One of the less glamorous but absolutely crucial parts of game development involves building tools to support content creation. For GalCiv II, we used MFC. In Elemental, we used WinForms. Now, we’re making our editors using Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon aka WPF). It’s amazing how far things have come. Internally, there’s a lot of debate on whether we should be using WPF vs. WinRT for this purpose. I’m curious what others think on this in terms...
Ah to be young again. I’m watching Twitter afire with different groups blaming each other for the death threats of different people. They’re all wrong. They’re not sending death threats. It’s the crazy lurkers who do and they are typically not particularly into the cause. Death threats: A starter’s guide Now, first, let’s define a death threat because I see a lot of people confusing “I hope you get cancer” with a death threat.&n...
Setting up Visual Studio 2008 and all the other dev tools to start building software on a brand new machine. Ugh.
1990s During the creation of the history for the Galactic Civilizations universe a number of stories are assembled regarding the earliest days. These become known as Elemental: Guardians of the Telenanth , Elemental: Mascrinthus & Draginol , and Elemental: Destiny’s Sentinel Early 2000s Stardock attempts to license Master of Magic from Atari to create a Master of Magic 2. Negotiations stall over legal requirements. 2006 Galactic Civilizations II is a hit, t...
The Washington Post has an interesting article about how colleges are increasing their support for game developers as a genuine career. Highlighted in the article is Stardock's own Scott Brodie, an intern at Stardock from Michigan State University who is working on the space battles for Galactic Civilizations II.