Warning: If you’re not into game development, you will probably find this entry very boring.
While I wait for my items to sell on the Galactic Trade Market in SWTOR, I am also working on Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.
At this point, we have the largest beta group any Stardock game has ever had. Tens of thousands of you now have in your hands the first beta of Fallen Enchantress. The goal of this is to help us eliminate instability, identify late-game performance issues, find out how people play the game and evaluate balance, user interface quirks, and overall “fun”.
Introductions
To get started, I should introduce some of our key players.
Myself, I’m Brad Wardell. My day job is President & CEO of Stardock Corp. which has two entities attached to it – Stardock Software (which makes our consumer software and enterprise software which has historically been what pays the bills) and Stardock Entertainment (Which makes the games). A year ago, there was a third business unit called Impulse, Inc. which took care of digitally distributing our games and apps as well as those for third parties. We sold this unit to GameStop last year and as a result, I have enough available time to be talking to you and actually being involved in the game development process. While Stardock has been actively looking to recruit a lead developer (hint hint), it was decided internally that as of November 1, 2011 I would step in to take on the role of Lead Developer on Fallen Enchantress. My particular specialty is multithreaded software development.
The true key to Fallen Enchantress’s fun factor has been Derek “Kael” Paxton. He was the author of the well known Fall From Heaven mod for Civilization IV. He is the one that has brought design discipline to the team. That means making choices. Fallen Enchantress is first and foremost a strategy game in which the world itself is your first enemy to be dealt with before you can even think of dealing with your other foes. Besides being the designer, he is also the Project Manager (in game speak “Producer”). Nothing goes in without his approval and this disciplined approach is main reason that the beta you see before you is as good as it is.
We also have a number of Stardock veterans from Galactic Civilizations II on Fallen Enchantress. My friends Jesse “CodeCritter” Brindle, Cari “Elf” Begle, and Paul “Mormegil” Boyer are all well known to our community. Jesse and Cari didn’t get to have much time on War of Magic as they were mostly involved on Impulse related projects. I’ve asked Jesse to take the lead on graphics performance and Cari is helping across the board on game play coding. The amazing art you see in the game is a combination of Leo (no cool handle) and Mormegil. They’ve been asked to enliven the world environment (i.e. eradicate the “blah” remnants from WOM).
That’s just a few of the people involved, there’s another dozen+ others but these are the people who get to hear my whining and complaining the most.
Whining and complaining
My job is to try to execute as best I can on Derek’s design. On some things, I take care of directly. On other things, I have to complain to Jesse or Cari or Paul (mostly poor Paul).
So what are some of the things we complain about?
Examples: Why do the mountains not look that distinct? The interface requires me to move my mouse too much around. It takes too many clicks to add improvements. The late game turn performance is slow. The AI needs better units to choose from. The land needs more variance. The world needs more distinction between things I care about and background. The quests need more hand holding. The sound effects are repetitive and horrible. The music doesn’t seem to progress in tempo. I need more spells. And on…and on….and on…
Which brings us to this blog
If you’ve managed to survive this long into this entry, today I’m going to play on a large map with a gazillion players. I am going to play at Normal difficulty and I’m going to try to make the game get as slow as I possibly can. I am going to try to crash the game. I am going to wreck this game. That’s my job.
And you, the victim of this blog, will get to see the crashes, the stupid mistakes I find in my code, and my griping on balance, user interface, music, etc.).
A word of caution
If you aren’t in the beta, please understand, my job here is to criticize the game. My critique of Galactic Civilizations II, which I designed, was that it was essentially a soulless piece of crap with shoddy AI, terrible carpal-tunnel UI, mindless clickfest. And that’s a game that got a 93 metacritic score. So you can imagine what my critiques of the beta of this game are.
A key lesson learned from WOM is that if you get too close to the project to the point you’re playing it non-stop and making a lot of the content is that you lose objectivity. I actually thought WOM was a great game when it shipped. Then I took a short vacation, came back, played it and went “Oh, Dear, God. What hath we done?” Lesson learned, don’t do 100+ hours a week for 3 months and don’t confuse the fun you have making the game with the fun playing the game.
Anyway, point being: I’m going to be flaming the game throughout this journal. The goal is to make the BETA version better so that when people get the final version it is the awesome game people are looking for.
