One of the most common series of questions I’ve been getting over the past month is what the difference between War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress will be.

The marketing folks want me to keep the specifics to a minimum so I’ll focus on broad terms. 

The Plague Cat you see on the right would never have been in War of Magic. That’s because War of Magic was much more broadly scaled.  Fallen Enchantress, by contrast, is much more tightly designed.  Put another way, Fallen Enchantress isn’t an expansion pack for War of Magic.  It’s a new strategy game that takes place in the Elemental universe (hence Elemental: War of Magic, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, there won’t be an Elemental II for example because it would be like having a Star Wars II).

War of Magic, hence focuses on building a kingdom where your primary competitors are other kingdoms and empires. It’s very much like Galactic Civilizations in that sense.  The terrain itself in War of Magic is of only minor importance and the individual soldiers and heroes are heavily abstracted.

Fallen Enchantress, by contrast, has the world itself as one of your primary antagonists. The cataclysm has ruined and in the vacuum of civilization other…things have taken hold of the land.  From a lore perspective, War of Magic broadly takes place in the West of Anthys, far from the epicenter of the cataclysm.   Told largely from the point of view of the men of the West, the races of the East, collectively called “The Fallen” are treated as villains.   By contrast, Fallen Enchantress largely revolves the much more hostile and dangerous East.  There, we learn that there is a lot more nuance to the various races fighting for survival. The world itself is as much your enemy as Magnar or Kraxis.

Fallen Enchantress is a much more personal experience. Winning is not just about building up the most lethal civilization but also adapting to the environment. As a result, weapons, magic, and technology are much more specific. You’ll need to look at what your opponents are up to and focus on countering it. Biggest mob != Win.  You don’t have housing in Fallen Enchantress. City Building is much more specialized. You won’t be building the same kinds of things in every city but instead of customizing your cities such that they can meet the threats and environments they exist in.

Stay tuned.

There’s been a lot of debate in our industry in the past year about the so-called “middle market”.  This is the class of games between say Call of Duty and Angry Birds.  Not quite AAA (i.e. not $25 million to produce) but also not $250,000 to make the game. The middle market is the world that Stardock and Paradox thrive in. And both of us have done very well in this market.

The argument against the middle market basically boils down to market size.  That the middle market just misses the “sweet spot”.  Retailers don’t want to carry middle market products because they don’t sell as well AAA or the casual market.  The thing is, digital distribution changes all this. 

I contend that a game like say Baldur’s Gate (with updated graphics but no where near Dragon Age) would likely sell very well at a fraction of the cost of Dragon Age.  The same is true on a whole host of games.  The challenge, of course, is for developers to carefully budget their title based on their best guess on the market size.  A game like War in the East may not sell a million copies but they also didn’t cost that much to make.

What’s your take?

Programs in use:

• WindowBlinds for GUI skinning
• DeskScapes for animated wallpaper
• Tiles for task management
• Fences for icon organizing

Other things on there…

Chrome is my browser. Skype I use constantly. Impulse of course for managing my games and utilities. CVS for source control (not pictured is SVN and PerForce for other projects). Visual Studio 2005 for coding. Excel and Word of course going there.

Why is IE9 so ugly?

Next week we plan to release Elemental: War of Magic v1.2 which is largely a rewrite of how War of Magic deals with memory.  So the change log in v1.2 isn’t that long but involves a lot of work.

v1.3, which mostly gameplay, will begin its journey immediately following.

Follow this blog for a status report of where things are.

War of Magic v1.3: Changes Implemented

• Base HP lowered from 10 to 2 for trained units.
• Minimum trained unit group size changed from 1 to 4.
• Base map movement speed increased.
• World Difficulty will set the default difficulty of the AI players
• When a sovereign dies, its faction is inherited by the player with the best relationship with them.
• Improvements that can repeatedbly be built (studies, workshops) use increasing numbers of citizens
• Tile limit per city level reimplemented with housing no longer using up tiles (so you never get "stuck")
• Random Events
• Notable locations no longer require a tech level
• Quests no longer require a tech level
• Champions are now rare to find on their own
• New notable locations added
• Low level notable locations more likely to provide equipment
• Harbors (sea faring techs) eliminated until further notice
• Special buildings no longer required to special units (but they'll be helpful)

War of Magic v1.3: To-Do

• Champions will offer to join you automatically when your faction meets certain milestones
• Minor Factions are going to go bye-bye until they can be loved more by us
• Tactical battles: AI re-design
• Major AI updates to general strategic areas (unit design, city management, unit and army movement)

War of Magic v1.4: Tentative To-Do

• New Setup option: Notable Location frequency 
• New Setup option: Random Events [enabled][disabled
• World Generation will now place exotic things far away from starting points.
• Clairvoyance (Channelers can cast spells from remote but the cost is based on the distance
• New Random Events

More to come. Stay tuned. List will grow and shrink and change over time as we determine schedule as well as make adjustments.

