If you've ever worked on a game, you know that for 80% of the process, the game is little different from any other development endeavor. It's not "fun". You aren't "playing" the game, you are simply working on it in the hopes that it will be fun at some point.

Galactic Civilizations, for instance, was incredibly boring until the final months. We were starting to sweat it but then, like the flick of a switch, it came together and was very fun. Sins of a Solar Empire was extremely tedious until the last few months of development. But then, as players saw, it came together and started being awesome.

And so it's starting to come together with Demigod.  We still have a lot of work to go. But even with lots of features not enabled yet, I find myself enjoying myself playing just against the computer players in a 3 on 3 game (all AI except me).  I just love the various powers that the Demigods have, the items are really fun to mix and match.  I'd say it's about 60 days away from being at that point where, like Sins and GalCiv before it, Demigod gets the critical mass of "fun stuff" in that it starts to become a problem internally (i.e. where we have to limit "testing" to non work hours).

-Brad Wardell = Draginol = Frogboy.

More so than any game Stardock or GPG have done before, Demigod is truly unique in that it's such a radically different game from what we've done before.  While it has some simlarities for Defense of the Ancients, the strategic scope is significantly larger (as one would expect in a AAA stand alone title).

Here are 10 reasons why users may want to pre-order the game and get the beta:

#10 The game will include the usual multiplayer skirmishes most strategy games have, but Demigod will also have a persistent on-line tournament mode that is being co-developed by Stardock and Gas Powered Games.  We will definitely want to get people's input on this. If you ever played TA, especially on Boneyards you can get an idea of some of the things we're going for.

#9 Item ideas.  You build up your Demigods by purchasing items in the game to equip.  We've got a lot of items already but I suspect you guys will have some requests in this area.

#8 Map ideas. Demigod comes with multiple maps (arenas).  We will be looking for feedback on how to make these maps even better.  What would Total Annihilation have been without Painted Desert or Greenhaven for instance?

#7 Collector's Edition. Technically, the pre-order version of Demigod is the Collector's Edition which will come with extra stuff over the standard retail version.

#6 Assassins vs. Generals. The former is a bad ass. The latter is a strategic genius. Balancing the two will be quite a challenge and who better to do that than the players BEFORE the game is released.

#5 Multiplayer testing.  With Demigod, Stardock, GPG, and Ironclad are working together on a new type of multiplayer platform that, in theory, will allow people to play online without opening ports when it's done. I.e. it just "works". 

#4 Game Mechanic Tweaks.  How many times have you bought a game only to have it have some feature or game mechanic that really throws off the game for you? You can help make sure Demigod is the ideal game for you BEFORE it gets released.

#3 Tournament Achievements. One of the things we'd like to put in are features that give kudos, awards, achievements to players who have played a long while that show up in game.  The beta players will be the ones who help decide what those are and how they operate in game.

#2 Strategic Flow.  In Demigod, the map will have other objectives to take than simply wiping out the enemy's base or what have you.  We want to have a lot of depth in this department and who better to help mold this than players before the release?

#1 Richness of experience.  If any of you have played Galactic Civilizations, you know that one of the reasons why the game has been so popular is that the game presents a rich experience in terms of dialog, back story, bits of history here and there that show up during the game.  Beta testers will be major contributors in this regard just as they were in GalCiv.

We're only 4 weeks from the first beta (the compatibility beta).  Things are about to get very interesting...

The first beta of Demigod is looking to be on September 5th.  We wanted to do it at the end ofAugust but we're all going to be attending PAXX (Penny Arcade trade show) that week and we want to be here to help people get started.

Now, just so you know, the first beta we are intentionally removing a lot of gameplay elements just so that we can get people to focus on compatibility and performance.  We want this game to be about twice the performance as Supreme Commander had (a LOT of work has gone into lowering the hardware requirements).  Multiplayer in the initial beta will be LAN only but you'll be able to play against an AI player.

Once we have all that nailed down, we can add the actual gameplay elements, broaden the multiplayer, and go from there.

