Keep a close eye on the Stardock sites tomorrow…

Tomorrow, Stardock turns 20!

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

October 15, 2013.

I found this fairly dry looking site that goes over all kinds of interesting financial stats:

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com

It’s non-partisan (it’s non political, it’s a glorified spread sheet).

But it’s interesting to look at snap shots of what the federal government spents its money on.

Starting in 1800..

Pretty boring still…

..

and next…

The 16th amendment passes allowing for direct income taxes…

Holly shit! World War I + new amendment brings a ton of new money.

War is over but the spending is still much higher than it was.

1929, the year the great depression starts.

So 4 years later, we’ve doubled our spending, no doubt to stimulate the economy.  The depression must have ended in 1934 then right? Because, look at that massive stimulus.

No. Holy cow, we spend even more. And nowa new item, for the first time ever, has been added: Welfare.

Growing and growing.  Note that we are now almost 3X the spending we were when the stock market crashed in 1929. That’s an incredible federal stimulus program. This is 1935 so this is pre-World War II.

World War II comes to the United States. Welfare disappears but we nearly double the budget again.

Holy shit. So 20 years since 1929 and the federal budget is nearly 10X bigger than it was. That’s incredible.

Marty McFly travels back to 1955 and the federal budget has massively increased still in just 6 years ($278 to $443!!!). Pensions (social security) are now part of life.

So now we have pensions (social security) AND welfare. This is the year I was born.

What the fuck is health? We went 200 years with only defense and “remainder” and now we have pensions, welfare and health?

The year I graduated high school

That social security and medicare thing sure sure took over.  How did the federal government get into this?

Bush leaves office.

Christ, spending went from 2.7 to 3.2 on one year? Right, the Stimulus.

Spending goes down.

In recent discussions, it's become clear that many people aren't really that familiar with the US constitution.  This is a shame because it's actually not very long.

The constitution is broken into two parts.  The first part lists the explicit powers the government has.  The second part are the amendments, two of which are designed to make it bloody clear that only the explicitly named powers listed are things the federal government can do.

The recently passed ACA was held as constitutional only because the court narrowly decided that the government had the power to tax people based on whether they have insurance or not.  

Most of the runaway government comes from the 3rd item below known also as the "commerce clause". It's amazing at how one little chink in the armor has been exploited so massively. The word "regulate" has been tortured into all kinds of things.

Similarly, the 16th amendment has been tortured to give the federal government all kinds of weird powers.  If you look through the constitution, the only amendment that gives the government more power is the 16th. The rest have been put in to reduce federal power. And two of the amendments were put in there as a "We aren't kidding, seriously, No joking, only the 16 enumerated powers are things the feds can do. Really!"

Since some people seem to be confused as to what the federal government is legally allowed to do here is a list:

1. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
2. To borrow on the credit of the United States;
3. To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
4. To establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
5. To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
6. To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
7. To establish Post Offices and Post Roads;
8. To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
9. To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;
10. To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;
11. To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
12. To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
13. To provide and maintain a Navy;
14. To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
15. To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
16. To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

It can be quite a challenge to work at the same place for 20 years. I think that’s doubly true if you’ve never worked anywhere else.

That said, looking back, I haven’t really worked at the same place for 20 years. I’ve actually worked at 5 places, all called Stardock and all very different.

Stardock Primoridal

“This really seems exciting!” –College Student Brad Wardell, 1993

This was back when it was just me. The year was 1993. The closest thing I had to “employees” were friends and family who worked on contract on a specific thing. This Stardock was run out of my dorm room at Western Michigan University (Smith Burnham!).

Stardock OS/2

“Holy cow this is fun! I can format a floppy while downloading on Z-modem and I get paid for it!” –Entrepreneur, Brad Wardell, 1996

This began the day I rented an office in 1995. It was the front office of a tank plant in Canton Michigan. So in the back, they were making tanks and we rented the front office.  It was here that we really got our start. The first two people “hired” were Angie Marshall and Pat Ford. They’re both still here! 

Galactic Civilizations 2 for OS/2, Object Desktop for OS/2 came out during this time along with a  bunch of really high quality OS/2 products. Our days were making cool software and our nights were spent playing Magic the Gathering or Duke Nukem 3D on our company LAN. It was a very fun time while it lasted.

Stardock 2000

“I can make Windows look like a Mac! And our office has air conditioning and the toilets work!” –Brad Wardell, CEO, 2001.

