At last we're being unchained by our marketing masters to start being able to publicly speak about Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy.

We (and by we I mean Ironclad and Stardock) can't talk about all the other cool stuff that's been happening behind the scenes. Mainly, it's because we're afraid of our PR manager Stephanie (if you knew her, you'd be afraid too).

But as I type, Blair at Ironclad has her distracted talking about something or other so I'm free to write here to tell you a little bit about what's going on. 

So...

Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy.  What's the idea here?

The idea is to have a secondary way to win the game other through sheer conquest.  In the current diplomatic system, AI players give "missions" to players.  Human players can't do the same back.  

With Diplomacy, this system is being heavily revamped with a new technology tree. The technology tree could be views as a diplomatic arms race because diplomacy includes espionage and counter-espionage in there. How far it goes will depend largely on the beta testers and their preferences.

Then there's the balance and new game modes. We'll be putting our head together this week to see what can reasonably be put into a $9.95 micro expansion.  But balance and tweaks you guys would like to see in Diplomacy you can freely post them here and we'll make sure to look at them.

There's also a whole new diplomacy system that lets players have a much more tactical view of why your relations are what with a given player. If you've ever played Civilization IV you can see some of the inspiration. The idea though is that relations shouldn't involve excessive guess work.

The official season has now officially started though for Diplomacy.  

Those of you with Demigod have priority access to the Ready to Play beta. Highly recommended you sign up.

https://www.stardock.com/products/readytoplay/

 

Back when I was in college when I first started Stardock to help pay for school, I never would have guessed how much money is spent on useless crap just to have a business that deals with consumers.

Here’s some stuff that we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on that I think a lot of people would be shocked about.

#1. LAWYERS.  I’ve been in a number of lawsuits over the years.  When I was in college (15 years ago), I’d never even met a lawyer.  Now, 15 years later we spent well into the 6 figure range every year on lawyers.  Why? Because nearly every day, someone threatens to sue us over some item or other. Occasionally we get sued for something.

The most obnoxious lawsuit I’ve ever been in (that I’m still bitter about to this day) was with Entrepreneur Media who sued us because we made a game called Entrepreneur and they believed that they owned the name Entrepreneur in all forms.  We ended up settling because, well, 10 years ago, we couldn’t afford the lawsuit.  If it happened today, well, it would have been a different story for them.

But every couple of weeks I get a summary of the various legal work that went in. Everything from company X arguing about a trademark, patent, or whatever that I’d never heard of to some user saying that they should get paid for “lost time” because a given program or game didn’t work the way they thought it would.  Then there’s the people who claim that a given program or game “damaged” their computer and want compensation.

We tend to take a hard line on that kind of thing (I’d rather pay lawyers to fight something than to give in on some frivolous or baseless thing but it’s expensive).

#2 COMPLIANCE.  When we were smaller, this wasn’t a big deal. But once you hit the magical 50 employees, all kinds of obnoxious state and federal regulations come in that serve no use other than to drive up costs. 

As I watch the healthcare debate and see the vilification of insurance companies, I have to wonder how many people realize that a lot of that cost is due to state and federal regulations. Things like “tort reform” get mentioned a lot (which would help – see #1) but time spent complying with the government has always struck me as very wasteful. I mean, we make computer software that we sell. How much regulation hassle is there? As soon as you sell a product or service, the government is involved in a big way.

#3 EMPLOYEES.  Of course, if you’re going to hire people, there’s going to challenges there. That’s not a surprise.  What is a surprise is just how much time gets expended on “employee issues”.  Ones perspective on a whole range of issues changes dramatically once you’re hiring and firing people as well as simply managing people. 

Let’s face it, we humans are complicated. Each of us has our own “issues”.  Like I said, it’s not a surprise that there are these issues. We can, in the academic sense “imagine” the kind of junk people have to deal with. But there is no substituting real world experience with it.

That’s why companies, even small ones, end up having to hire a HR manager (Human Resources).  There’s always someone who just can’t manage to wake up in the morning or someone who’s “just going through a tough time”, someone who “broke up with their boyfriend”, and so on.  There’s always something.

When you’re a small company, there’s a lot of flexibility. But once again, once you hit that magical 50 employee threshold, the government gets involved and is there to “protect” employees from us evil, money grubbing capitalists who might want to find out during an interview whether a potential employee is “trying to have a baby” or has a medical condition that requires them to miss a lot of work. Because you can’t ask those kinds of questions because, “it’s none of our business”.

 

Anyway, none of this is meant as a complaint of running a business. Rather, it is all interesting stuff that someone who never intended on starting a business but accidentally got into it has learned on the journey.