Let the Butchering Begin…
First, I’m going to see if I can cheese up a custom sovereign and faction…
Like all good hearted people, I wish that all races were Smurf-Like…
I’m going to play 18 other players…
Expert Tip:
Fallen Enchantress defaults to running at your desktop resolution. If you are going to be playing a long game, I recommend lowering your desktop resolution to maximize performance.
The Game Starts
I am already regretting choosing deep blue as my color.
Complaint 1: Champions vs. Everyone else
It’s a fine line. You want champions to matter but you don’t want to make it about collecting champions and steam rolling. The basic problem I see is that champions have too much base HP imo. We used to have it a lot less but then they were pointless. So it’s something we’re placing with.
Complaint 2: UI of the research window
If you don’t actually click on the graphic, it won’t switch tabs. This creates a little fatigue after several hours. The graphic itself is transparent so I go code hunting…
Complaint 3: Long end game turn lengths
There is an inncoulous check for city contiguity that gets very expensive late game which I’ve changed to only care about if it’s humans since the AI just uses the auto place system anyway. This little tweak just reduced the turn times by 75%.
Complaint 4: Frame rate when lots of stuff on screen
This might as well be a complaint about reality. You want to see lots of stuff but you don’t want to pay the price. Well, I don’t want to pay the price but I still want to see lots of stuff.
But the human eye is easily tricked. It’s just a matter of giving the illusion that the player is seeing the same lots of stuff as they zoom out. Unfortunately, I know zilch on DirectX programming. So I’m just kind of going through the code and trying to learn it on the fly to see if I can help in this area.
My first attempt at reducing the number of things being painted. On the one hand, the frame rate is really high…
Too extreme. Now, I’m learning this with you right now (on a weekday, I’d just bug Jesse or someone).
So there is our start. 25fps.
Reducing the number of children to 1 gives us..1fps. A dead end. Oh and I lost my UI.
Trying to crash the game: Tips and tricks
Under the covers, the game revolves around having a ton of things going on at once. I hate “Please wait…” screens. To eliminate that, we use threads. Lots and lots of threads. And it can be tricky with so many different hardware configs.
The best way to get the game to crash is to have it autosave every turn and try clicking on the UI everywhere. That’ll expose if someone accidentally tried to directly update the UI rather than sending a message request to update the UI.
That is, you can’t just say MySoldier->SetMovesLeft(defaultamount) and in that call have it update the UI right there. It needs to send a message to the UI and then be processed.
The best testers for this are people with crappy computers and terrible OSes (single core, Windows XP users). We don’t officially support single core CPU’s because they’re so old but their terrible performance helps us find bugs.
Complaint 5: The world needs more…umph
This is one of my main gripes. A long time ago, the goal of the look of the game was a kind of cell-shaded look. This evolved into Illustrated look. But illustrated doesn’t need to mean desaturated and brown.
Now, mind you, I’m no artist. But just playing around with Photoshop I got this (barren land):
So in the above picture, I took the dullest looking area and tweaked it. Tell me what you think. I don’t have an artistic eye.
Here’s a starting location.
Desert
Fallen lands
Like I said, I’m not an artist so I just messed with the textures. But I’ll pass these ideas on to the art team to see what they think.
Here I messed with the color of the water.
I went through the comments. My work on FE revolves around coding, not game design – other than making suggestions. I did pass on ideas to Derek.
I kind of went off track by playing around with the art stuff for fun.
I rewrote one of the city functions to hopefully improve performance. There is that little…stutter I see when I place an improvement. I also made it so that you can double click on an improvement in the build menu and have it auto place it.
Champion Stacking
One of the things humans do in the game is they just toss all their champions in one stack. This isn’t surprising, it is a good strategy with the way the game is currently set up.
One of the things on Derek’s list has been to split experience up amongst the units in the group (rather than all the units simply getting all of it). It was supposed to be in Beta 1 but just didn’t get done. In hindsight, I wish I had gotten this in sooner because the champion stacking combined with this creates a real imbalance.
It’s in now though.
More playing around with the art.
Trying to figure out why sounds cut out. The state of sound drivers on the PC is deplorable (outside the really mainstream brands – that is what you’re really paying for, quality drivers). But we can program things to work around driver issues.
Debugging
Why does god hate me?
Yea, I know how that feels.
The champion stack of doom.
Ideas of my own:
I think research is the first problem- it's just too slow- which means early game troops are too weak, which makes champions too strong in the early game.
One other idea: mundane troops, when they attack champions, can "surround" them, giving them a chance to knock them prone. maybe # of troops * 10%?
