Lots of cool stuff going on around here.

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes 1.6 is due out in April and there will be a new DLC released shortly after that.  It involves spouses. That’s all I’ll say.

Legendary Heroes 2.0

Also, as some of you may have heard, Legendary Heroes 2.0 has been approved and budgeted. This will be a free update of some significance.  I don’t have a due date for it yet but it does have some interesting changes in it including ZOC for monster lairs and possibly some changes with regards to the way champion inventory is handled. 

Other things on our “want” list for Legendary Heroes 2.0 include:

• Updated diplomacy options to help build longer term relations
• More performance boosts (we’re working on redoing the way trees are handled)
• Some tweaks to the way magic is done
• More effective alliance handling (this is something we really want to see)
• Some changes to the way the Spell of Making is handled

That’s just a bit of it.

Obviously, this all boils down to having enough revenue to pay for it.  The numbers for LH are quite promising.  In January, about half of LH’s revenue came from the DLC. So that’s a good sign.

Next DLC

Like I mentioned, we have new DLC coming out next month. It’s already in QA.  Kael has gone pretty crazy with it.  Anyone from the Civ IV world knows the crazy stuff Kael can do so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. But it’s pretty neat.

But AFTER that one I have two questions I’d like to get your views on:

1. How OFTEN do you want to see new DLC?  (Monthly, Quarterly, Every couple months, etc.)

2. What would you like to see our NEXT DLC be?

a. Stamps pack (for more random map generation interest)

b. More tactical battles maps

c. More magical spells

d. New factions

e. More loot

f. More quests

g. Something else (if it involves writing c++ code, it’s not DLC so has to be content that is downloadable).

Other sneak peeks…

Stay tuned!

First off, for those of you not familiar with our forum structure, I go by 2 handles: Draginol and Frogboy.  Draginol came from the old idea that when I posted from home, I’d use a different handle. Bah. Now I never get them straight.

Anyway, I need your help. 

As concisely as possible, can you list the things in Legendary Heroes that you find the most FUN.  Not unique. Not stand-out. But FUN. Can be something that you love in many games.

After a few posts, I’ll list my own favorites but I really want to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks!

I’m going to do a follow up article soon on how I almost killed myself with cough suppressants.  Long story short, I came down with a bad cold in January but I’ve been traveling like crazy so to function, I just took a bunch of cough suppressants to control the cold.  Unfortunately, that led to a pretty severe case of bronchitis which has basically taken me out for the past 3 weeks.

Lots of stuff going on in the Elemental universe though.  An additional year of development effort on Legendary Heroes was approved in January. While we shouldn’t expect a bunch of updates on LH this year, there will be some across the board.

We also have something new in store which we’ll talk about more when it gets closer. 

There's a Steam sale this weekend for Fallen Enchantress (and now Legendary Heroes) which is bringing many thousands of new players into our community.

Please welcome them!

Clearly my offensiveness is a genetic condition.  Therefore, I have a disability and nothing is my fault.

Seriously though, here’s some fun my teenage son had with photoshop he sent me.

Top X rejected flavors for chips.

I won’t post the others he sent.  They’re unprintable…

Sometimes I’ll hear someone marvel at how amazing it is that humans have been able to adapt from hunting and gathering to the information age so well in just 10,000 years.  Of course “so well” is subjective.  In reality, as a species, we’re struggling with it. A lot.

Most of my friends who are, let’s say, economic peers of mine, suffer from a surprisingly consistent set of brain demons as I do.  The brain demons giveth and taketh.  I suspect many of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about.  Intelligence really can be a bitch.  I am still not convinced that the whole “getting out of the trees” thing was a good move for us.

If you’re reading this and are suffering, know you’re not alone.  You’re amongst friends here. You might even be surprised of how many of people you know are with you in struggling against afflictions that seem explicitly created to torment the 21st century human psyche.

Many people have dreamed of writing the great American novel.  Few people actually do it because, well, it’s a ton of work and even harder to get published.

These days, you can release your indie book on Amazon but don’t count on selling any copies. The age of publishing isn’t over, not by a long shot.  I’ve talked to many indie authors and I’ve yet to meet one whose book outsold Destiny’s Embers. Not because my book was better but because Random House was my publisher and they did a lot of work to make sure my book got well marketed and well distributed.

But being published can also come with a high price that most people don’t realize.  My manuscript for Destiny’s Embers came in at about 100,000 words.  Random House’s editors added over 30,000 words to it, mostly internal dialog for characters but also changes to the plot. 

Since my day job isn’t being an author, the changes to my book bothered me because even to this day, I don’t feel like it’s my book.  But that is the price that authors often face, if they lack literary clout, if they want to be published.  That’s not to say I don’t like how the book turned out, it’s just that it’s not the book I had dreamed and set out to write.