Too often people only hear one side of these issues without really considering the ramifications of “solutions” to problems in the work force.

So as some of you know, Demigod v1.2 is in private beta.  On other games that we have published, such betas have been available to the public but with Demigod, this tends to split the MP community.

So here is where things are at:

Replays.  These basically work but need some polish and some additional bug fixing.  We are going to try to release this feature along with accumulated fixes and tweaks in the next few days.

Now, before I go further I want to point out that I get estimates from the teams and I relay them to you. Some people in the community take a missed date as me “lying”. We’re not lying, we’re simply trying our best relay to players what we’ve been told.

Modding. Modding is another feature that is pretty far along. The next update is likely to be called v1.19 and won’t include the modding because more polish and security needs to be added to the system prior to it being made available to the public.

Balance, Fixes, etc. I’m not as up on what’s happening on that end. Some people on the forums say the game “crashes” on them a lot.  The big question we have is what is different about those machines versus everyone else’s?  I play every day online and it doesn’t crash for me (i.e. the infamous “works on my machine”).  Luckily, plenty of users have sent us crash reports and so a lot of work has gone into addressing this.  With any luck, the next update will include these fixes.

The New Demigods

The two new free Demigods are being worked on. The art assets appear done but they still have to be scripted, tested, and hooked up.  I had hoped to see these by the end of August in time for PAX but as with many things in game development, things can take longer than expected.

Ready to Play

The beta for this is rolling out today.  It’s going to a select group of beta testers first and will expand from there was we gauge the robustness of the backend once it’s out in the wild.  This will be a big deal for Demigod players since there’s hundreds of thousands of Demigod players out there but getting them together in a fun experience online with what is in the game is not always as easy as we’d like.

Future of Journal entries

I don’t plan to stop making journal entries but I do plan to stop letting people comment on them. Simply put, it’s too aggravating dealing with trolls so it was either blocking comments or just not creating journals.  The phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” can only be said so many times. 

There are people out there, particularly from certain competitive communities, that clearly have a different vision of what Demigod is or should be (i.e. a clone of some other game).  As someone who plays (and gets crushed) online every day, I love Demigod. It’s a great game. It works well, it’s well balanced and I know most people feel this way too.  But it’s not for everyone.  There are other games that are much better suited for hard core competition than Demigod.

We had much the same issues with Sins of a Solar Empire. If you read the forums at certain points, you would think that the fact that Sins of a Solar Empire isn’t designed for the “competitive scene” somehow meant the game was doomed.  I can also say, right now, that those people who are hoping Elemental will be targeting the competitive scene will be disappointed as well.  Our job is to make games that are FUN to play in their own right.  In that, Demigod succeeds, spectacularly.

There are few games out there that you can get a game going on the LAN with a bunch of buddies and be able to get them up to speed in a short amount of time. I.e. the counterstrike of MP.  It was never our intent to have Demigod be a game that would require an hour or more of time to show people the basics of the game. The whole point is that it’s fun within minutes of sitting down and playing it.  The skill (as I’ve learned the hard way online <g>) is subtle. Knowing which parts of a given arena to control or how to “build” your Demigod for a particular situation or a particular team. 

Future of the Demigod forums

One of the things we’re going to become more assertive about is behavior on the forums.  We have an access group called “visitor”.  People with that access cannot post or comment.  Those users aren’t “banned” they simply don’t get to participate on the forums.

One of the most commonly requested things we got at PAX from Demigod players was that we get rid of the toxic users on the forums more aggressively. This is something I agree with and so we’ll be more vigorously policing the forums. If you are angry at the world or can’t control your hatred of another person, the game, GPG, Stardock, ducks, or whatever there are plenty of forums out there that will cater to that but not our forums.

The Future of Demigod itself

We’ve said this before but it’s worth saying again, from Stardock and GPG’s perspective, Demigod is a long-term thing for us.  We’re very happy with the game and we plan to support it and enhance it for the long term.  The pacing of its evolution may not always be to the liking of some users but as we develop new things for other games, we’ll find ways to bring it back to Demigod as long as we think there’s sufficient demand for it.  Things like Clan Wars and the like will make their way in from Elemental or other projects (for example) as long as people still want them. 

But at the same time, we reserve the right to alter course based on our perception of what people want. So if the consensus of the community is they want feature X then we might do feature X and put feature Y on the back burner (which is what happened explicitly with clan wars versus modding). I’ve seen users say “They promised feature Y!!! Where is it?” without taking into consideration that feature X came up as a higher demand feature and was given priority.

In the meantime, I’ll see you guys online. I have games up nearly every night now as “Frogboy’s 3 on 3 fun!”.  Feel free to join me. I only win 40% of the time so I’m not that good but it is almost always a lot of fun for all.