When do we get to hear about the game shafer is working on?
I'm using the "quote" button all the time. I tried this time to quote two excerpts: one from the post and the other from a reply, and I got this (I hope this time it will look the same; edit: yeah, it looked like this):
Oh. So I must forget about playing FE on my oldie Pentium 4 2.8 GHz, 1.5 GB RAM, GeForce 8600 GTS (256 MB)? Really?
[quote who="Frogboy" reply="6" id="3068847"]Jon is lead designer on a different game that's in development.
Interesting. Is it a Elemental game? Is it the old-school RPG Stardock was to develop?
FrogBoy do you find the lack of differences in tactical maps annoying or is it fine to you? just interested in your opinion since this is a complaint that gets leveled over and over at game by various people.
I've always thought that perhaps a way to "fix" champions would be that if they fall and the overall battle is won on your side, they get one of the injury perks they currently have, and if that side loses the battle, they die; perhaps with some chance for escape tied into a perk or tied into territorial control. They should be the heroes; stars of the show, but at the same time there should be some risk/reward metric there. A question of whether you want to commit to a battle creates a choice and interesting choices are what drive good gameplay.
I've been playing Fallen Enchantress extensively since I got the beta last Thursday and I am overall very, very impressed with it. The overall game design is much tighter than War of Magic's and it's just generally a more cohesive experience. Aside from some balance issues (the champions and obvious things like Maul), there are a few things I'd look at:
1) City improvements. I like the idea of being rewarded a selection of buildings--some more rare than others--upon each city level up, but I think a lot of them don't quite have enough "umph." We need more "cool" buildings like the Guardian statues, and the ones that make produced units have certain abilities, but a lot of the more utility ones don't really feel powerful enough. It's not a good thing when I sit and regard a building that reduces the building cost of improvements and try to figure out whether it'd actually be an economic boon compared to its upkeep. I think a broad solution would be to make these buildings far more powerful and desired (where there's say, several each game you really really hope to come across), but at the same time possessing drawbacks that make you think as to whether it's worth the upkeep cost of maintaining.
2) Some of the aesthetics. The overall look of the game is considerably more refined, interesting, and visually complex than WoM, but a few things in addition to the ones you pointed out stick out to me. Like the waves that don't actually touch the shores/cliffsides; the odd colour that borders get when they go over water, the fact that paths and roads aren't nearly so visually noticeable as they should be (and the road generator generally produces a huge mess, at that), and the fact that some of the walking animations in tactical combat are actually a little too fast. It seems sort of silly to me when someone's feet are such a blur they don't even appear to be walking, or when a horse zips by as they do, on the NORMAL speed setting, and these other aesthetic issues are sore thumbs in an otherwise good canvas.
3) Traits and abilities are great! Let's have more of them. Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic the Gathering once said that the reason Magic is interesting as a game is that it sets up a number of very basic rules and then proceeds to break them in a measured way. I think this kind of thing--expressed through traits, abilities, and city improvements--are an important way to add depth and flavour to the game. We've got a lot of solid, cohesive basic systems that work together now, in a way we didn't in War of Magic (which had a lot of good ideas that were kind of tossed together and kind of worked during certain patches to make a functional game--a game I did still enjoy!), so let's go about seeing what ways we can twist and modify those rules, and let the player step outside of them every once in awhile.
Just my thoughts about the modified graphics：
Yes, a thousand times yes! Of my biggest gripes with the current build is that I simply can't see clearly what goes on in the world. I feel like everything just blends into a mushy background. Those screenshots are obviously a bit exaggerated, but I think that increasing the contrast between elements and making the colours more distinct in the way to go. Just don't make the forsakeb lands too purple, I would hate to spend hours looking at that colour...
how to make this a 90+ metacritic game: specialized, well designed troops, more specialization in each faction, steal ideas from warmachine, well designed and unique tactical maps. And obviously: balance, balance, balance. Buy a couple of boxes of warmachine, learn the rules, play on a desk with the team. Look at the best tactical games that's come out over the years, how close are the tactical battles to this in war of magic?
(frozen synapse, x-com, jagged alliance 2).
the tactical maps needs to be much bigger in some instances so you can have what looks like a miniature war game battlefield like warhammer 40.k or warmachine. you'll have areas with forests, areas with obstacles to hide behind, rough terrain that slows down movement, areas that gives height advantages. the player has to be able to position his troops to defend these important spots and use them to his/hers advantage.