With the loss of physical retail stores, the clout of traditional publishers continues to decline. But publishers still matter.  Here are things to keep in mind:

1. Don’t let the publisher hijack your novel. By hijack I mean don’t let them change the story to the point that you don’t feel it’s not your novel.
2. A good publisher should provide good, quality editors who can help you find your voice and bring out the best in your story.  They should be the voice of sanity (“Hey, take out the love scene with the Orc, please…it’s not related to the story”)
3. The role of the publisher is to take your book and make sure it is read and enjoyed by as many people as possible. That means marketing, distribution, setting you up for interviews, PR, book tours, etc.
4. Don’t expect your first manuscript to be the final word on the topic. The manuscript is your raw vision of the story. A good publisher will help you find the core elements of your story and make them shine. 

So yesterday the art team gave me a tour of the new rendering technology being used for GalCIv III.  If you’ve been with us for many years, you know that I’m not a graphics guy.  I drew the original OS/2 version “art” myself with the built in OS/2 icon editor.  As you can imagine, that means I have only a little understanding of all the cool stuff they’re doing.

To me, I thought the GalCiv II ships looked pretty good. But the art team cringes when I say that.  I am intimately familiar with DirectX, Mantle, OpenGL and the other technical side of things. But I’m a lot less familiar with how different features affect the beautification of a game. So I’m just going to tell you some of the stuff in the engine and you tell me (And other clueless people like me) whether it’s cool or not…

GalCiv III 3D engine features

First off, the game will require DirectX 10 minimum.  Ships are made of many different types of materials which the player can control in the ship designer. The materials affect how light interacts with them.  The lighting in much truer in GalCiv III than in GalCiv II making the ships look more real (not real as in photo realistic but less like computer graphics, GalCiv III still has its own surreal art style).

The Ship Designer is expected to export your ship designs as FBX files which should pave the way for lots of interesting things being done to them outside of GalCiv.

The ships reflect what is around them.  So for instance, you can see the reflection of nebula and such on reflective surfaces.  They are also in the process of implementing diffused point lights which should result in ships “popping”  more on the screen because the light affects the ship much more realistically than traditional harsh directional lighting. 

Now, how much of this gets in by the Alpha remains to be seen.  Currently, my opinion is that the ships look better than GalCiv II but not spectacularly so but we have over a year to go on that aspect so by the time we ship, they should look amazing.

Was anyone here in the GalCiv II beta? Remember how sad the game looked? The alpha of GC3 will look far far better.

Derek (Kael) has been super busy with the general expansion of Stardock Entertainment over the past 3 years.  AS I type this, there are 7 concurrent game projects going on.  Back in 2008, I dreamt of having a second team.  Here we are, 6 years later with seven teams.  I’m writing this from the airplane on my way to visit one of the new studios (one that hasn’t been announced yet).

So what does that mean for fans of the Elemental universe?  The answer is, lots of good news.  While Galactic Civilizations III heads towards its March alpha, the Elemental team is hard at work on a new DLC pack for this Winter tentatively called “Monarchs” which will bring more channelers to the world for players to play with.  In addition, we expect to announce the third game in the Elemental fantasy universe this year.  It will be dramatically different from War of Magic or Fallen Enchantress.

Without giving too much away about the new game, which we expect to formally announce this Spring, its planned feature set includes:

• Radically different races (players won’t design units ala WOM/FE but in exchange each unit is custom crafted and visually stunning)
• Crafting (the player STARTS with the Forge of the Overlord and getting recipes and loot now mean being able to craft some really cool stuff)
• The player starts by choosing their sovereign and deciding what spell book he or she has. The more spell books of a particular type, the more likely the player will be able to use their lore to research rarer spells in that category.
• No tech tree. Instead, the available units are based on how you construct your cities.
• Each hero has his or her own unique talent tree (there won’t be a “Defender” class for instance) that players can then use to customize their heroes.
• Because of the stronger emphasis on magic, vastly more spells will be available strategically and tactically. Sovereign spells are available in every battle as your sovereign, thanks to the Forge of the Overlord, can “see” anything in the world that his/her units can see (as a result, your sovereign interacts with the world indirectly from the capital and doesn’t appear as a playable unit).

It’s been in development for awhile, prior to LH.  LH was originally supposed to be a minor expansion on FE but as you’ve probably gathered, we really love making these games.  The next update to LH is in the works, pathfinding improvements, performance and some other updates are scheduled.

Greetings and Happy New Years!

Over the years the time and effort to create quality skins has increased and so effective January 1, 2014, the royalty split between the skinner and WinCustomize is now 70% for the skinner and 30% for WinCustomize (it was previously a 50/50 split).  

We hope that this will the first of many positive improvements that WinCustomize will be seeing this year.

Cheers!