This week I’ve been presenting internally our company business plan for 2011. Part of this is the Stardock Customer Report 2011 (which we’ll be making available publicly soon) along with our road map on the studio games (this doesn’t count future titles from our partner Ironclad who developed Sins of a Solar Empire nor does it address next steps in the Demigod franchise.

This journal entry will likely only be of interest to either techies or biz types. So if you’re looking for interesting game feature stuff, you’ll probably want to skip this.

The Road Map

Essentially every studio has a road map. They just don’t make it public for obvious reasons.  Since we’re privately held, we can pretty much do whatever we’d like and one of the things we like is to keep our fans up to speed on what the heck is happening here.

So below is the road map for the studio developed (Stardock Entertainment’s studio) titles.

Kumquat

Kumquat is just our internal nickname for the engine. It was called this in honor of former Stardock developer Mike Duffy who created the predecessor “Pear” which we licensed from him after he left to start his own studio. Pear is what all Stardock games from 1997 through 2003 used (Entrepreneur, The Corporate Machine, LightWeight Ninja, Galactic Civilizations I).  It was a fantastic game engine for its day but was 3D.

Kumquat is a new engine that was developed originally for Society which is the free to play MMORTS that we’ve been slowly developing for the past hundred years or something like that.  We decided to have the first game that used Kumquat be a fantasy strategy game, namely, Elemental: War of Magic. 

Now, when War of Magic was being made, we obviously had very high hopes for how it would be received. So we pictured having Elemental: War of Magic – Expansion 1…2…3.  And then you’d have Elemental: War of Magic II and so on.  But when Elemental: War of Magic was released it was very buggy and even after the bugs were largely fixed, the gameplay wasn’t what we had envisioned it  being. We had cut or altered so many features from the original design to match what Kumquat could do – at the time – that we ended up with something that few were pleased with.

But work on Kumquat has continued non-stop and so in December it was decided that rather than continue the War of Magic line we would use the opportunity to create a new fantasy strategy game in the Elemental world that would succeed War of Magic and then just give that to everyone who bought War of Magic in 2010 it for free with steep discounts for anyone who buys it before it is released. That’s where Elemental: Fallen Enchantress comes in.

Elemental: Strategy Games

The effect of this is that we’ll eventually have War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and <Untitled third branch>.   This isn’t really very different than what we did with Galactic Civilizations II with the exception of the intention to have them be stand-alone and thus allowing the separate entities to continue to be potentially developed on their own path based on what players ask for.  If the strategy games were primarily multiplayer games, we obviously couldn’t do this because you’d be fragmenting the player base. But these are primarily single player games that happen to have (fairly crummy) multiplayer support.

One nice thing about this is that it gives us, and players, a lot more design flexibility.  Fallen Enchantress is a pretty radical departure from War of Magic. Based on what I’m seeing, I suspect most people will prefer that by far to War of Magic but only time will tell. But in any event, we will be making a v1.3 of War of Magic that will be on its own code branch.

As a game developer, I can tell you that this is pretty exciting stuff.  Consider the challenges other strategy game franchises have. Some players would have liked to see Civilization V be more along the lines of Civilization IV. Others would have preferred it to be far more complex and others would have preferred to have it streamlined. 

Elemental: RPG games

Now, as some people may recall, after War of Magic’s difficult launch, we had to re-evaluate our staffing levels and reorganize. This meant some painful layoffs back last Fall which came from people slated for the RPG title.  After War of Magic, it was recognized that the game studio was being run like a hobby and not as an engineering process like our enterprise software unit. This meant we needed to bring in full-time designers and full-time project managers onto the studio.  Thus, the second studio team, designated for the Elemental: RPG, got largely zapped. This year we will begin to reconstitute this team as we bring in a lead studio developer and some senior developers to help ensure that we don’t have another War of Magic episode.

