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 ...

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...

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...

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. ...

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...

Improvements in Galactic Civilizations II are done completely different than the first one.  It's probably the most radical change to the game-play and probably the most risky since one of the things that has always helped GalCiv was the lack of micro-management.  So we've had to really think about how we want to handle planets. In GalCiv I, most players (myself included) would just go to the governor and have every planet build everything.  This time around, we wanted to l...

So how are the different civilizations in Galactic Civilizations different? The easiest way to illustrate the difference that I can think of is how each of the civilizations would deal with the scenario in which they are driving a car down the road and there's a turtle trying to cross... The Drengin would swerve onto the shoulder in order to squash the turtle. The Arceans would run over the turtle if it were on the road, otherwise they would drive past. The Humans would swerve ...

Galactic Civilizations I didn't have many hot keys.  This time around, we want to have lots of them. Here are some of the preliminary ones (and if we have time, we'll make this configurable -- maybe for the bonus pack). F1 through F4 are different views of the map. 1 Ship List 2 Planet list 3 Research Screen 4 Domestic Policy 5 Foreign Policy 6 Galactic Census 7 Ship Design TAB Find next ship SPACE pass on current ship (give up moves) ENTER end turn ` Toggle grid lines ...

The weapons in GalCiv beta 4 aren't well balanced.  We're moving towards the point when it's time to start thinking about how to balance the weapons and defenses. In general, the idea is that defense technologies will be somewhat cheaper to research and be somewhat cheaper to put on your ship than weapons. But they'll both use up costly space. So what's more important? SIZE or COST?  Cost is the pain that keeps on coming because the Maintainance cost on a military vessel is 3% it...

As I get older or at least busier, I have a lot less toleration for micro management.  I just don't find it fun.  I know lots of people do but I personally hate it.  When I play Civilization IV, for instance, those workers go on A (auto improve) right away.  And I think it works fine.  I'm sure the workers aren't optimal but they're well into the "good enough for me" area. That said, I've always resisted having any micro management issues resolved by computer AI. ...

One of the things that bugs me and bugs others is that some of the numbers, especially for abilities, get morphed when they're factored into your production. That's from play balancing and such. But now that the game's been out a couple weeks, we have been able to play around with the values based on how people play. For instance: Abilities. The way research, social production, and military production are going to work is that players will see X% increase in their production.  Half...

Okay, don't freak out...But one of our developers figured out how to make it so that you can rotate and resize your ship parts once they're already on the ship. Yes, FREE FORM rotation. None of that crappy "rotate 90 degree" crap anymore.  And here's the thing, you can create some really whacky stuff with it.  We're going to have to put out a beta or something because some of this new stuff is too cool to wait until the end of the month.  So for our own sanity, we hope to have...

It's been decided that we are going to do a 1.X.2 release. Don't know when. But there's little tweaks and changes we want to make. The team fixed some glitches that have been reported on the forums. But for me, it gives me a chance to start having some fun with the AI. Stupid AI At lower levels, I want the AI to play stupidly. I don't want them to just be super smart but economically starved. There are a bunch of APIs in there for the AI that will cause it to make "newbie" mistakes.&n...

World of Warcraft is one of my favorite games. I was in the beta from the start of it and when released, re-did my Paladin. And it was good.  I didn't really pay much attention to all the numbers. I knew that doing X was better than doing Y.  I didn't really know how much better it was, I just knew it was from the description.  My Paladin today doesn't resemble too much my Paladin of that initial launch (let alone the beta). A lot of that is from player feedback.  Third p...

In a perfect world, we could release an update every single day.  But from a marketing point of view, that would be a disaster. You need pauses between releases in order to justify announcements and the like.  If you're doing a daily update, a site like Blues News or Gamespot is not going to mention it, they couldn't. I've mentioned this previously but when I play the game, I have it in the debugger.  Previously, I only had my own insticts to go off on when it came to tweaking ...