Greetings and happy new year!

For those of you in the beta for Demigod, we are currently working on a new build that we hope to release this Thursday which will have a lot of improvements to the multiplayer code. We don’t anticipate there being any big new features in this build, we really want to focus on the connectivity.

Tomorrow, I leave for CES (Consumer Electronics Show).  I’ll be live-blogging there at http://www.impulsedriven.com/ces2009. Check it out as you’ll get lots of little tidbitgs.

On Saturday, I fly from CES to Seattle to visit with Gas Powered Games so that we can finish up the user manual and work on the next beta phase.

So that you guys understand what’s going on, like with Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod is being worked on as an integrated team effort between Stardock and Gas Powered Games. So GPG is helping us on ads, box design, etc. And we’re helping them on code. It’s not your usual situation. But it allows us to combine our strengths.

What that means in concrete terms is that Stardock is developing the Pantheon Tournament code that Demigod will call on. The competitive on-line features in Demigod should be pretty state of the art when it’s done which is where my visit comes in at GPG. Coordinating the integration of the two code bases. Then we will need to get a public beta going.

If there is time, I hope for us to run a beta tournament with cash and prizes to test out the system. It’s a good way to thank beta testers for helping us out and work out cheese and connectivity problems early. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been frustrated about buying a new game only to find it having glaring problems in on-line play. Our goal is to make sure that doesn’t happen.  Mind you, it will still probably happen but at least we (you guys and us) can put in a best effort to reduce that sort of thing.

So assuming this week’s build is called Beta 2A, we will either follow-up with a beta 2B which will have additional connectivity issue fixes or we’ll start looking at Beta 3.

So what would beta 3 have in it?

Here’s a tentative outline:

• Multiplayer tournaments.
• Pantheon where players pick a Demigod and earn favor points in the battles.
• Skirmishes where players play normal stand alone games and go up a more traditional ladder.
• New Game Mechanics
• The War score implemented that should greatly improve game play.
• More balancing and cleaning up of skills, citadel upgrades, flags, etc.
• General polishing.

We don’t have an exact ETA. It won’t be available until Chris Taylor and I are satisfied with it.  I’ll have a better idea next week on that. We’ll be posting pictures here from the beta team directly when I’m in Seattle.