The OS/2 market collapsed abruptly in 1997. I had to lay off nearly everyone I had hired since 1996. It was horrible. I lost some good friends as a result (lesson #1: Don’t hire your friends. Lesson #2: If you disobeyed lesson 1, don’t lay them off!).  I put everything I owned up as collateral to secure loans to pay the people we had left so that we could make the transition from OS/2 to Windows.

By 2000, we had made the transition. Barely.

This Stardock wasn’t quite as fun as the old Stardock. But I began making a lot of friends over the INTERNET. This was the age where WindowBlinds, Object Desktop, IconPackager, DesktopX, Control Center, DeskScapes, WindowFX, ObjectDock, ObjectBar, Keyboard LaunchPad, RightClick, Multiplcity, CursorFX, etc. reigned supreme. We kept a finger in the game market by taking a contract to make a Starcraft expansion for Blizzard called “Starcraft: Retribution”.

As time went on, things got better. We were on a roll. We reached a real high point with Galactic Civilizations II for Windows and new software was being released on a regular schedule to glowing reviews and strong sales. were ready to expand in a big BIG way…

Stardock Sucks

“This company is bullshit. I hate it here. I’m printing my resume on that fancy paper as I type this!” – Disgruntled employee, Brad Wardell, 2010

The expansion we made nearly ruined my life and the company. I had no idea how to manage a company with this many people in it and it showed.  About the only good thing that came out of this time period was Sins of a Solar Empire and the fun I had working with Brian Clair and the Irconclad team. 

I honestly believe that if it weren’t for the friendships I made with people like Blair and Craig Fraser at Ironclad and Chris Taylor and others that I would have rage quitted before making it through all this. It was such a horrible period that even today I cringe when looking back.

So where did it all go bad? One word: IMPULSE.

Impulse was incredibly successful – financially. But it nearly ruined our company culture. So much money going through so few peoples hands had a highly toxic effect. Combine that with an engineer turned CEO whose understanding of non-engineer motivations bordered on non-existent and you have a catastrophe.

Product plans were made based on what would maximize the short-term bonus/compensation/commission of those drawing up said plans. I was too incompetent at business administration to recognize what was being done until it was far too late. While the people actually doing the long hours got only token bonuses, others gamed the system to enrich themselves.  It was a bad time and I was oblivious to how political and toxic things were getting.

What I did know was that I hated going to work. I was miserable. Every time I (or others like me here) wanted to set up a project based on making something good we got the uneasy sense from our opponents (though I had no idea they were our opponents at the time) that we were somehow robbing them of bonuses/commissions.  Little care was put into what was good for the company long-term.

This is the period that delivered such wonders as MyColors (which nearly ruined Stardock’s desktop enhancement business), Elemental, Demigod, and wastes of time like NBA desktop themes.

But nothing could compare to Impulse. In order to make it successful, you had to bring in sales people, relationship managers, enterprise managers, etc.  And if quality suffered and I (or others like me) spoke of the need of quality I got (to quote) “Incentives drive behavior. You need to make my compensation package such that I am incented to care about quality.” As an engineer, such attitudes were horrifying.  Technologically, Impulse was amazing. It was far ahead of its curve. The talent pool Stardock had at the time was still amazing.  Our problem was cultural.

The launch of War of Magic was the low-point and the moment of truth.  That game was a canary in the coal mine. It was a symptom of everything that was rotten at the company at the time. After taking a few days off, I realized that the source of the rot was Impulse or more specifically, the toxic culture that had evolved around it. [I want to emphasize that the Impulse engineering team was excellent and not part of the problem].  Impulse had to go.

By the end of 2011, virtually every person we had hired during the start of this era was gone. It was a new day. A new company. Or more specifically, it was the previous company having undergone a massive Ctrl-Z.

Stardock Renaissance

“I am truly excited about working with such world class-talent,” said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock Corp. “I am very proud of what we are accomplishing.”  (2013)

I basically took a year off to recuperate. But before I could do that, I needed to build a world class management team who could run the company in my absence. I was now very aware of my managerial strengths and short-comings.  From this, we got an amazing new leadership team here who in turn brought on board other talented people that has resulted in a renaissance.

Within a year of the new team being brought on, the games unit quadrupled its revenue and the software team more than tripled their’s. At the same time, a host of new programs were conceived and executed on – all in 1 year!

To put things in perspective, in the Stardock Sucks era (mid 2006 to early 2011), the company only released 1 truly new desktop enhancement (Fences) on the software side and the studio produced ONE game: Elemental: War of Magic, which sucked.    Think about that. FIVE YEARS and the game studio only eeked out one new game and it was a mess while the software side only got one truly new desktop enhancement out.

