I recently wrote about Economics in gaming . It talked about the difference between buying direct vs. buying at a retailer. Retail is a tough nut to crack. Especially these days and especially if you're a smaller developer. Retail has gotten to the point where it's dominated by a relatively small number of suppliers in a given industry.  So when someone else comes along, it's hard to sell a lot of units of its product. One of the reasons for this has to do with the concept of se...

The GalCiv II launch was a much greater success than we ever imagined. Of course, that also meant it was a much bigger load on the servers so we had to keep JoeUser.com down a little longer than we expected. But we're back now! Sorry for any inconvenience.

Due to the popularity of JoeUser.com, we're going to have to schedule a couple days of outage when GalCiv II launches so that all the database bandwidth is available for it.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

This is the second game-play example. It's the same settings as the last one  except I'll be playing as the humans.  The idea is to show you how radically differently two games, even with the same settings, can be.  Random galaxies combined with lots of special events can really make things interesting. Today I shall install Alex (my son's name) as leader of the Terran Alliance. I will be playing on a large galaxy.  I also decided to customize the look of my ships a...

Some of my friends who work in the game industry (you know who you are) have been teasing me about why we put so much effort into low end hardware support.  That is, GalCiv II supports kind of ridiculously low end hardware.  I mean after all, who has an 800Mhz computer?  What gamer has a really low end graphics card?  Those people don't play games. They won't buy games. So why support them? Our view is that it's not low end desktop users that we're targeting. Sure, the...

Aren't they great? No matter where you go, Islam seems to be much the same.

Now you can be Dick Cheney. Time to take out the trash.

Here is a lot from tonight's GalCiv II chat that took place on irc.stardock.com #stardock. There is also a dedicated #galciv channel on there. 18:03.04] (Undoing) AND SO it begins. [18:03.32] (Frogboy) Greetings! [18:03.35] (Frogboy) Thanks for coming by. [18:03.41] (Frogboy) Here's how we're going to do this. [18:03.46] (Frogboy) WE have creatd a channel called #questions [18:03.51] * Nakor changes topic to 'GalCiv II Chat here at 6pm EST Friday - Moderated chat, please join #qu...

JoeUser.com is a pretty popular site.  Ranked in the top 20,000 websites worldwide, it gets a decent chunk of traffic. But compared to some of our other sites, it's a drop in the bucket. We had the site down today as we tried to narrow down what was eating up our database bandwidth. Answer: JoeUser. This Spring we're going to have to revisit how JoeUser is coded and figure out why it's so intensive.  Part of it has to do with how database driven it is.  The content you are s...

This is an example of what a game of Galactic Civilizations II goes like.  What I did is play the game and then took screenshots and provided some commentary.  Each game is quite different from the other, the idea being is that you, the player, are creating your own epic history as you play. Here we go... The galaxy is a dangerous place.  I have set up a game in which I play as the Altarian Republic.  I modified it however. I changed the name to the "Altarian Do...

Just because the game has shipped doesn't mean that development should stop.    Each time I play the game, I play it in a window, in a debugger.  As I get better, I think of new possible strategies and then try to incorporate them into the AI. Tonight I'm in the middle of Drengin/Human Wars XVII.  I've won the previous 16 games and I am...reasonably confident I will win this one as well.  I have this map called "duel" (comes with the game) and I set the Drengin t...

 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 get...

Galactic Civilizations II is less than a week away.  And we will be putting out a demo of the game after it's released.  But we wanted to put some quick gameplay stuff out there.  This is just a little thing we made that shows how the main UI works. If people find this useful, we can do more.  Cheers!

The original back story from 1990... The universe that Galactic Civilizations exists in came long before the game.  They come from a series of manuscripts that I wrote in the late 80s and early 90s.  The stories were titled: The Terran Alliance The Defender Revenge of the Defender Twilight of the Morning Star The Yor Corruption of the Shard As well as 3 not-so-completed manuscripts Guardians of the Telenanth Draginol Mascrinthus Drengin / Terran Wars The first...

I have little patience for racists.  Most racists I encounter fall into two groups: Group 1: People who are indoctrinated to be racists.  They grow up around racist people and become racist themselves. These are the people who will go to ridiculous lengths to "prove" that one race is "better" than another. Group 2: People who confuse race with culture.  They'll say "Look at all those <insert racial group here> doing that? They're natural born <insert insult here>...