One of my favorite webzines is Gamasutra and its parent magazine Game Developer I love reading the post mortems that give a blow by blow detail on how the games came together. One of the common themes is dealing with running out of money and such.
Stardock's problem is lack of people. Despite being located in Plymouth Michigan (pictured above on New Years morning..) we have a hard time finding talented game developers and artists. What limits us the most is simply getting enough people who are qualified to do the job.
For example, we need software developers who know C++, Visual Studio.NET, and have an interest in making games. It's harder to find people than one might think. We hire people from across the spectrum of experience -- you graduating from college with a computer science degree? No problem. You have 10 years experience programming? Great.
We give a lot of latitude to our developers. For example, the entire battle screen stuff that you've seen screenshots for was written by an individual developer who was literally weeks out of college. We gave him vague specs and he just want crazy and made this incredibly cool thing.
There are 3 projects coming up that we are trying to get more software developers for (we also occasionally hire more 3D artists but right now the balance is we need more developers):
- Galactic Civilizations expansion packs and future sequels
- The Political Machine 2008
- Society
Group #2 won't start on that until the end of 2007 and in the meantime will likely be on projects 1 or 3. If we get enough people, we also want to do a fantasy strategy game (we've long been in talks to do a sequel to a certain well known fantasy turn based game but there's been little movement on there due to some of the legal requirements involved to do it). I'd also like to take the GalCiv II engine and eventually make an RTS multiplayer game out of it (Galactic Federations was the concept that's been floating around since the early 90s but we just haven't had a sufficient engine to make it happen until now).
But all that depends on getting enough people. To finish GalCiv II, we had to pull people from Society. So we definitely need more developers.
So if you or someone you know is interested in developing PC games and is willing to move to Michigan (an absolute requirement) let me know. bwardell@stardock.com.