Yesterday Kay , the boys and I went to the Reptile show. We didn’t come away empty handed: My son Ryan got this Gecko. Alex got an iguana. My daughter Ashley got a baby Red footed tortoise: And I got an adult red footed tortoise: These were taken in the conservatory, don’t worry about the snow outside. The floor tiles are heated to 78 degrees. Poor Deb (my wife). I always tell her that by marrying me she’d end up with a ...

Recently I had teased some friends of mine from Firaxis about Civ V not having a separate defeat screen if you lose because another civilization launches their space ship. But then, last night, I’m playing Fallen Enchantress and another faction casts the Spell of Making (basically Elemental’s equivalent to the space ship victory). And what screen comes up? Yep, the generic loss by conquest screen. I suck.

(Alex – 16 year old son, Ryan – 12 year old son, Debbie – wife, me are looking out the window at all the mouse trails under the snow) Debbie: That’s pretty cool Ryan: You know, this family is pretty weird Alex: Shut up and get ready to go to the Lizard show [we’re about to leave to go to a reptile show]

Lest you think Legendary Heroes is going to get all the fun, plain old Fallen Enchantress is getting a ton of love too.  We’re working on 1.3 and wow. I don’t want to oversell it but gameplay wise, this will be the biggest change since the pre-release builds IMO. Where do I start? Let’s start with Diplomacy. Diplomacy IMO, the biggest weakness of Fallen Enchantress is the diplomacy system.  There’s still a lot of stuff that could be done here but my biggest beef has be...

I’ve seen a couple of articles that argue that real time strategy games (RTS’s) are “dying”.  They’re not. They’re waiting. Waiting for the adoption of the hardware to implement the next generation RTS designs. Hardware drives innovation It is easy to forget how closely tied video game innovation is to the technology that it runs on top of.  We didn’t even have “first person shooters” until Castle Wolfenstein 3D because the computing horsepower wasn’t there.  T...

If you haven’t seen Jon Shafer’s new project, At The Gates, check out its Kick Starter page . Here’s the basic concept:  The Roman Empire is failing. To those who have lived during the glory of Rome, it may seem like the end of the world. And they’re right – it is the end of their world but it is the beginning of our world. To my knowledge, no game has tackled this very interesting time in western civilization.  You aren’t Rome. You’re a barbarian. Or more aptly, ...

Without clicking on the thumbnail, what differences do you notice between the two? Not in terms of what units appear on what. But in terms of general visuals.  One of the things we’ve done with Legendary Heroes is revisit the underlying lighting and shadowing engine in Kumquat. Earlier this year, we got a visit from Intel who brought forth many new tools that we’ve used to have our cake and eat it too – Legendary Heroes has a faster graphics engine than Fallen Enchantre...

Here are some screenshots we’ve taken for Legendary Heroes that I wanted to share with you guys: In this one, we’re showing off the complex shadows. It’s really surprising how much easier it makes playing the game when you can see your units pop better.  This is still early but this is the direction we’re going. It also shows the updated mini-map. We’re still thinking about what color the base map should be (it’s tan in this screenshot). We decided to stop showing terrain...

Full priced Stardock title releases of the last 5 years as measured on Metacritic. One of these is not like the others.

I must confess, I wasn’t expecting one of the best reviews of Fallen Enchantress to come from PC Gamer let alone Tom Francis.  Which isn’t to say I don’t think he’s a good reviewer, he is.  But PC Gamer’s Tom Francis was the avatar for those who were deeply disappointed in our first attempt at creating a fantasy strategy game back in 2010 (that game, Elemental: War of Magic). Deep down, I had hoped PC Gamer would assign Tom to review Fallen Enchantress. I thought it would be in...

After we complete upcoming expansion pack for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress (which we expect to announce NEXT WEEK) we have to do some hard thinking.  Specifically, what do we do next? After some trials and tribulations we’ve put together what is, in effect, a Master of Magic style engine (and before someone flips out, I’m not saying FE is just like MOM, I am saying that at this stage, our *game engine* is finally capable of actually making that game which is obviously was not capable of in...

I’m missing the link now but a indie developer once posted that he had to stop reading his own forums or else he’d never work on his game. I know how that is. I don’t think most forum users have any inkling how demotivational carping on the forums can be. I can’t even count the number of times where I was geared up to work on a new update to a given game over the weekend only to have all desire to open up the compiler snuffed out when I went onto the forums to see what things people wanted ...

Historically, we've made space strategy games. And from a rendering point of view, space games are much easier to do.  There's no terrain and generally a lot less "stuff" to render. When Stardock began work on the Elemental games (our fantasy strategy game world), we got a crash course in having to get a lot more disciplined in how we do our rendering. Below is a short list of lessons we've learned that can be universally applied: The GPU is usually not the limiting f...

If you haven’t read Chris Taylor’s interview with EuroGamer.net you absolutely should . "There's multiple games that we got almost to the finish line on," Taylor revealed, reluctant to say more because of NDAs, which suggests this happened recently. "We got a phone call from the publisher and they said, 'We're terminating.' And we're like, 'Yeah but we're only a month away from beta!' And they're like, 'Yeah we're still terminating.' And we're like, 'OK.' " ...

Screw it, all future games will just have the word Poochie in it. Every time we try to think of a name for a future game, pow. It’s taken.