And so beta 2 of Galactic Civilizations II has arrived.  We still have a lot of work ahead of us.  But I can tell you from even these early betas that we're very excited about the direction the game is heading.  Some of the new game mechanics over the first one have created all kinds of new strategic opportunities that simply didn't exist in the first one.  But before I start giving examples of that, let me talk about beta 2. First off, the beta still does not have the fi...

OS/2 is a lesson every ambitious game developer needs to know about.  OS/2 in 1994 was so much better than any alternatives that it should have been the defacto OS.  It ran DOS, Windows, and OS/2 programs side by side. It was very stable (rarely crashed).  It had a very easy to use, object oriented interface (Similar to what we finally have in Windows XP) and it had preemptive multitasking and a DirectX capability called DIVE. Yet, despite all that, despite being from IBM, Wi...

Long long ago there was a hyper-advanced civilization that had colonized the galaxy. They are called the Precursors.  Eventually, they split into two races who went to war with one another.  Just as the final battle between the two was being fought, they disappeared.  This was hinted at in the first game but not truly explored. Thousands of years later, new civilizations slowly started making their way into space.  But they lacked the ability to travel great distances.&nbs...

This week we're starting to work on the Civilization Manager.  Galactic Civilizations I didn't have a Civilization manager and some people thought that was definitely something we should have.  And we agree.  BTW, the screenshot doesn't have anything to do with it, just wanted to have something pretty to go along with this blog entry. So what does the Civilization Manager have on it?  Four things: Civilization Summary This is a screen that displays in brief informat...

Spent a lot of time this weekend working on the game. There's just so much to do. Maintainence costs of planetary improvements weren't implemented which messed up the economic balancing. The cost of production wasn't being correctly calculated.  Right now, there's still an issue with production bonuses which I'll hae to work on. The AI is building fleets. Not well. But I had to turn it off because it's made the game very unstable. We'll have to fix that this week. The AI now des...

With Beta 4 less than two weeks away, things are starting to get pretty exciting here.  We're in bug-fix mode on a ton of the newer features.  For example, fleets are in and they're pretty fun to watch fight it out.  There will be polishing on those screens until we ship I expect since making a fleet battle look cool is a lot of work.  I've been trying to tune the game play a bit as we wait to get the fleet stuff ironed out.  Can't really do the AI with fleets...

Beta 4 of Galactic Civilizations is the first gameplay beta of the game.  It's as this point players will get a decent idea of whether we're on the right track. Beta 3 and before were basically engine tests. We needed to find out what compatibility issues we were going to run into and work around them.  But beta 4 is different. At that point, the clock starts.  We will have from November 1 to Christmas break to essentially "finish" the game.  After that, it's just polish. ...

Holy cow are things going fast now.  Up till now, it's been engine building. And even now, it's still engine building. But now we're starting to get into gameplay features which are far more fun. Fleets are in. Totally in. Of course, at the AI guy, I have to get the AI to effectively use them.  I just finished working on the AI's handling of the planetary improvements.  The planet surface code is all done with STL which I'm a bit sketchy with.  So my first crack at it was ...

We've been so busy lately that we haven't had time to do much in the way of journals.  Things have been going a mile a minute. We're internally working on what will eventually be considered beta 3B. It's the last beta drop before we move onto beta 4 which is due out just before Halloween.  What we want to do is get all the non-diplomacy, non-campaign stuff done so that when we move towards beta 4, we're feeling pretty good about the core parts of the game. Beta 3A, which is the vers...

The team is getting features in like a well oiled machine.  The new research screen just totally rocks. Kudos to Mudflap and Mormegil for getting that stuff humming.  BoogieBack and the Elf Girl (doncha just love these handles) made good progress for getting the new star base system in and the new freighters in. Our newest team member, Jesse (no cool handle yet), has started on the ship battles.  We want the ship battles to be really impressive and we want ships to show damage....

Most of my week on Galactic Civilizations II was spent doing game-balancing.  That meant messing with the various .XML files that determine how long technology takes to research, how much different weapons and other ship items should cost and how powerful they should be.  The result was that a ton of changes were made to the values of these things. For example, the weapons used to scale way too fast IMO.  You could quickly end up with ships doing 300 damage and that starts to b...

People with fancy new monitors make me mad. That's because I don't have a fancy new monitor.  But Paul Boyer, the UI designer behind GalCiv II has a new one.  See the screenshot there? That's from his monitor. There's been so much going on.  I didn't get to bed until 5am last night.  The number of touches, tweaks, and enhancements to make the game "fun" has been immense. For me, I'm been working on balance. Making sure the game is fun and challenging.  This has...

So much of a strategy game, particularly a single player one comes down to little things like pacing. If things cost too much, it's too slow and boring.  If things cost too little, then things move too fast and nothing has value. That also holds true to the difficulty levels. How hard should it be? How aggressive should the computer players be?  For me, what I've tried to do is make it so that I can beat the game at "Intelligent" (for the AI players) but just barely. At higher le...

The hours are starting to get to us.  Stardock, as a company, is 7/8's a Windows desktop software developer and 1/8th game developer/publisher. At least, that's how revenue in 4th quarter came out to be.  It's not that the games do so badly but rather our other products are so popular. But right now, nearly everyone in the office is on Galactic Civilizations II.  One thing that really hurt us is turn-over.  In all the years we've done games, we've never had anyone...

It's been a productive holiday season.   The AI that existed in Beta 5 (public) is dead. It's gone now. And it won't be remembered fondly. Not by me at least.  It functioned.  But the fact is, in a game that has no multiplayer the standard of quality on AI should be very very high.  It isn't enough for a game AI to be challenging.  The AI needs to be more than that.  It needs to play like a human being.  Much of what I've done this holiday is go through an...