While the world endlessly debates on what is an indie developer, one thing that is very common at indie developers that is not common at major development houses is the requirement to work with teammates that are spread across the world, all day, every day. Another difference is that optimizing every bit of juice out of your development setup is a major priority. So here are some suggestions I have from spending many years online: #1 Use Skype I started out using IRC to communic...

Lots of cool stuff going on around here. Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes 1.6 is due out in April and there will be a new DLC released shortly after that.  It involves spouses. That’s all I’ll say. Legendary Heroes 2.0 Also, as some of you may have heard, Legendary Heroes 2.0 has been approved and budgeted. This will be a free update of some significance.  I don’t have a due date for it yet but it does have some interesting changes in it including ZOC for monster l...

First off, for those of you not familiar with our forum structure, I go by 2 handles: Draginol and Frogboy.  Draginol came from the old idea that when I posted from home, I’d use a different handle. Bah. Now I never get them straight. Anyway, I need your help.  As concisely as possible, can you list the things in Legendary Heroes that you find the most FUN.  Not unique. Not stand-out. But FUN. Can be something that you love in many games. After a few posts, I’ll l...

So yesterday the art team gave me a tour of the new rendering technology being used for GalCIv III.  If you’ve been with us for many years, you know that I’m not a graphics guy.  I drew the original OS/2 version “art” myself with the built in OS/2 icon editor.  As you can imagine, that means I have only a little understanding of all the cool stuff they’re doing. To me, I thought the GalCiv II ships looked pretty good. But the art team cringes when I say that.  I am intim...

Derek (Kael) has been super busy with the general expansion of Stardock Entertainment over the past 3 years.  AS I type this, there are 7 concurrent game projects going on.  Back in 2008, I dreamt of having a second team.  Here we are, 6 years later with seven teams.  I’m writing this from the airplane on my way to visit one of the new studios (one that hasn’t been announced yet). So what does that mean for fans of the Elemental universe?  The answer is, lots of goo...

Greetings and Happy New Years! Over the years the time and effort to create quality skins has increased and so effective January 1, 2014, the royalty split between the skinner and WinCustomize is now 70% for the skinner and 30% for WinCustomize (it was previously a 50/50 split).   We hope that this will the first of many positive improvements that WinCustomize will be seeing this year. Cheers!

Introduction These collected notes are are often sketchy. Much has been lost over the years.  To the best of my ability, I have put together the hints, scraps and rumor together in order to give you a somewhat coherent history of the world of Elemental.  Some of this may just be myth as much of it seems fantastical and unbelievable. It is, however, the best I can do and will, I hope, allow us to predict what events may occur next. The Lost History In the beginning t...

Just for kicks, I tried to compile the GalCiv II project (written for Visual Studio 2003) with Visual Studio 2012.

In case you haven't heard, GalCiv III is in development! You can sign up for the Alpha/Beta programs over at www.galciv3.com  

Greetings! I hope you had a Merry Christmas. Preliminaries http://youtu.be/QIWyf8Hyjbg (note that the video demo of “Star Swarm” was from November, it looks even better now, we were able to throw that together in basically a month or so with Nitrous). Now… I have a confession to make. For the past year I’ve been seeing other people.  Don’t get me wrong, I still love Stardock. It’s what I still spend most of my time on. But as the next couple of years are ...

I don't know about you but when I get time off of work, I end up thinking about lots of random things. In no particular order: Very proud of the people my kids are becoming. 20 year wedding anniversary is in a few months. Gotta start thinking about what to do about that. Very excited about some January announcements Stardock will be making I wish I had more time for skinning I am addicted to Battlefield 4. I suck at Battlefield 4 I am grateful for the friends I have. I wish I ...

Greetings! I just wanted to give you guys a quick update on where things stand with Galactic Civilizations III. Internally, the game is fully playable at this stage (except the AI is really stupid at this point as we won’t really get started on that until January).  While this isn’t a promise, we anticipate the Alpha version being made available in late February.  Those of you with Founder’s Elite access will receive a Steam code around that time and be able ...

Over the past 20 years there has been a lot of changes in how games are made.   When I first got started, I had Deluxe Paint, Vista Pro and graph paper as my non-compiler tools. My latest, favorite gadget is the Wacom Cintiq which lets me, very quickly, whip up UI designs to pass on to the team for critique.  Below is a screenshot of a UI mockup for something we’re working on.

Greetings! For those of you not familiar with our Elemental game universe here it is in brief: Elemental is a fantasy world made up of many different civilizations vying for control the world. There is a great deal of history and lore to tap into and we decided to begin making games in this world back with 2010s release of War of Magic.  Unfortunately, when it came out, it was pretty buggy and got some negative reviews. We fixed the bugs but the game itself was still pretty meh. So...

vs.   Actual impressions (putting aside the specs) PS4 has a much better controller XBOX One has slightly less sucky launch titles XBOX One UI is more powerful XBOX One has integrated Skype (this is actually quite useful) PS4 has much better indie games market I can’t visually tell the difference in graphics between them (I know the specs, I’m just saying in real world, I can’t tell the difference so far) Got any questions? I’ll answe...