In Galactic Civilizations, we had minor races which players had relatively little control over their existence.  In Elemental, 32 players will be the maximum number of major factions that the game will start out with but that doesn’t take into account of minor factions and vassals.

In Elemental, one of your abilities will be the governing ability. The more cities under you control, the more overhead cost there is to run your ever growing kingdom. At some point, it may become advisable to turn some cities into vassals. A vassal state is a city (or group of cities) that is originally founded by the player but has been made independent by that player. It becomes its own independent faction controlled by the AI. Initially, as a vassal, it is allied to you. But being independent, all bets are off of what happens in the future. It may join up with someone else, combine up with other vassals to form a new kingdom, or even go on its own to try to become a major faction in its own right through a path of conquest.

One could picture a large game where there might be dozens of vassals who form ever changing alliances throughout the game.

A year ago if someone would have told me that Impulse would have become nearly as popular as it has I wouldn’t have believed it.  The growth of digital distribution has been explosive across the board.

Impulse Phase IV, launched today, is a major overhaul for the popular digital distribution platform in more ways than one.

First, there is the client itself.  While some users have requested more visual options (like darker backgrounds and such which are in the works), the big change with the Impulse client is performance.

A year ago, developer Stardock had to have a “fast load” option in order for the pokey client to load at a reasonable level. It did this by having part of itself launch on start-up which was objected to (rightly so) by many users.  Fast-forward a year and Impulse loads quickly and uses very little memory.  Even when web controls are used, the amount of memory used is still far less than many commonly used programs as the screenshot above makes apparent.

In addition, a year ago Impulse’s content included basically Stardock’s plus a handful of indies.  Now, a year later pretty much every major player in the PC game market is on Impulse.  This week EA’s flagship titles go up and most new games arrive on Impulse at the same time as anywhere else with its prices being typically lower and its download speeds being higher than elsewhere.

A year after launch, Impulse now boasts most of the top games at launch day and supports applications and utilities as well.

The original Impulse store was…painful.  The new one allows per category featuring.

The new store catalog is quick to browse

Now, that isn’t to say that Impulse represents perfection.  There are still several things that need to be added in my view to Impulse:

1. For Gamers. Ready to Play needs to get out there as soon as possible.  Users who go to http://readytoplay.stardock.com and sign on for the beta which will start getting out there in the next few days.  However, Stardock does not intend to bundle Ready to Play with the Impulse client at this time in order to keep the base download size of the package as small as possible.

2. Community Features. These remain an area Stardock will need to focus more on if it hopes to see it be more competitive with entrenched players like Steam.  That is, groups, clans, developer support features, third-party support for Achievements, rankings, and match making are all things Impulse needs to improve on.  Still, Phase IV of Impulse sets up a good foundation to get there.

 
Impulse’s Common Virtual Platform (CVP) supports achievements, rankings, and match-making but it isn’t expected to be made available to third-party developers until this Winter. Since it’s .NET based, developers can support it with virtually no code changes to their games. But it’s not out yet for third parties so it’s academic.

 

3. Catalog. Catalog. Catalog. While Impulse has done a good job in catching up to other players in this space in terms of getting new third-party content, there’s a huge back catalog that Stardock needs to get onto Impulse to make it compelling.

Right now, Impulse’s biggest advantages remain very “bread and butter” (i.e. boring): Stuff on it tends to be cheaper, its download speeds higher, and  you don’t have to have it running to play your game. 

The last part above is going to be a defining feature.  While Impulse tries to componentized itself (with a separate tray application and Ready to Play) other players are increasingly putting more and more into a single ubiquitous client. Both strategies have their advantages and disadvantages and it will be interesting to see how that plays out.

Of course, the real winner in all this have been the gamers. Anyone who has purchased a game in one of the “weekend sales” online can attest to the importance of competition.

Last week at PAX I demonstrated a new free program coming from Stardock called Ready to Play.

During my demo I start with “I am sure I’m the only person who has ever encountered a mean person on the Internet…”

Of course, most people have run into people on-line who are obnoxious or griefers and such.  Ready to Play is designed to alleviate that issue by letting people create gaming profiles of themselves.

Here’s how it works:

Users enter in data like how old they are, how competitive they are, what they value in gaming the most, and a bunch of other data.  Then, it will take that data and generate a list of “recommended” friends, these are people who have similar gaming profiles.

For example, I, as a father of 3, 38 years old with a very scarce amount of free time have very different priorities when it comes to playing online than a 15 year old.  Nothing wrong with 15 year old gamers at all. But if I want to get a quick game of say Demigod or L4D or Rise of Legends in, then my best case of getting a fun game going is to find people to play with who have similar gaming expectations in mind.

