Greetings! We’re very excited to have you with us on Sorcerer King.  We hope you’re having as much fun playing the beta as we are having making it.  This post will go over the road-map between Beta 1 and the final release of the game so you can see where things are. Milestone #1: Sorcerer King BETA 1 [October 2014] Crafting is in Outposts attack enemies in ZOC and can be upgraded Minor factions are on map but don’t do anything Wizard sovereign is...

One of the major new features of Sorcerer King is the Dungeon Master. Essentially, the Dungeon Master is the AI behind the game making sure that things stay interesting and different from game to game. In coding terms, the Dungeon Master is a big fat state machine that you feed with your actions.  Here’s how it works:   First, I create a narrative resource.  In this case, I’m making one called Indifference. I am putting a _ in front of the name (_...

Greetings!   Getting a ton of questions regarding minor races. Here’s the scoop: You and the Sorcerer King are trying to woo the “remnant factions” (minor races).  Each time you succeed, you gain favor with them. When enough favor has been gained, they will ally with that player. If they ally with you, they will be attacking the Sorcerer King on their own as well as giving you units. In addition, you can outright ask them for help Each min...

Setup This game takes place in a land that the Sorcerer King has dominated for some time.  The world is ruined. Very little life exists now. The rot of the Sorcerer King encroaches on my last city, Athica.  The Sorcerer King is powerful and is already in the process of casting the spell of making which will convert all life on this world to elemental magic. My job is to build a force that can take him about before it’s too late. Of course, how I go about doing...

Greetings! The first week of the Sorcerer King beta has been both exciting and terrifying.  On the one hand, the people who play the game seem to really like it.  On the other, people who have only seen the screenshots think it looks like Fallen Enchantress which makes us very sad. Update 1 = this week We’re getting ready to roll out the first update. Lots of changes in it.  A lot of performance optimizations have gone in that should be noticeable to everyone.  ...

It’s almost over The world is on the brink of ruin. King Galor sits on the last piece of farmable land.  The shadow has crept right to his door step. On this map, the shadow lands have crept right to your doorstep. The rest of the world is ruined. Hope through magic But not all is lost.  For Galor has the ability to revive land.  He must save up his mana, revive the land and build on it. You have a spell that will revive the...

Greetings! HOLY COW! Things are coming along great! And much of the reason for that is you. We’ve gotten a huge amount of really constructive feedback from the community. Anyone who doubts the usefulness of “Early Access” needs to be sent to the Sorcerer King and/or Stardock forums. Your wish is my command: UNREST! We got a lot of requests to bring Unrest back in some form.  But we wanted to do it in a way that connected it tightly to the overall game. So here’s h...

This Thursday (October 30th) we plant o have an opt-in beta which is basically a preview of Beta 2 (not quite done but getting there). This is what will be in there: All eight minor factions. The Guardian sovereign The Tyrant sovereign Lots and lots of gameplay enhancements across the board The Minor Factions Minor factions in Sorcerer King interact with you purely from conversations.  It’s not a trade screen ala GalCiv, FE, Civilization, etc.  I...

Greetings! For those of you who might be interested in seeing the sausage factory of game development in action, I’ll be streaming my antics at 1pm EST at http://www.twitch.tv/draginol today at 1pm EST. I’ll be playing Sorcerer King, debugging it, writing code, complaining and answering your questions, comments, criticisms.   Update:  Thanks everyone for coming by! That was a blast.  I'll try to do a pre-beta 2 one soon with more lead time.

  4K and 5K monitors are coming. And we think they’re going to become common much faster than most people think.  That means gamers will be in a bit of a pickle. Either they’ll have to run their games at a lower resolutions (blurry, non-ideal) or face games with tiny tiny text and UIs. Sorcerer King will be the first Stardock game to explicitly support high DPI displays.  The screenshots below come from my mere 2560x1440 display but as the last screenshot shows, the supe...

Had a busy Saturday playing and adding new stuff. Here’s a sampling:   Lots of tweaks to quests to give players more intangible traits. Lot of work on the Guardian sovereign in general Guardian gets a mass sleep spell Guardian gets a mass slow spell Guardian gets an obstruct map spell (rains rocks onto the tactical map causing those tiles to slow down enemies) Guardian gets a damage reflection spell where damage is 2X back at the enemy as long...

  For Sunday I spent the day doing lots of various little things.  I’m not sure where to even start.  One thing I can say is that we still have a long way to go. Not just in terms of bugs but just balance and feel. The mid-game has a death-lull in it.  That is, where you’re well into the game, you think you have a pretty good handle on things but there’s nothing exciting happening. In a traditional 4X game, this is where diplomacy/world council type...

Greetings! We cannot wait for you to get Beta 2.  I always hate the first beta. They’re so painful. They’re basically a “does this work on your machine”. Very boring.  Beta 2 is where the actual game starts to matter a little. So where do things stand with Beta 2? Beta 2 is due out this month and it’s going to be big.  It’s where the Minor factions start to matter. A lot. It also starts to really show off what makes Sorcerer King unique as a strategy game...

Another Sunday with Sorcerer King.  A lot of progress was made this week.  So below are the good, the bad, and the ugly things I have to say about Sorcerer King this week. It’ll all be schmushed together. New Sovereign: Ashlira This weekend I mainly played with Ashlira, the Priest.  Scott and I have been designing her for awhile and it’s amazing (but not surprising) how many ideas that look good on paper just don’t work out when implemented.  That’s...

We’ve got questions for the beta team: Some people have said that Sorcerer King looks a lot like Legendary Heroes.  What do you think people mean by this and what would be the most effective way to make sure the two games are visually distinct? We are debating a lot about camera rotation.  The game supports it and we plan to have an option for it.  The question is, what would you like to see as the default and why? We have the Magic slider in the game ...