The Mod Layer

As some people may remember, I was planning to take a sabbatical last year. Clearly that didn’t happen.  I am still planning to do this sometime early this year. With Kael and Jon Shafer here now, I am comfortable that the games unit won’t need me to intervene.  This will let me create what I’ve creatively named “Mod Layer”. The idea is to create a piece of middleware between Kumquat and future games that would allow people to make games using mostly Python.  I’ve started the planning part of this with our DesktopX lead developer so that we can use Expression Blend to create “objects”, and then manipulate them via Python and render them in Kumquat. This way, modders can easily create a wide assortment of games that are either 2D or 3D and potentially portable to (at the very least) Xbox Live Arcade and Windows Phone (though I’d like to also do iOS but Xcode is the devil still so I may ask some Stardockians to make that part for me <g>).

With the recent launch of Elemental: War of Magic, we now have the engine we need to start bringing the pieces together.

It's amazing how much has changed since we started the project.  Our radical concept of people playing a game "for free" but being able to pay for additional content has become much more mainstream and is now called "Free to Play".

We don't have any due dates yet but things are moving forward.

Greetings!

I'm going to put together a better preview soon but v1.2 is supposed to go into beta tomorrow. 

I can tell you, I think people are going to be pretty happy.  While v1.1 had a huge change log, v1.2 has a huge one too but in less obvious ways than v1.1. 

Here are some of the things i've been noticing:

1. The memory usage is dramatically lower. Hopefully, users who run out of memory will be far fewer than in previous versions.  This is an area that will be a constant battle since I see it as our job to push the map sizes and such as far up as we possibly can. So the smarter we use memory, the bigger the worlds.

2. There's a lot of little polish things. Things that have bugged me for awhile but seem to have been taken care of with this version. You'll see what I mean pretty quickly.

3. There's been work to tactical battles. The AI is using magic in battles and seems to be somewhat smarter.  I wish I had time to take this part of the AI over but Charles is doing a great job here and hopefully people will start noticing.

4. Performance is snappier. I can't tell you why, but it just seems to be there.

I haven't looked at balancing and such, I've been working on regular "Stardock stuff" and not the game this month but wanted to give you guys a quick report on what I'd seen this week.

I play MP online and I hate to say it but it sometimes brings out the worst in me. I am a big believer in being a good sport but if someone’s being nasty enough online and they’re winning, I know how to drag it out a very…very…long time.

One of the challenges we’ve had in War of Magic has been making the world interesting.

On the one hand, you want a world that looks ruined. But on the other hand, you don’t want a world that looks boring. 

During the betas of War of Magic, we had rivers in the world. Unfortunately, they looked horrendous because they couldn’t easily change the way they looked based on the morphing terrain system.

For those of you not familiar with Elemental, in War of Magic, the terrain is totally morphable. It doesn’t just change shape but changes texture and such. We couldn’t get the rivers to look satisfying with this system and took them out. Unfortunately, this only made the world look even more uninteresting to players.

One thing we could/should have done was have paths and roads right from the start.

In Fallen Enchantress, a major effort is being put in to have truly randomized landmasses.  In War of Magic, the worlds are randomly generated but the land masses are not. Part of this was an issue of how long it takes to generate land (anyone who’s ever coded fractal code knows what I mean). It’s certainly not undoable. Civilization does it and there are some freeware tools that can do it as well. It just takes time and optimization (i.e. budget) which has been allocated for Fallen Enchantress so that we can get our roads, rivers, and randomly generated land masses.  For us, the challenge isn’t to create randomly generated maps (the editor does it already) but to make them fun and interesting and pretty (hence no rivers in War of Magic).

As War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress diverge, it’ll be interesting to see how different they end up being in the long-run because War of Magic will have its own source tree and continue to evolve on its own while Fallen Enchantress has its own path as well. 

You hear about executive producers sending “notes” down to the director or producer of a movie.  That’s what I’m doing these days. “Maybe we should have robots in this scene instead of a dragon?” I’m leaving the dream.

I assume a lot of people read these journals because they like seeing what happens at a game company that they would normally not get to find out about because most game companies these days are publicly held and thus there’s a strict PR leash on everyone. So today I’m going to outline to you what a medium sized game production looks like in terms or organization.

