There has been an ongoing debate on another blog over whether the bible has contradictions on it. On the one hand you have the skeptics. In the middle the realists. And on the other side, for lack of a better word, you have the dogmatics. There are countless perceived contradictions in the bible. But whether they are truly a contradiction depends on how far you are willing to read between the lines. One of the most blatant contradictions in my opinion is the account of how Jud...
Most of the team took the rest of the week off to recover. It's been quite a time. Now I have to start catching up. I wrote up an article for IGN today for their feature on the GalCiv races. So you'll soon get to see the first public shots of the Dread Lords in action. Their ships look quite a bit different from the other ones. I've taken a couple days away from playing the game so that I can get a fresh perspective to decide what to focus on for the Bonus Pack. Bas...
Last Friday we went code-complete. That means, no touching the code except to fix something. We had spent the past 2 weeks in the final QA process -- fixing bugs, typos, grammar, optimizing performance, and adding usability features. We had also used that time to continue improving the AI here and there along with tweaking the campaign missions, game mechanics, etc. So over the weekend we went through the really hard tests. That is, making it as solid as it ca...
Game development is a labor of love. At least for me. After two years of working on Galactic Civilizations II in varying degrees and in fact having lived with the "franchise" now for 12 years from the original OS/2 version, the code-freeze has been really difficult for me. Every time I play the game, I see something different that I could tweak, improve in some slight way. We're way beyond the "it's good enough to ship". As some of our external and internal gamma teste...
We've talked about this in previous entries but in GalCiv II you play as any of 10 races and depending on which race you pick the AI will choose different dialog to talk to you with. Moreover, depending on your ethical alignment and their ethical alignment you will get different variations. There's plenty of "generic" dialog in there as well but there are pages and pages of unique dialog that only show up if you play as the right race. So tonight I was playing as the Drengin Empir...
Steven Den Beste's site seems to be down but I had a copy fo an article he wrote some time ago that talks about the reason why Noah's Arc is a fairy tale. There are many many reasons why Noah's Arc is fiction but this is one of the better arguments I've seen. Steven's site is located here . I just had the distinct displeasure of encountering someone who is a Biblical literalist (and who actually believes that all evidence supports the fairy tale of Noah's Ark). Let's review the s...
Before Civilization 4 came out, we were kind of on our own in terms of turn based user interface. I don't want to say that no turn based strategy games came out since GalCiv I back in 2003 but I hadn't played any extensively. So when Civilization 4 came out, there were a bunch of very innovative user interface tweaks. I also really liked the Civpedia. The Civpedia stores a lot of information that is presented to the user at the time of execution. But there's a lot of good st...
The GalCiv II campaign has been a lot tougher to do than we had thought it would be. A couple years ago, we whipped up a campaign for the GalCiv expansion pack called Altarian Prophecy and so this time around we thought it would be pretty much the same except we'd make it more dynamic where you could lose missions and go to alternative missions instead. We were wrong. It's all in the balancing. First of all, the main feature of GalCiv II is the stand alone "sand box" games.&nbs...
I'm glad I'm not doing translation. There's a lot of it. For a strategy game, GalCiv has a lot of text. GalCiv II may have more text in it than most RPGs. This really stems from the decision to be a single player game. By focusing on the single player game, we can sit down and put in per-race dialog on a per situation basis. Most people won't see a fraction of it. Play as the Torians and you'll get a different set of dialog and reactions than if you played as ...
Translation was an after-thought in GalCiv I. It was amazing it even worked as the fonts in GalCiv I were bitmapped. That means every character -- every letter -- was literally an individually encoded picture. Translation to a non-indoEuropean dialect would have been out of the question. But this time, we used the True Type Engine that is part of DirectX 9c (this is actually the feature that breaks compatibility with really old Intel integrated graphics -- not the fancy 3D ...
Match #5: The Settings The Drengin and I are playing on a tiny galaxy. Just them and me. They are set to "intelligent" which means they play their best game without any advantages. The goal is to keep tuning the AI so that at map setting that at intelligent they can play a very tough game against experienced players without cheating. The War has begun.. While I could use a pre-made map, I am also doing this testing to make sure and tune the random map generator so that it c...
While beta testers seem pretty pleased with the performance, there is always room for improvement...A LOT OF ROOM. Users with beta 5 will be astounded by the improvements in performance. Game loading speeds cut by 90% over beta 5. Save game speeds cut to 30% the time of beta 5. But there's still more. The key is profiling. That is, you use tools that literally tell you how many ms the game spends in different areas. The Green Reaper finally graduated t...
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...