Once you’ve set up your profile you see a screen like this:

Read to Play also supports traditional “Friends” lists and indeed you can use your existing Impulse Friends with this seamlessly (Demigod’s built in Friends handling is going to be updated to make use of Ready to Play for v1.2).  But in addition, you will also have the Recommended Friends too.  Now, you can always block those people if you run into someone who you don’t like.

 

But when you’re ready to play, you pick the game you want to play from the list then pick who you want to broadcast to (by default, it’ll be everyone who has the game that is on your list).

Users who have Ready to Play running and are opted in to be broadcast to will get a small dialog in the bottom corner that looks like this. If they choose join they go here.

 

This pre-game chat window lets players set up what map they want to play, what password they want to use to get into the game, etc.

The results have been particularly spectacular internally when played with games whose persistent online communities have diminished over time.

Ready to Play supports any PC game. It will automatically pick up games on Impulse and soon from Games Explorer, Steam, and elsewhere.

If you want to sign up for the beta go to www.stardock.com/products/readytoplay

 

Greetings!

The Penny Arcade Expo is the best game related trade show I go to each year. The reason I say that is that as a gamer, I really like hanging out with other gamers to see what they think of things.

 

Beatles: Rock Band looks like it’s going to be crazy popular. I am probably one of the few people who haven’t gotten into Guitar Hero or Rock Band but this might make me take the plunge.

I got to play some Diablo 3 at the show and was just blown away at the continued dominance of Blizzard in terms of crafting games to perfection.

Starcraft 2 was another game people could sit down and play.  This is a game that is going to own the RTS genre for some time I think as again, Blizzard demonstrates why it’s the world’s greatest game developer at PAX.

 

At the risk of being biased, I think Elemental was one of the more talked about games of the show too based on Twitter traffic from PAX.  Stardock’s upcoming fantasy strategy game isn’t due out until next year but was playable at the show.  Stardock also showed off some Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy at the show as well.

Dragon Age: Origins had a super cool booth with a huge dragon.  My gripe with this, however, was that it was shown behind closed doors.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good screenshot of Star Trek Online so I put up one I took from their booth. It looks extremely fun.

 

Another thing that was surprisingly popular at the show was Ready to Play. It’s a new program set to go out into beta this week that lets people quickly find other people of like mind to play a given game. Someone described it as real-time eHarmony for gamers. 

 

Pirates of the Burning Sea had one of the coolest booths. They assembled their own pirate ship. Arrrgh!

Even Tru Blood was there!

Coming home is so hard (a view from the plane)

To say we were pleased with the reaction Elemental got at the Penny Arcade Expo would be an understatement.  Despite the game only being in alpha, users seemed to really like the direction we’re heading.

Some of the features that really got people going included:

Family Trees and Succession.  That is, one of the strategies for victory is to quietly arrange marriages so that your family is in the path of succession when sovereigns start getting killed.  In Galactic Civilizations, succession often seemed random (it wasn’t but it came across that way). So the Arceans would “surrender” to the Thalan even though you had been helping the Arceans.  In Elemental, if a sovereign surrenders (goes into exile) his kingdom might be divided up amongst heirs belonging to the various houses.

 

The planned number of players allowed in a game being 32. We only plan to have 12 “canon” factions just like in Galactic Civilizations.  But we also plan on letting people create their own (which we think will be typical).  If you’ve ever played Master of Magic or Master of Orion, you probably have an inkling of the kind of race customization we have in mind. 

 

The consequences of magic on strategy. Because of the engine, we plan on letting people alter the world a great deal. Later in the game, the arms race on magic will become increasingly apparent.

 

Modding. People at PAX were able to see the modding tools first hand. Hearing us talking about modding is one thing, seeing highly polished, functional modding tools built into the game long before the game is released lets people see just how serious we are about letting people create their own worlds and share their creations with others.

 

Now, all that said, the beta, which is due out in the next 2 weeks, is NOT going to be fun.  Let me reiterate that: IT WILL NOT BE FUN. IT WILL BE HORRIBLE. WE ARE TURNING OFF THE MAIN GRAPHICS ENGINE.

 

BELOW ARE THINGS YOU WILL NOT SEE IN BETA 1 OF ELEMENTAL:

 

This is the built in modding tool. You take these, classify it, and then share it on the Internet within the game. Then, players can optionally have these mods inserted into their games.

BETA 1 will not have the magic system in it. At least, not until November.

 

The graphics engine in Elemental will not be enabled until January.  Why? Because if the game is good it should be able to be fun without super good graphics.