Some of you know Kris Kwilas as Nakor around here. He’s been with Stardock since, I think, 1996. Last week he’s moved from our VP of Technology to being a consultant. He’s going off to do new and great things. It’s been a long planned move. He gave me a 2 year notice that he was eventually going to do it. But I feel like my right arm is missing. Our management team continues to evolve. We’ll have to do a new management page. These days it’s: Me A...
I woke up today with my twitter feed full of angry, hateful people. Ok, so what are they mad about this time? I click on a few tweets and see back where they came from. Zoe Quinn accusing me of having "offered a job" to someone because he had drawn "revenge porn" of her. None of this true of course but her gullible followers, always ready to demonstrate their virtue, started filling my feed with hateful tweets. So what was the truth? An artist had posted that he would love to draw...
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...
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...
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...
If you like Rogue-like games, a new one has come to my attention: http://www.indiedb.com/games/there-is-only-power Let me know what you think. Cheers!
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...
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...
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.
Years ago the world was at war. Ceresa, The Fallen Enchantress, had unleashed an army of the undead upon the Kingdoms and Empires of Elemental. The adventurer, Relias, managed to acquire the necessary pieces to build the Forge of the Overlord and with it, defeated Ceresa and her allies. For a time, there was peace. Then, one day, a powerful Sorcerer named Mirdoth found the ancient artifact, Curgen's Bane. It was thought that the bane had been lost in the cataclysm. This ...
Happy Halloween everyone! Just pouring some thoughts out into the ether here. I <generally> don’t like boycotts I’m only speaking of myself here. So don’t think that those of you reading this who engage in boycotts are being tut-tuted by me. Here’s my rationale: I don’t like coercion. I don’t like the idea of using economic power to stifle someone’s speech. The answer to speech I don’t like is more speech. When we decide to exert our economic power to punish ...
Greetings! I bring you fear, death, pestilence and candy. Virtual candy anyway! Just some highlights of today’s Halloween at Stardock: Our lead 3D programmer on Sorcerer King dresses up like Tandis for Halloween! The lead designer of the Sorcerer King website is a fierce warrior! The man in charge, Derek “Kael” Paxton is a great buddy! GalCiv III lead designer, Paul “Mormegil” Boyer is a smooth operator. My son…is…I’m n...
They say timing is everything. I keep being told that #gamergate started as a harassment and threat campaign. Maybe they’re right if you treat #gamergate as having started years ago when people under the guise of “Social Justice” started harassing and threatening people they didn’t like. I don’t just speak of myself. What is happening now in the gaming community has been building up for years. So let me be succinct: People have the growing, creeping feeling th...
For those of you not aware, Stardock is working on a new fantasy strategy game called Sorcerer King. The Sorcerer King isn’t you… It is currently in beta and we are getting ready to release Beta 2. In our previous fantasy game, Fallen Enchantress, the player was competing with 8 other civilizations in trying to claim dominance of the world of Elemental. Sorcerer King takes place centuries later and the bad news is, a new enemy (the Sorcerer King) has annihilated the King...
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...