The initial inspiration for Demigod was heavily based on the Warcraft 3 mod, Defense of the Ancients. If you've never played it, Defense of the Ancients is an incredibly clever game concept in which players team up on on a single map choosing between many different heroes. How one customizes their hero makes all the difference.

Demigod works similarly in that you choose amongst several different heroes (your Demigods). Some heroes are called Generals whose strengths come from their ability to manipulate their minions and engage in larger scale strategy. Other heroes are called Assassins who are immensely powerful individuals whose strengths focus on just being massive butt kickers.

Defense of the Ancients could almost be described as a game where two rivers are flowing against each other. Each player is trying to get their river to make headway against their opponent's river until the flow enters their base. My analogy may not make sense unless you've played DotA. But if you have, you probably get my meaning.  Demigod does not play quite like that.

In Demigod you have a lot of strategic choices you have to make. Arenas have other elements that give one side or the other significant advantages. This means players have to choose often to give up some ground in order to gain longer term advantages. That is, there are certain parts of the Arena that you can control that give your side significant advantages. Hence, there are multiple strategic objectives.

The Demigod gains strength through experience, as they level up, the player can choose to strengthen different abilities or add new powers. Players can also use money to purchase items that give their side or their Demigod additional advantages. This is basically the same as was found in DotA.

So it's definitely fair to say that DotA served as inspiration for Demigod. But Demigod will ultimately be somewhat different in play style. Right now, myself, Chris Taylor, and Mike Marr are putting our combined design experiences together in trying to create a unique, innovative, and compelling strategy game experience.

More to come on this soon.

Wah.  I'm back from vacation and I don't want to be.  I still ended up working but it was beautiful there.

Below are some pictures from the trip.

Me on the phone driving the boat away from shore.

The boys getting ready to sweep the steps.

Dr, Melissa Clouthier: Mourning Michigan: How liberal policies are killing the state I love.

6 steps for dealing with liberal friends and family

Do you want to be friends or do you want to prove you're right? I'm not saying you should go along to get along, because I don't believe in doing that, but people get very sensitive about how little they know about politics. If you rub it in their faces or make them look like idiots, which incidentally, is what generally makes for a good blog post =D, it's going to upset them. It's one thing to do that to liberal bloggers or liberals in a comment section, whom you probably don't care about one way or the other, but it's another thing to do that to your friends and family. So, let them know you disagree, but don't make a huge issue out of it or humiliate them.

That's a tip I need to learn. I don't try to humiliate friends or family, I try to stay out of discussions on politics if I can with them. Most of my family is quite liberal but they also don't follow the issues very closely.

More on liberals and conservatives in relationships here

I'm on vacation officially though in reality according to my journal I still managed 30 hours last week here at the cottage. My online availability has been diminished a bit (i.e. not browsing the sites much).

Here some pictures from the trip.

In classic strategy games such as Total Annihilation and in Supreme Commander the player not only had their usual units but also had a commander -- a very powerful central unit that was particularly lethal and capable of doing many different things.

Demigod, in many respects, is the logical progression of this game mechanic.  In Demigod, players choose a hero to be their Demigod in a quest to becoming increasingly powerful.

In individual games that take place in arenas that, in my opinion, are a strategy gamer's panacea (even classic maps like Painted Desert in TA can't hold a candle to some of the cool arenas in Demigod), the Demigod will rise in level as he (or she) gains experience allowing for increasingly powerful abilities.

What is also cool is that outside these individual skirmishes these Demigods grow in power. This has some very important ramifications.  Besides making the single player experience much more interesting, it introduces a much better on-line experience.

Let me put it like this: Demigod is aiming to solve some of the most basic problems in on-line gaming: Because your Demigod gets better in a persistent universe, experienced players have an incentive to keep with their hero and its stats rather than "smurfing". 

