I’ve been working on the AI this weekend and making a few proposed balancing changes. For one thing, I moved the tougher monsters away further from starting locations and murdered the remaining “Uhh” sound effects that make me cry the tears of a thousand rains every time I hear them (I get dehydrated a lot). I’m making my own faction The Drengin Empire are back, baby! I’m not above gaming the system until Kael notices this. I should probably tell him that you can co...

No promises…but I am lobbying for an in-game quest editor to make it relatively easy to create quests and events.  

So many crashes, so little time. Well, not really. Not on the time part anyway. I have a crazy amount of time. I hate to say this guys but I enjoy your crash reports. I’ve mentioned before that this is the first game I’ve been lead developer on since…I think The Corporate Machine which was like 1999. Thanks to the sale of Impulse, I can…indulge myself here. So anyway, here is why your game crashes (most of the time). Unlike with War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress is very very m...

I’m one of those people who have traditionally disliked tactical battles because I hate having to fight all of them out. In FE, my goal is to make it so that the AI does a pretty good job of fighting the battle for you. You’ll still want to fight it out if it’s a close thing or if there are particular units you want to spare. But overall, it does a decent job. Right now, I’m still toying with the concept of having units retreat from battle to let others take their place. I’m not sure i...

In the debugger right now working on tactical AI. And I’ve wondered just how many spells there potentially are in a given game.  The current number: 175 (not counting strategic).

For those of you who really like video journals, here are some quickie videos I’ve  done this week. Part 1: Around my fledgling Kingdom http://screencast.com/t/Zi0XvYku0pWP more to come.

The random maps are definitely getting better and better. I’d almost have guessed this was made by a person with the inland quasi-island and such. Here’s another:

Elemental has rally points. Oh, you guys don’t get them. There’s no UI for it presently. But they’re there. Just like in Galactic Civilizations but much more sophisticated. Did I mention you guys don’t get them right now? One of the things I’ve been working on is getting the AI to use them in ways far beyond what I’ve done in GalCiv or other AI’s before.  Using rally points intelligently (and without using a lot of CPU time) is a serious trick. Now, in the scree...

Stardock is a pretty silly place to “work” at.  So my new rule of thumb is, blame Derek for all my problems.  Compiler problem? Derek. VPN issue? Derek. Incredibuild glitch? You get the idea. Now, if the airs are let out of my tires again…well, who knows what caused that. … Anyway, thanks to Derek, I get to work primarily on the parts of our games I’m traditionally used to working on.  With GalCiv, I knew exactly what I wanted.  With War of Magic, we kind of ...

This is not a story that will make all people happy. In War of Magic, we had a requirement that the game would work on netbooks. And the good news was, it did.  But it came at a price: Pixel Shader 2. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with graphic tech, video cards support various types of on-chip programs with the best known one called Pixel Shader. Pixel Shader 2 will work on really old machines going all the way back to the Radeon 9800 series and the Geforce FX cards and t...

There’s been a lot of talking about the character portraits shown in screenshots. One thing to bear in mind: Developer journals are not marketing screenshots. I take them in the debugger while I’m working. It’s the only way we are able to have so many developer journals. That means the lighting, particle effects, etc. are disabled. Here are some of the character portraits for FE:  

How aggressive should monsters be? Make them too nasty and people get frustrated.  Make them too passive and they’re a joke. I’ve got to tweak them in both directions. Gonna have to be a lot of subtlety in the difficulty levels.