This would make each tactical battle far too long. X-Com suffered from this and it made it drag later in the game.
note "in some instances". the size and type of battle field would depend on how big the armies are.
And finally my system is good for something again. Proud to help out
why does the tactical battles in heroes of might and magic feel more involving and interesting than the ones in fallen enchantress? difference in troops between the different factions. the differences are not as big as one would like but it shows how important it is with differences in units between faction.
This is a gem of an idea. It seems that the graphical limitations allow for many more units to be on the battlefield than what we can currently get. Assuming that tactical runs the same as strategic, the number of units and the size of the map could be much larger. Tying map size to unit count is brilliant. I would like to have much larger maps for a 9 vs 9 battle for instance.
On a modding note, this would rock for modders that want to explore the limits of max units in a battle. I plan on having Conjurers who summon many units during a battle, potentially getting 6-10 more units than are allowed from the strategic map. They will be weaker, but you will get the feeling that you are totally surrounded. It would greatly help if larger armies could get larger maps. A tile editor function on the Cartographer's Table would also not go amiss.
I really like the modified desert. Stands out much better from the normal bleh wastelands.
I don't understand why Brad (who admits he's not an artist) has to modify the artwork to make it look better and present it to the art team. Shouldn't the art team be presenting Brad with their improvements? I mean, isn't that their job?!
yeah it's kind of odd, i agree with that.
Might I suggest http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHG6BhqZY74&feature=endscreen&NR=1 for you instead of keep saying that FE should be like Warmachine? Its getting a bit old. Also, you seem to fail to grasp the concept of "Beta" and keep comparing games that are finished (HoMM) to a product without an actual release date ( FE).
Brad's playing critic for his team, and since he is also the CEO, he can suggest improvements. Internal criticism is good. If you are face-forward in the mud all day, eventually all mud looks the same. The guy standing alongside the line can see you're in a different kind of mud, however.
Yes, but it might also require a rework of the tactical battle system, and that would be... time consuming.
that's an action rpg set in the warmachine universe as far as i can tell, not really the same as a turnbased miniature tabletop game. kind of a shame, i got excited when i saw the link. also i'm just pointing towards warmachine because they have brought loads of innovation to turnbased battle that can be stolen by anyone.
Everything I proposed works well with the current system. I have been looking at the XML for tactical and this would even be something you could tweak the AI to perform well at. The only real change would be a calculation of army size before combat.
Stolen? So you are saying that we should privateer the intellectual property of Privateer Press? Do you know what copyright means ?
You seemed to have transformed the texture to make the game world look more like an actual cloth map. Which from a stylistic point of view is... Interesting. The only problem I see with it is the clash of the character/objects on the map. If you could somehow blur the line between those, then I think you'd have a very different feel to the world, a bit more .. earthy? Tangible maybe? I mean having the world textured like that could give it a "open the box, lay out the map, place the pieces, roll the dice, happy-fun-times" feel to it I think. As for the water color.. I dig it.
I am on a small land mass - I've recruited the ever-faithful Janusk and Elisabeta, conquered Relias, and have one more enemy on my small continent. Apart from beating them (and building my cities), there is nothing else to do - no more champions to recruit, very few enemies or places of interest, and no way to move to the other islands. What now? What gets me coming back to play more?
Borrowing good ideas as part of a new game isn't copyright violation.
I do think the tactical side of things could use some expansion, the same tactics seem to be best every time right now , but that's a lower priority compared to some other problems right now.
The big thing right now balance-wise I think is champ/army/monster balance. I think champ/monster and monster/army is fine, it's army/champ that needs to be looked at I think, which means that armies probably need some sort of specific buff vs champs.
I think that rebalancing heroes/regular troops are needed in order to get a better feel for this game and providing input for the beta. Right now the beginning of every game is fun but then all you need is really 2 heroes to win the game. Regular units is a waste of time and resources and upgrading them is just impossible. If the goal is to have regular units alongside heroes then this should be a priority in order to get feedback on how the game plays and if it is fun when it plays as intended.
Currently I like the game and I enjoy it until my heroes are level 5, then it goes down hill from there. I tried using regular units and cut back on hero use but it just doesn't work and the cost for upgrading units is either a bug or unrealistic. Right now regular units are bad and drain your resources.
I would suggest lowering the hp for heroes and tuning down the magic just abit while making upgrades for units cost a lot less and abit more effective. This way outfitting a veteran unit will make it useful and something you care about.
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