically have a permanent effect placed on them (limp, lost eye, fear, etc.) that will haunt them for the rest of the game.  It is not uncommon – and in fact typical – for a late game champion to have several scars and old wounds from battle.

Part 6: Combat

The combat system in Fallen Enchantress centers around the concept of initiative. Initiative determines how often that unit will be able to take a turn.  In tactical battles, the left side of the screen shows what’s coming up (a unit or a spell to be cast).  A really really fast unit may get to take several turns before a slow unit gets to take a turn.  As a result, few units get to “Retaliate” when hit (though some units do have this ability, it’s exceedingly rare).

Magic duels come in the form of both sides trying their best to overcome the other with spells and counter spells flung back and forth. The more powerful spells may take 3 turns for that unit to cast giving ample time for their opponent to cast a counter on it.

Ranged units are also very crucial (as well as countering them) since they can do a great deal of damage from afar. The typical counter here is Cavalry who move fast and are hard for archers to hit.

 

Part 7: User Interface

Often unappreciated, a good UI is crucial to this type of game.  This was an area where myself, Derek (Fall from Heaven), and Jon Shafer (Civilization V) spent a lot of time thinking about.  A good UI is a gateway to having greater depth in the game because it lets us explain the game to players in bite sized chunks.

Players can manage their kingdom from a single screen if they want to.

Everything here has a friendly tooltip.

Example of a tool tip.

Another tooltip.

And another tooltip.

And another…

 

When players zoom out, a cloth map is displayed.  Players can optionally display the HUD icons on here or not.

 

Part 8: Magic

Magic is arguably the most potent tool at a player’s disposal to win the game. Generally speaking, you don’t learn spells from spell books (though there are spell books out there that you can get from quests, notable locations, and loot from monsters).  You learn them as your characters level up.  There is only one master spell book for your kingdom and it is the composite of all your spell casting units combined (strategically).

There are enough spells hidden away that even I haven’t seen all of them yet. Each time I play, I find a new one depending on who I’m playing as, what strategy I took, what quests I found, what technologies I researched, what proficiencies I chose and what perks I chose when I leveled up.

Part 9: Technology

One of the challenges in a fantasy, turn-based, civilization-style strategy game is the tech tree. First, we wanted there to be two very different tech trees – one for the Empires and one for the Kingdoms.  And we wanted players to very easily see the difference in them and this led to some…interesting choices that I would never have thought of without Derek and Jon.

Anyone who’s ever played GalCiv knows my view on techs: More is more.  In FE, however, Derek and Jon showed that less is more.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of techs here. But each one gives you a lot of stuff but they also take a long time to get to.

The number to the right of a tech is how many turns it would take your current kingdom to research.  The result is that players come to really appreciate the tech they have rather than blowing through techs to get to the ultimate.  The other effect, which was what Derek and Jon were going for, was to make “mop up” for whoever was winning much easier.  The players who can get good stuff will wipe the floor with those who simply can’t.

 

Part 10: AI

Nobody talks about AI stuff anymore. I challenge you – find a game where the media (or most players even) talk about AI.  It’s like our industry has given up on it.

AI coding is a bit of an arcane art.  It’s the part of the game I care about the most. But I don’t usually get to spend much time on it because I am supposed to be running a business allegedly.  On GalCiv for OS/2, I got months and months to write AI. It was great. Each AI player got multiple background threads. One dedicated to near term issues and one for long-term strategy along with writing data to the drive that would let it learn from human players.

But as Stardock grew, the number of hours I could put on a single product declined.  By the time of Elemental, I got about 30 days of AI coding in (for GalCiv II I got almost 4 months until Twilight when I handed it off to others).

For FE, I’ll get almost 4 months of AI time. That means I get to write both the strategic and the tactical AI. This has had the secondary effect of making the game much for multithreaded. There is no “Turn” screen in Fallen Enchantress. There is no stop in the action between turns because all the work is happening in the background.

Let

While the player is doing their thing, the AI and the general data work of the game happens in the background. So when you hit turn, it’s really just a matter of resetting the UI.  Now, if you sit there and pound on the turn button, you’ll have to wait (though it’ll still be smooth UI-wise) but generally, the AI will move faster than you.

The BETA

In early January, every person who bought Elemental: War of Magic will be getting an email from us telling them about the beta. 

If they bought War of Magic in 2010, they get Fallen Enchantress for free.  War of Magic had great potential and I think most people would agree that v1.4 of War of Magic is a pretty good game.  But it is still not the game we had planned on making and frankly, it was not acceptable at release. It was too ambitious for us at the time to make and combine that with a health dose of cogitative dissonance and you have a real problem. We just didn’t have the project management process down to make such a large game (and by project management, I mean we didn’t actually have project management, we were just a bunch of guys/gals making games – that doesn’t scale well).   Now, for people who bought WOM this year, you will still get a discount on FE. We just haven’t come up with a specific policy yet.

