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Growing Pains Brad Wardell
Executive Producer of Demigod
CEO and President
Stardock
Back in 2003, we developed the PC strategy game Galactic Civilizations. It was published by Strategy First and was a great success – for Strategy First. Unfortunately, Strategy First filed bankruptcy while owing us over a million dollars. We made virtually nothing from the game. I sometimes wonder how different things would have gone had Stardock had an extra million dollars to invest in its digital distribution efforts (which led to Stardock Central in 2003 and later Impulse in 2008). But oh well.
After the debacle of Galactic Civilizations I, we decided we would start publishing our own games. We had a lot of ideas on how we thought game publishing should be done and worked them out during the release of Galactic Civilizations II in 2006. We also decided that we would start publishing third-party games so that other game developers wouldn’t have to go through what we had gone through.
In 2008, we released Sins of a Solar Empire. The partnership between publisher Stardock and developer Ironclad was unlike anything that I’ve seen before in our industry. The teams were integrated together such that Ironclad did many tasks that are usually the exclusive purview of the publisher and Stardock got heavily involved in the design of the game. The results speak for themselves.
This April, we will publish the second game developed externally – Demigod. With Demigod, we have taken the integration of the two teams to a whole new level. Having literally spent weeks at Gas Powered Games working closely with lead designer Mike Marr on the game’s design and coordinating actual development efforts by the Stardock development team and the GPG development team, I think we’ve really put something special together.
I write this while on board a plane coming back from the latest 5 day stay in Seattle working with the GPG team to get beta 3 out the door. It has been an absolute blast. There are people at GPG whose talent are just insane and whose contributions don’t get the attention they deserve.
As the confidence that Demigod was going to be a great game increased, so too has the initiative of the team members.
Let’s face it, back in September, we weren’t sure how Demigod would turn out. It was something quite different. Some would compare it to DotA but it has really taken its own path. But as Beta 3 has come together and we’ve all seen it come together we feel pretty confident that we have a pretty big hit on our hands – if we can get the word out anyway.
It’s been fun watching the team’s enthusiasm grow each time I visit. The morale gets stronger and the confidence greater.
Getting a firm hand on things
Back in September, Mike Marr (lead designer) and I had this engine and we had a budget to work with. Our friend John Comes had left to take up an opportunity at a brand-new studio and the game was really his baby. So Mike and I adopted this baby and over the last several month made the game our own.
We made a number of decisions early on that are only starting to bear fruit in Beta 3. First, we decided that we wanted to make a game that was very straight forward to play. A game that people could sit down and play and finish in a half hour or less.
Mike Marr had been the designer on SupCom: Forged Alliance and combined with my experience from Sins, we knew that as cool as those games were, if you want a game with a really vibrant on-line experience we’d need to modify the design so that games were shorter so that people’s “investment” in a given battle was more reasonable.
The other, riskier, decision was that we would need to create a bullet proof multiplayer system for the PC. While hard core gamers understand port forwarding on their router and such, the average user did not. That meant we would have to develop something relatively new – an external server that does nothing but handle all that kind of thing for the player.
With beta 3, we have started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Connectivity is still buggy but the architecture is still there, now it’s just a matter of fixing bugs rather than building the features.
The amazing team at Gas Powered Games and Stardock in action
Probably the coolest thing is just watching these amazing people working together.
For instance, as Gas Powered Games I’m in regular contact with Bartosz Kijanka who was heavily involved in Total Annihilatoin. He’s the Executive Producer of Demigod at Gas Powered Games. We’ve had a blast working together on this project.
Then there’s poor Shana Markham. I say poor because when I’m visiting, I violate every project management protocol by trying to bypass people to get my suggestions in. She’s the one who implements a lot of the balance changes. She’s also, easily, the best Demigod player I’ve encountered so far.
In the last couple months I’ve spent a lot of time working with Patrick Meade who is the Lead Engineer on Demigod. All “real” coding goes through him and we have a good time talking about different ways to architect the multiplayer features, thread safety, etc.
There’s also Caryn Law, better known as “Hell Chick” who is heavily involved in all things UI. Demigod does almost everything internally in LUA or as I like to call it, that evil evil scripting language. One of the reasons I think Demigod will be so successful is because it has people like Caryn who come up with cool looking stuff and takes a lot of personal pride in the quality of her work.
Another outstanding GPG contributor I worked with on this trip was Steve Thompson. He’s one of those people who can take a concept and make it incredible and (to use the cliche) thinks outside of the box. The Demigod box was the project he was finishing up while I was visiting. It would have been already done except I meddled in the box design up to the 11th hour.
Another person at GPG I really have enjoyed working with is Howard Mostrom. There’s no equivalent of him at Stardock. He walks around with a sound capturing device to add new and cool sounds to the game.
Speaking of sounds, John Lowrie who did voices for Total Annihilation came back to do some awesome voice over work for Demigod which shows up in Beta 3.
Now, I’m just touching the tip of the iceberg here. I could mention Bert Bingham for all the amazing things he does but, he killed my Demigod one too many times.
I’m working on the user manual now and like I said, I’m barely scratching the surface of all the cool people at GPG.
And I haven’t even mentioned Chris Taylor who has more vision in his pinky finger than I do in my entire body. Me, I’m just a gamer. I’ll rip off ideas from other games without an ounce of guilt. I’m a total hack. Chris Taylor, by cont流氓软件王t, is the real deal. He actually comes up with new ideas – that subsequently guys like me rip off and put into our games. Similarly, the GPG team benefits from guys like Jake McMahon, their President who has been with Chris since the Total Annihilation days at Cavedog.
…Meanwhile, at Stardock, we’ve got people like Cari Begle who is Patrick Meade’s counterpart in implementing code. I am pretty sure that Demigod is the first time Gas Powered Games has had the “publisher” checking out source code to work on in tangent. It’s worked out extremely well so far.
I also get to work with Pat Ford who I’ve been friends with since before I was old enough to drive a car. He’s the man behind Impulse Reactor’s database goodiness.
Heck, with Demigod, people from all over Stardock have gotten involved. Even the WindowBlinds team is contributing. For instance, Demigod is scheduled to include Impulse overlay technology (similar to what Games for Windows Live and Steam provide) where users can chat and pull up stats by hitting a hot key in game.
And so we see the light at the end of the tunnel…
With Beta 3 the game starts to come together. Like all Stardock published games, I suspect Demigod will be another “Where the hell did this awesome game come from?” like Sins of a Solar Empire and GalCiv II.
The collective game design and development experience between the two teams is awesome. Now we just have to finish the game and get it out there! |
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发表于 2009-2-24 15:08:13
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