I’m also going to try to show those of you who are aspiring game developers some of the things to look out for that can lead to disaster.

A Stardock Game Org Chart

First, let’s look at the general Stardock game project org-chart.

Stardock Entertainment Model

It looks huge but many of these spots are occupied by 1 person. In fact, some people wear multiple hats in here.  For instance, our art lead also does all the UI. Kael is the Project Manager and also the Design Lead.

The object is to find the right balance between maximizing your “resources” usage (people) and the overall output. That is, sometimes, it’s fine for someone to wear more than one hat – it’s often preferable. The challenge is to find out when they are wearing too many.

Sometimes, you end up having little choice but to stretch people thin. That’s where “crunch” time comes in. It’s when you’re asking people to do far more than they really should be expected to do. Crunch time occurs because someone – usually management – screwed up.

Now, if you look at the titles listed in the chart above, you’ll notice that they don’t sound that gamey.  For marketing, we try to translate our software engineering titles into something that remotely conforms with industry norms such as:

Product Manager = Executive Producer & Lead Designer

Project Manager = Producer & Designer

And so on.

Other Org Charts

Other companies do it differently. At Gas Powered Games, the Lead Designer is on a separate track from the Project Manager. This has some advantages in that the designer doesn’t have to be a software engineer or project manager. With larger teams, you really do need someone with a background in project management to run the show.  Gas Powered Games teams tend to have 30 or more people on it. Hence, finding someone who is both a game designer and someone capable of managing that many resources would be very difficult.

Stardock teams tend to be much smaller. Historically, our game teams are 10 or so people. Elemental: War of Magic  got to be about double that and that’s one of the reasons it got into trouble.

For the first 2.5 years of Elemental’s development the org chart looked like this:

I wore two hats. Product Manager and AI. 

My job was oversee the overall product and provide AI.  Unfortunately, during a good chunk of this, I got diverted to help out another project that was struggling for several months. This turned out to have been a fatal decision – I didn’t assign someone else to take over for me while I was gone.

When I finally got back into the thick of things, it was clear that I needed to add more hats since we couldn’t readily bring in people easily (one of the downsides of being in Michigan, I can’t just go up the local Digipen and get people).

By the time War of Magic shipped, it looked like this:

With the benefit of hindsight and common sense, that’s too many hats (the orange spots). 

Each new hat has its own unique story behind it (Marketing Manager left the company, The printing deadline got changed by a month and I type faster than anyone else, our Producer’s wife was having a baby and could no longer put in the time necessary, the lead developer was having health problems, the tile creation (part of concept) was far behind, etc.). But in the end, I had assigned myself across the whole project. If you’re a new game developer, you may think you can do everyone else’s job. Maybe you can. But you shouldn’t. If you’re the one who gets to decide the game is “ready for release” you shouldn’t be too involved in the parts that determine whether it actually is ready for release. You can get way too close. This is a very very common problem in small software studios. One we knew about but after a shelf of Editor’s Choice Awards, you start to think the rules of software engineering no longer apply.

This is why, if you’re an aspiring game developer, that you should never forget, even for a second, that making a game is an exercise in software engineering  -- and has to be treated as such.  None of the above hat acquisitions occurred overnight. Only gradually, does one realize that people were taking over more and more spots.  Our Art Lead, for example, had taken over all UI and was involved in a lot of the design (XML) implementation. Our Engine lead and I were doing debugging scenarios, etc.  I cannot overstate just how talented our staff here is.  It’s the thing that comes up all the time when people visit us – you did THIS with this few people? It gets dangerously tempting to forget that such a team has any limits at all.

I’m friends with “Chantz”, the guy Atari sent in to try to rescue Master of Orion 3 and we have talked a lot over the years about this kind of thing. Beware of the combination of the phrase “I can do it” and also being the guy who gets to evaluate whether they can actually do it. The guy who says “I can do it” and the guy who gets to determine whether they really can do it should never be the same guy.  Because sometimes, you really can’t do it no matter how sure you are that you can. Fatigue, overconfidence, external factors can all weigh in to create a fractured evaluation of a given project.