By contrast, in the past year or so the software unit has conceived and/or developed: Start8, ModernMix, Decor8, Tiles, a new Multiplicity, Fences 2, ObjectDock 2 and has 2 more all-new programs scheduled for release this year.  Simultaneously, the game studio made Fallen Enchantress, Fallen Enchantress –Legendary Heroes, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion (coded in partnership with Ironclad) and Dead Man’s Draw. And every single one of these titles is excellent.

And not only is the management team focused on quality and long-term viability, they’ve created compensation packages that award everyone fairly and put into place morale lifting programs like on-sight personal trainers, on-sight chefs/nutritionists, health screening days, an extra week per year of vacation (so yea, the team gets more done while working fewer hours and gets paid better). 

I’d be hard pressed to even name anyone who has voluntarily left the company during this period (other than maternity leave). If you work in the technology industry you can probably attest that this is a significant achievement on its own. 

It’s good to be having a good time again at this new company!

…

So there you have it. The 5 Stardocks I’ve worked at!

In the evening as the parents were going to bed, the drowsy four-year-old appeared at their bedroom door with a question: "Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?"

That was the moment when the Nokia executive understood that his company was in trouble.

http://pulse.me/s/rL4vl

Jon Shafer has a new game brewing called At the Gates and I’m in love.

Let me preface all this by saying that if you’re a gamer, you live in a golden age. I say that because thanks to digital distribution, all kinds of games can now be made that wouldn’t have been economically possibly to develop just 5 years ago.  At the Gates is a game designed for people who love history.

It’s not commonly known that when the Roman Empire fell, the world didn’t just fast-forward to black death and knights. There was a period in which “barbarian” kingdoms (who weren’t really that barbaric) vied to fill in the vacuum left behind by the late Western Roman Empire.  That is the world that you enter in At the Gates.

At the Gates is currently in alpha. Jon Shafer is best known for his design of Civilization V. Having worked with him a great deal over the past few years, I can tell you that Jon is really one of the few people who have really mastered the art of integrating gameplay into the UI.  Being able to present visual information cleanly and intuitively is no small task and Jon has done an amazing job at this.

As an indie, I really appreciate that Jon has been able to create this with a team of 3. Himself, a programmer and an artist (who is also Stardock’s lead artist on a different, unannounced game project).  If you’re an indie developer, At the Gates is something you should definitely check out.

The object of the game is to build an empire out of the ashes of the Roman Empire.  This early alpha is still just that, an alpha. But it is exciting to see where Jon’s going to take it next.

Not that I expect those people who are wholly invested in their hate to retract or express any regret for the death threats, smearing, or abuse they sent my way, but as any lawyer who is familiar with employment law can tell you, this is as clear of a victory as you can get.  I said at the time that we wouldn’t pay out a dime (except for lawyers obviously) and that only an apology letter would satisfy us.

Anyone who has ever run a business with lots of employees knows that sooner or later, you’re going to run into something like this. Every business has their own horror stories. 

The sad thing is, our industry (the game industry) has legitimately serious problems. There really is a lot of misogyny in it. There is increasing awareness of it – which is good. But at the same time, there are too many opportunists ready to cash in on this issue. I know after what I went through I’ll never look at the issue the same again. I know many of my coworkers (male and female) feel the same. Is a story true or has it been exaggerated to get page views?

I know I’ll never have the same naïve views on business that I had in 2010 but I think I’m a better CEO as a result. 

And in case there are still people out there wondering about the original allegations: They were either completely made up or they were taken so out of context as to completely change their meaning. 

Been working on the tactical summons code for v1.4 of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes!

Should be some fun. 

While I was in there, I made some tweaks that should let the AI perform magic just generally better.  This is one of those things that just takes a lot of play time to master.  Knowing WHEN and WHERE and WHY to cast spells is not an “AI” thing. It’s a human judgment call that has to manifest itself in AI.

So keep those posts coming. It makes a big difference.

Far be it for me to hype something we make but...HOLY COW is this awesome!  

GET IT GET IT GET IT!

In the good old days of gaming, the game studios weren’t public and so they could give little sneak peeks and teasers of things they’re working on. 

Unfortunately, the number of indie studios is dwindled and so there’s very little spontaneity in what companies share (which the Xbox One unveil showed us can be quite a bummer).

Below is just some artwork from a few of the things that are in development.

NEW 7/11/2013

ADDED 8/9/2013

ADDED 9/7/2013

September 19 Update!