The BETA of FE will be released on January 19th to those who were part of the original WOM beta and January 26 to everyone else (we’re doing a tiered release because we’ve never rolled out this many betas at once before – you should assume that the process will cause your PC to catch fire and your pets to suffer).

 

See ya next year!

So that’s all for now. Hopefully you found this information helpful!

It’s been a long time since I got so addicted to a game that I found myself playing it long after I knew I should have gone to bed or eaten…or bathed.

But SWTOR is such a game.  My sons have left the lands of Skyrim and joined me and our guild (Lords of Hyperon on Kaas City server – I’m Talax there) where we have been playing together.  God, it’s good to have sons.

The last game that held my attention like this was Planetscape Torment which was a very very long time ago.  SWTOR as a single player game is outstanding.  Other than partying up with my fellow guildmates and my sons (mostly my sons) I’ve played it alone and the story is compelling.

My poor wife.  She says all she wants for Christmas now is for husband and sons to bathe.  Some wishes just can’t be fulfilled.

 

For those of you who want to see a lot of our day to day musings and mini previews, check out the Fallen Enchantress Sneak Peek Forum:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/1012

I love it.

As a long time player of WoW (which I really also liked for the first 30 or so levels) I can appreciate the inspiration it took as well as the innovations it’s made.

So far (first 15 or so levels) it plays remarkably similar to a single player RPG that you can bring your friends into if you’d like but don’t need to (WoW was this way too). For me, it has some advantages over WoW in that I care about the Star Wars lore, find it more interesting and prefer the appeal of something that is galactic-wide.

The Sith, which I chose to play as, are interesting to say the least. Each Sith Lord is a power unto themselves. Each one behaves as if it is its own “great house” from the Dune universe. I don’t know how the Jedi play but I find the Sith very interesting. 

My main gripe  with the Sith is that the writing for it is remarkably uneven. Some people writing clearly decided that Sith = Evil which is not how I (or a lot of other people) view them.  Strength through passion. Power through Strength. Understanding through Power.  That is the Sith code that I’m familiar with. Not “Hate and random cruelty”.  I prefer the Sith path to the Jedi paternalism path but that’s for another discussion.

The quests are very standard quests. Fetch this. Press these. Collect those.  The difference being the story and the enjoyable gameplay of doing those quests.  My biggest complaint about the quests is that there’s a lot of lazy idle animation in there which is, for a title with this kind of budget, unforgiveable.  There’s a lot of “crazy” people you’re supposed to dispose of. But their idle animations are as if they’re casually conversing with one another. It makes me feel like Lancelot in The Holy Grail where people are just minding their own business and I jump in “have at thee!” and start slaughtering people in the middle of afternoon tea.

The music is particularly nice, a good blend of traditional Star Wars and some amazing original sound. 

The user interface still has a long ways to go. It’s better than WoW was when it launched but that was years ago. It’s not bad but I look forward to modders getting ahold of it.

The graphics are good but I had to use my external GPU tools to turn on additional effects (such as anti-aliasing) because there are no in-game options at this time.

Character choosing. Yea, my character doesn’t look evil. Which is party of the point. The Sith aren’t evil in my view.

 

The green field tells you that this is an area dedicated to your story. It’s your own personalized instance.

Tired of not being able to play a lot of missions because you have to have a party? No problem. You can get companions as party members who you can even send on various tasks for you and they in turn gain skills that can be quite helpful.

If you get a real party going, you can dismiss your companions to go do something (you can’t have more than 4 people in a party and it doesn’t care whether they’re NPCs or humans).

When you launch the game, you are given a snap shot of where you are in your character’s main story arc as if it were a chapter from the Star Wars saga. The game does a good job making you feel like you are singularly important in the game universe.

If you have any specific questions, ask them here.  I play on the Kaas City server as Talax if anyone’s interested.

Problem: Launching SWTOR results in a blank screen or monitor losing signal.

Solution:

Look in c:\users\<your name>\appdata\local\swtor\swtor\settings\client_settings.ini

In there check the nativeheight, nativewidth, width and height and make sure they are something your monitor supports. There is also sometimes a refreshrate (on my son’s, it was set to 120 which the display couldn’t handle so I changed it to 60).

I wish I could say I found this solution online somewhere but unfortunately, this problem hasn’t “solved” yet. This is the solution. I looked for it because as a game developer, I am familiar with this kind of oops.

[update: fixed acronym!]

For those of you who really like video journals, here are some quickie videos I’ve  done this week.

Part 1: Around my fledgling Kingdom

http://screencast.com/t/Zi0XvYku0pWP

more to come.

I’m working a lot of hours right now.  But why?  At some point I think I should do some research on this.  It’s been years since I’ve “needed” to work from a financial perspective.  So what is the motivator?  Heck, I don’t even have a salary anymore but yet I love to work.  Clearly, I’m insane.