If it’s a team of a half dozen guys, you can wear a lot of hats. But as the scope of the project gets bigger, you have to be careful because those hats start to get really really big.

Process Matters

This is why delaying a project is pointless if the process is broken. If the process is broken, the result will be broken. Time isn’t the issue in such a case.  This was one of the principle reorg challenges we went through this Fall. Hiring very talented people to fill in some of these key roles.  The biggest piece of advice I can give to game start-ups is this, make sure you separate the business decision makers from the development decision makers. 

I hope you guys find this interesting and useful.

As some of you know, I’m a kook. As I get more time, I intend to indulge in this further but with life being so busy, I only get to do the smash and grab type of kookiness.

This past year I got into supplements and I’ve managed to stick with that. 

The big ones I recommend are:

1. CQ10 if you’re on a Statin drug (which I’m on to control cholesterol). These reduce those general “aches and pains” people get as they get older.

2. Fish oil pills in general. These just generally reduce inflammation.

3. Multi-vitamin.

Now, I take a lot more than these 3 but I cannot verify with certainty that they do something beyond give me expensive pee.

I take two prescription drugs that most definitely make a difference.

The first is LexaPro. This is a fairly commonly prescribed anti-depressant. In my case, they make me less irritable.  I’m probably no more irritable than the average person but because I run a company it is important to me that I am … well, nice.  I’ve heard stories about Steve Jobs being nasty to people. That’s probably how I’d be. I don’t have a lot of patience and can be pretty irritable.  This helps a great deal with that.  This is one that a lot of people would benefit from.

The second is Wellbutrin. This one is a new one that I’ve started taking temporarily since this Fall.  I kind of wrecked my health a bit over the Summer with one of our game projects. I worked over 100 hours a week over the Summer when I had to take over most of the key functions of the project and it still ended up being a failure on release. This has the effect of handling the post-release effects that I expect to reduce and eliminate by the end of this year.  But I recommend this to those who are experiencing mild to significant depression. It’s only useful if you’re low on serotonin – which I am.  Otherwise it can have some nasty effects.

There’s still a fairly significant stigma for people taking medications that are related to depression. That’s a shame since it can really improve life quality.  If you have any questions feel free to talk here.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a creature of the Internet. Some people are “private people”. I’m not. I like sharing stuff with other people because, frankly, I do believe that people are inherently good.

I believe this because I’m a believer of natural selection. People who can’t play well with others have tended not to be as likely to pass on their genes. There are clearly exceptions to that but all in all, most people I interact with fall well into the “good” category.

Over the years I’ve found out what I’m good at: Business.

At the same time, I know what I like to do: Software and game design.

For awhile, I held the conceit that I was pretty decent at game design. But since hiring Derek (Kael) Paxton and Jon Shafer, I’ve come to realize that my skills at a game designer are much like my skills at graphics design or software development – I can do it in a pinch but I’m out of my league compared to a specialist.

It’s a bit of a bummer.

Actually, it’s a lot of a bummer.  I’m a generalist. I can graphics design, I can code, I can write up business plan, I can write a contract, I can manage people, etc.  But I’m no where near as good as people who are specialized in a given area.

I have two programs that we make that should be on every computer but aren’t.  Why that is remains a mystery to me. Poor marketing? Maybe.  I am not sure.

Those two programs are:

1. DeskScapes (www.stardock.com/products/deskskapes) which gives your Windows PC animated wallpaper. I love this program. I have a little cottage running in the background with snow falling. I love it.

2. WindowFX 4 (www.stardock.com/products/windowfx) which lets you get a lot more usability out of Windows. This one is a harder program to explain other than to say that every feature in this program should have been part of Windows in the first place.

Quick video:

http://screencast.com/t/On8vqDPDu