Back by popular demand, Tom Francis of PC Gamer UK has begun writing a new epic diary of a Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor game.
The first one, released last year, was insanely good. This is an absolute must-read.
Check it out here:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=195920&site=pcg
We are back from PAX and what a week it was. PAX is definitely the best computer game trade show of its kind.
While there, Stardock, Gas Powered Games, and Ironclad showed off our latest and greatest and the teams got to know each other. We had a great time!
The Gamer's Bill of Rights, Demigod, Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment, and The Political Machine got a lot of attention.
Here are some scenes from the show...
Darth Vader approves of the Gamer's Bill of Rights...
Chris Taylor signs autographs
Blair and Craig (from Ironclad) demo Sins
Crowds watch Sins and Demigod get demoed
Chris Taylor (left) demos Demigod with Brad (Frogboy/Draginol) on the right with Brian Clair (Yarlen) standing right behind.
The Gamer's Bill of rights is a big hit at the show.
The Demigod station is very popular
Mike Mar (lead designer) demoes Demigod
The advent (Josie) at Pax.
The empire inspects Galactic Civilizations, recognizes Drengin threat.
Chris gets interviewed
Brad (Frogboy/Draginol) lives in fear of Karmagirl (for good reason)
Packing up to go
Stardock/Ironclad/GPG teams being silly and having fun.
So what do you do during your evenings? Me, I hunt around the various Stardock websites looking for problems. Yea, I have no life. Our sites and servers are growing and evolving so fast that we often miss things.
Here's what I found tonight... 
#1 CSS on Demigod journal messed up. Blog post the cause or something else?
#2 The Demigod pre-order page
Well first, we need to standardize on our description of Demigod.
Demigod is an action RTS. It can be played as part of a team but I would not use team in there.
Second, it's confusing to have on this page that you have to order it directly through Stardock/Impulse when it's on the Demigod page.
#3 Coming soon page: Demigod
I'd clean up the language here. While Demigod makes a great team game, players can play 1 on 1 just fine.
#4 Coming soon page
Probably should add some other programs to the coming soon page soon like the Sins expansion pack, Fences, and other stuff coming up in the near future.
#5 WinCustomize link on various product pages (like CursorFX) should take the user to the proper gallery and not the home page. They should also use the &mode=1 to eliminate the right bar.
Example: https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.aspx?libid=25&mode=1
Overall, the websites are looking in very good shape tonight.
This month we're going to put some extra effort to improve our forum experience. One of the big things is the move to a clustered server back end which should dramatically improve the performance of our sites.
Below is a bug report on some of the things I've run across on our forums recently.
#1 Number of users on the forums
The forum statistics don't make any sense to me. I know there's a lot more people on these forums than that because of the sheer number of responses. I'd like to see either this statistic be all forums combined or removed entirely as it's not really interesting stats.
#2 The editor
This is the editor I get. I think all users should get this rich editor too. Yea, it's possible to abuse it but I would rather err on the side of having a better forum experience.
#3 Quoting
In the stardock.com forum at least, when I quote something, I am still losing the carriage returns which is extremely annoying.
#4 Avatar images being weirdly sized
Some types of avatars aren't being resized correctly making the page look funny.
#5 Editing of comments
The forums are very inconsistent about editing a comment. I think the general rule should be that anyone should be able to edit a post within say 10 minutes of their original writing. Period.
#6 User Profiles with more info
Overall, the forums have come along nicely. If we can get the speed in forum commenting that you get when commenting on blogs, that would be a big step forward too.
I'm still not voting for McCain or Obama (I don't like either) but the behavior of Democrats thus far towards Palin has been so disgusting that I don't think they realize how much they alienate people.
The current plan is get beta 1 out near the end of the week.
What we are looking for is data on how well it performs on your machine, any incompatibilities you run into, any bugs you run into. We are not looking for game ideas at this point, that will come with beta 2. Obviously, feel free to post game ideas but beta 1 does not really resemble what the final game will be like in any major way.