Moreover, it creates a great deal of interesting match-making possibilities. Why not allow the option of someone who is really good at the game with a high level Demigod face off against 3 or 4 opponents online?  In Total Annihilation, I regularly would play against 4 or 5 players versus me and that was on a "level" playing field.  Of course, players can still opt to the traditional on-line skirmishes where everything starts on the same playing field. But with Demigod, players will have more options.

I am sure I'm not the only guy who remembers the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring (the movie) where Sauron is trashing Elven and human butt and thinking "ooh, I'd so like to be able to do that!"  In Demigod you are the Sauron.

For those of you interested in what my desktop looks like, I'm running Aero Frost with the "Think Green" weather gadget.

With Dell taking the Windows experience to the next level with the introduction of the Dell Dock, I've seen a lot of online buzz about it.  Most agree that the Dell Dock is really good but intermixed are a lot of Mac fans who use terms like "Mac rip off" or how it's a copy of the Mac dock.

Mac zealots have a long and glorious history of retroactively claiming pre-existing concepts as being invented by Apple.  For example, the modern "widget" (end user created applets that use Javascript) was not invented by Apple.  They also didn't first appear in Konfabulator either. They appeared in Stardock DesktopX years earlier. Apple zealots usually counter by arguing that things like desktop accessories from 1981 "invented" the concept (as if the average user was going to whip out small assembly language programs).

I think most rational people agree that the modern widget is a mini application that can be created by end users that are tied together with a high level scripting language (i.e. Yahoo Widgets, Dashboard, Sidebar Gadgets, DesktopX).  And DesktopX borrowed the concept from IBM's worksplace shell which in turn was inspired by prior art as well.

But the controversy over widgets is nothing compared to the claim that Apple somehow invented the concept of docks.  Even allowing for the history of NeXT with its side dock, the dock concept is ancient.

 Stardock, for example, has been doing "docks" since 1994.  Object Desktop for OS/2 included things like Tab LaunchPad and Control Center. You don't see Stardock fans complaining that every sidebar is a "rip off" of Control Center. And Control Center certainly didn't invent the concept of a side-based bar or dock either.

You would be hard pressed to find many companies that have been continuously producing a dock and a sidebar as long as Stardock has -- 14 consecutive years of development. I think it's fair to say that we weren't "inspired" by an Apple OS that wouldn't exist for 7 more years from the time we started doing this sort of thing.

Tab LaunchPad on OS/2 circa 1994

Stardock makes no claims of having invented the dock.  We called our first dock Tab LaunchPad because IBM itself had created a dock for OS/2 2.0:

IBM OS/2 LaunchPad circa 1992

But let's say you're a true die-hard Steve Jobs zealot and want to argue that NeXT "invented" the dock. You'd still be wrong as docks were part of Acorn computers from the early 80s.  The point, of course, isn't who invented the dock, the argument of course is whether companies like Stardock (who wrote the Dell Dock) were somehow ripping off or stealing or what have you from the MacOS dock and I think you can see why this is such an obnoxious and offensive argument - we've been making docks since before Apple had figured out how to do preemptive multitasking.

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words.  Here is a picture of what the Macintosh looked like in 1996 (System 7.5) along with a picture of Stardock Object Desktop in 1996:

vs.
Mac 1996 vs. Stardock Object Desktop 1996: Which desktop do you think more closely resembles today's modern desktop? Note that Object Desktop was written during the Windows 3.1 era.

Stardock doesn't run around claiming that it invented the modern desktop experience. We don't imply or assert that everyone else is "ripping us off". Some ideas are just obvious.

The Dell Dock represents the continuing evolution of the desktop experience. Like all improvements to the user experience, inspiration can be found everywhere. But when advocates of a company or an operating system try to lay exclusive claim to all such improvements, they diminish the hard work, innovation, and inventiveness by thousands of other people from around the world who often have worked in obscurity with little glory. It is bad enough that these innovators don't get credit they deserve, it's even worse when they are so often smeared as copying those who came after.

Other Pictures:

Dell Dock

Stardock ObjectDock

Stardock ObjectDock Plus (4 different docks)

Stardock Impulse Dock