LAST UPDATE: 5/29

v1.4 is a tentative build as the Fallen Enchantress beta will likely start after v1.3 is released but before v1.4. So we'll have to see what the demand for v1.4 is since virtually everyone who has War of Magic will be getting Fallen Enchantress.

It's been years since I've had a dog and my kids have never had one.  So after a lot of research and thought, I decided to get an Entlebucher and found a breeder.  After a lot of waiting, the puppies have been born and in several weeks we'll be traveling to indiana to pick up the pup.

Here are some pictures:

2 days old

The mom

Well it looks like v1.2 is going to pretty much take care of the memory stuff. The next step will be to have the game mechanics take care of the remaining things and that'll be in v1.3.  That is, the system is open ended and that'll have to be squashed (there's literally nothing stopping you from having 500,000 individual soldiers running around with their own unique clothing and items).

It's a bit painful testing beta v1.19f because of all the debugging info. Late games take literally minutes to go through turns for me because it's writing so much to disk and to the output buffer to track every bit of memory being allocated.  

For marketing reasons, v1.2 isn't scheduled to come out until March 22. Right after that, we're going to head into v1.3 which will be the most significant gameplay update to the game since v1.1 and in some ways, it'll be a bigger change since v1.3 is purely designed to take everything we as a community have learned about the game to add more fun elements into the game rather than game mechanic changes.

But we'll talk more about v1.3 in the coming weeks.

Over the years, Stardock’s Object Desktop suite of utilities has been the source of many innovations on the PC.  It is where the concept of “widgets” and “gadgets” was born. It is where ZIP files being treated like folders came from, it’s where GUI skinning came from, it’s where animated desktop wallpaper came from.  And more recently, it’s where the popular icon organization program, Fences came from.

This year, Stardock is proud to add Tiles to the list of new Object Desktop programs. Tiles is to tasks what Fences is to desktop icons. It is designed to allow users to more effectively manage what they are working on.

“The current PC task management metaphor hasn’t really changed in over 18 years,” said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock. “In recent years, mobile devices have been able to introduce users to more modern metaphors of arranging their digital life.  Tiles has been designed to update that metaphor to the PC experience.”

Tiles works by taking advantage of the wider aspect ratios of today’s desktops. On the right side of the screen, a page of tiles is displayed. Users may have multiple pages that they organize as they see fit or make use of several sample page filters such as displaying only active windows or only web pages. Users can then switch between pages either by clicking on the page title or on touch systems by sweeping their finger across the page to “turn the page”.

Users add tiles to a page through either holding the shift key down and dragging a window onto a page or by dragging an icon onto the page. When the tile is active, it is displayed as with a thumbnail of the window. When the tile is inactive, only the program’s icon is displayed. Users can configure Tiles to be different sizes, automatically maximize the windows selected tiles, automatically hide and show windows based on the tiles on a particular page as well as dozens of other options to enable users to customize Tiles to their work style.

Tiles is currently in beta exclusively on Stardock’s Object Desktop software network. Users can get Object Desktop at www.objectdesktop.com. It is expected to be generally released this Summer.

Download:

http://www.objectdesktop.com

Video:

http://www.screencast.com/t/u4oK0520uoK

Screenshots:

One has to wonder what’s going through Charlie Sheens mind.  But I suspect that I’m not the only person who’s wondered how often the mega successful think “Why should I put up with crap? I’m rich!”

The problem is, that place only leads to ruin. As tempting as it is to lash out at your critics and demonstrate your capacity to operate without restraint, no man is an island.

When my son was younger, he asked me why certain words were considered “dirty”. I told him that these were were selected, fairly arbitrarily, by society as being unacceptable for polite conversation. I told him that he should do what he thinks is right and not feel he is forced to live by social norms but at the same time to recognize that there are consequences for violating social norms. My message: Pick your battles carefully.

Charlie Sheen is demonstrating that he is not bound by social norms but he is also paying a price for it – social ostracization (is that even a word?). So unless he plans to live in his own private fortress, he isn’t winning. He’s losing. Badly.

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.