Reporting feedback:
We will be in the #Demigod channel on IRC which you can reach from Impulse. You can type /join #demigod to get to it.
Good luck!
It was a good week at PAX as we got to show the pre-beta of Demigod to the world and let people play it multiplayer. Only a few more days until the engine test beta.
If you're not familiar with hamachi, you will want to download it for the beta 1 of Demigod if you want to play multiplayer.
https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp?lang=en
The first beta will be LAN only with support for AI playres (so you can pay single player too effectively). But we won't yet have true Internet play in unless you use Hamachi.
I write this from the plane on the way to Redmond which is where Gas Powered Games is located.
Normally, publishers and developers have very explicit division of labor on projects. The developer makes the game, the publisher takes that game and markets, distributes is, and supports it.
As people observed with Sins of a Solar Empire, you can get tremendous results when the developer and publisher combine their teams together into a single "big" team.
That means Gas Powered Games will be intimately involved in the marketing of Demigod and it means Stardock will be very involved during development. At GPG, I'll be sitting in the "bull pen" with the development team working on the game itself. And together, we will be able to tap into the combined team's resources to get things done much more quickly.
Of course, the crucial element that can't be forgotten is the public beta program. Here's how it works:
We get the first beta out to you sometime in the first week of September. The goal here is to just see how well the thing works on people's computers. It won't be anywhere nearly fully functional. But we'll rapidly be enabling features and getting feedback which we'll be able to address.
AI needs help? AI developers at Stardock (including myself) can help. Need more map elements? Let us know and we'll see who is available to help on that too.
Similarly, advertisements and promotions for the game will get posted here before they go live typically. Art work, ideas and concepts won't be from Stardock's marketing team alone but rather the Gas Powered Games development team as well as anyone else.
One of the reasons why the Sins of a Solar Empire ads came out so well is because Ironclad (the developer) was so involved in the actual creation of the ads. It also didn't hurt that we put out the ads on the forums before they went to print where fans could make suggestions on how the ads could be improved.
Right now, we're playing the internal beta. The part that we're most challenged by at present is how quickly we can implement the Hamachi-like multiplayer system so that players who don't know what router ports are and such won't have to worry about them anymore. The first beta won't have that in there (I'm not sure as yet how much, if any, multiplayer will be in the initial beta 1 engine test portion).
One other thing players may find interesting is that GPG and Stardock have nearly a full year of free updates planned for Demigod. While the single player portion of the game is very important, our hope is to make Demigod the preeminent multiplayer strategy game for tournaments and such since the actual game-play is supports a lot more team mechanics than the traditional Starcraft or even Supreme Commander model would.
We'll have a pre-beta 1 showing at PAX in Seattle this weekend. If you're in the Washington area, be sure to stop by the Penny Arcade Expo. Chris Taylor and I will be giving live demos.
-Brad Wardell = Frogboy = Draginol
The good news is that there will be a Galactic Civilizations III. The bad news is that it won't be out this decade.
Galactic Civilizations II v2.0 is currently in development but it's free for all players of the expansion packs. But that will serve as the code basis for any further GalCiv II updates.
Right now, the team is working on the "unnamed fantasy strategy game" sometimes called "not-MOM" (not Master of Magic). It's a totally new graphics engine that makes use of multi-core CPUs and GPUs but will still run fine on lower end hardware thanks to built-in detection that will determine "how much stuff" to display in real-time.
That game will go into public beta early next year and its release date will be largely based on player feedback. As many of you know, we are in the position of being able to keep working on our games until everyone's happy with them. Our non-game part of the company does so well that there's no pressure. We want to make it the best turn-based strategy game of all time.
THAT engine will be what serves as the basis of a future Galactic Civilizations III. That means GalCiv III will have features like tactical battles (as an option), multiplayer, more sophisticated planetary development, and much more.