So our friends over at Amplitude have announced Endless Legend II.  It's due for Early Access late Summer.  My good friend Kael (Derek P who was the lead designer on Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and did the Fall from Heaven mod) is working on it.  

These days I'm mostly playing our stuff.  There's just not a lot of time for other games.  So lots of Ara: History Untold, GalCiv IV, Sins of a Solar Empire II and even some Ashes of the Singularity. But what are you guys playing? Anything you would recommend I should check out?

It's really amazing how easy Ara: History Untold is for modding. The first thing to know is that all the source data files can be found (if you're on Steam for instance) in a directory like: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Ara History Untold\assets\SourceMods So say you don't like one of the balance of say...Recipes. Let's go find that. Recipes0.zdata is where all the recipes are. Now I happen to be a bit unhappy that the Feast recipe is defaulting to using money inste...

This is really interesting documentary broken up into bite sized chunks. It deals with the transition in games journalism that we saw starting around 2010 with the changes to the underlying business models of the media and in particular the games media. Here is part 1:

Google's streaming game platform, Stadia, has been having a rough time this past year. From Take 2's CEO publicly calling them out to the recent Terraria debacle coming right after Google's decision to close their first-party studios, it's not looking too promising for Stadia these days. The tech Stadia is run on is good.  We were deeply involved during the Yeti project and were very impressed with the potential.  We ported our engine over to Yeti and were ready to move our g...

I am really, really enjoying CK3. These days, I generally prefer to stick to playing games that I would never want to make.  So games like Civilization VI or even Stellaris are games that I play but I don't enjoy because they feel like work (this isn't the game's fault, it's because my brain goes into analyst mode when I play them). But CK3? There's nothing else really like it and I love it.

I've worked on a lot of games over the years.  It's really hard, on a personal level, to dedicate multiple years to a single project.  It's the nature of the business but at the end of each project I end up in quite a bit of a funk.   Looking back on my own schedule here is what I've been worked on: 1992: GalCiv OS/2 1993: GalCiv OS/2 1994: GalCiv OS/2 1995: GalCiv 2 OS/2 1996: Avarice 1996: Trials of battle 1996: Entrepreneur [Pear engine] ...

I recently wrote an article for Gamasutra on scripting languages and game engines .   Whether it be Lua or Python or some other scripting language, I think there is a lot to be said about not having to compile your code after every change.  It makes iteration much faster to be able to be playing the game and be writing code changes to improve it while it's running and have those changes simply update. I don't have a strong preference between Lua and Python other tha...

Elemental: War of Magic (most fun) [2010] Galactic Civilizations OS/2 [1993] Galactic Civilizations II [2006] Star Control: Origins [2018] The Corporate Machine [2000] Sins of a Solar Empire [2008] Fallen Enchantress [2012] Stellar Frontier [1999] Ashes of the Singularity [2016] Trials of Battle [1996] Avarice [1996] Offworld Trading Company [2016] Galactic Civilizations I [2003] The Political Machine [2004] Galactic Civi...

So I still play quite a bit of StarCraft online.  I am not great at it (low Diamond league) but I am good enough at it to know when I'm playing a Smurf. A Smurf is someone who is deliberately playing in a league far lower than what they should be in and they really ruin the game experience.   Smurfing isn't specific to StarCraft and there really isn't much that can be done about it that I can think of.  But it is one of those things that helps remind me as to why I don'...

Paradroid, Raid on Bungling Bay, Lode Runner, Kings Quest, Civilization, Master of Orion, Wing Commander, Planetfall, Star Control, Total Annihilation, Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic. #alifewelllived .

Have you ever been playing a game and wished you could just hit a button and start changing it right in the middle of the game? Then you're going to love The Video Game Machine (VGM). This is a game we've been working on for over four years.  Hopefully you'll be able to see why. VGM isn't a development tool.  It's been designed so that anyone can make games with it.  Easily. Here's how it works: First, you pick a genre.  We've started with popular genres from the 8-b...

My entire adult life has been dominated by 4X strategy games. Some periods have felt like the genre was in a bit of a rut. Other times (looking at Alpha Centauri and Distant Worlds) there are true moments of amazing innovation. I can't go into specifics because of NDAs. But I can tell you that we're entering a new era for 4X and I thought I'd share with you why this is. As some of you already know, my partner Soren's studio, Mohawk Games, is working on Ten Crowns which is a 4X game an...

I spend a lot of time looking at the sales of PC games and we are quickly moving away from the traditional individual purchase model and towards subscription based platforms. Fundamentally, most titles simply don’t generate enough sales to justify engineering support post release. This is a relatively new issue that will be interesting to see how it gets resolved by studios.  

The most important game release in Stardock's long, 25-year history was celebrated with a party! Here are a few pictures to give faces to match the names! Derek (GM of Stardock Entertainment) and Amy (Director of Operations).   QA and SUpport team with the marketing team!   Sarah and Leo Chris Kowal (VP of BizDev), me, and Kevin Unangst (VP of Marketing & Partnerships) Engineers! Me an...