ShadowTiger

Comparing it to Baldur's Gate... okay you win. I'll bite.

The game seems interesting but I don't think I will enjoy it. What I really want out of a spaceship simulator is to make tactical decisions like slingshot around that planet and use the momentum to exit the pull of the sun before it goes supernova. Simply choosing whether to target their weapons or their shields is too bland for me, especially since there is very little difference in most cases. I generally hate games where it comes down to a simple optimization equation, especially with all the luck that disrupts that. I want to make difficult choices that a computer can't solve, engage in complex interactions with other ship captains (bluff, intimidate) and use advanced technology to get an edge (think Jango Fett vs Obi Wan in Episode 2) Its a great concept for a game but a little to casual and simplistic I think. I'm sure I will pick it up eventually for a few hours of enjoyment.

This was an interesting show but usually you were assuming there is only one teacher. In my group its usually three of us working together to teach one new player. In that case it really helps to have one person take charge and the others only chime in if something was skipped over or the explanation is unclear.

If the components for your board game are simple you can also put them on this store https://www.thegamecrafter.com/ I used it to print out a prototype just for my own use but you can open it up for others to buy at whatever markup you want over the base cost. You can contact successful kickstarter projects and ask them for help, that usually works.

I think the problem is that people's initial impression of kickstarter is that it is a fundraising platform. It isn't really, from my experience of failure. Its really more of a fund motivation platform, where you can take an existing audience and give them an opportunity/reason to send some money your way. I am sure there are some exceptions, but you really need lots of connections to get publicity around your project and even then if you don't have a large fanbase already you are fighting tough odds. That being said, I really enjoy backing projects and I think that, once refined, it will be the best way for content creators to get funding for their next project. There is a cool thing that you can do with kickstarter as well: Funding free content. http://www.kickstart...r-force-returns The Cyber Force comic book is a great example where the creator simply wants to fund giving away free copies to stores around the country in an effort to get people into their local store and perhaps reinvigorate that market. I really hope that more content creators will use kickstarter to get as much money that they *need* and then release the project for free once they reach their goal, which is basically what Tom vs Bruce is. I threw some money towards Tom vs Bruce purely based on their appearance in this podcast so please make sure they appear regularly!!!

This was an interesting interview and I will spill some out for the dead strategy portion of Atom Zombie Smasher.

I am an indie developer but I got my start making custom maps for Starcraft and Warcraft 3. I made a tower defense when those were just catching on in the early 2000's and I have worked on making RPGs, a pirate ship simulator, and more stuff all in the Warcraft 3 editor. Since it lets you do scripting/programing but also has built in art assets it really is the easiest way to make a game. In HS I took a remake of Asteroids in Java and I edited the source code to add in lots of new weapons and was going to turn it into a scrolling shoot em up but I lost interest. I started working on a 2D platformer in Unity but it is a really big learning curve for me, I would suggest making stuff in the Starcraft 2 editor unless you are trying to learn very specific skills. As for as design... I spent many hours growing up with graph paper making essentially spread sheets for various game ideas. I very much like working with numbers, hit points, damage, abilities... so it was lots of fun for me. Still do it in my free time once in a while.

In response to biz: 1. There are several contract AI programmers which do as you suggest, travel between games and only work on AI. 2. Having the AI decide its actions during your turn is a basic principle that developers should use when possible. It can be very complex though, Fallen Enchantress has it but it likely contributes to the instability of the beta. It doesn't really help much if the player is hammering the end turn button in a 4x game. 3. The AI can't always cheat. In a game like Chess... the only way it could cheat is by making the game asymmetrical, like defeat the opponent without one of your pawns. If you want a fair challenge, then you have to have an AI that performs well. Also, many players despise cheating AI, here is a small forum thread that shows that: http://forums.elementalgame.com/404724 In response to podcast: As a modder, I think that allowing the community to modify and improve the AI for the game is usually a good idea. I am not sure how well this would work for smaller indie titles as there may not be enough talented people in their audiences. I think that one big thing that all game developers should do to help their AI is to simply budget some post-release work on the AI. There are several games which put little or no work into the AI after release, often failing to patch exploits and bugs that are easy to fix and would improve the game greatly. For games that are multiplayer, like Civ, but lack a fun way to engage in multiplayer, I have another suggestion. Instead of making the AI really fun to play against and simulating a human opponent, maybe it would be better to ease up on the AI and focus more resources on improving the multiplayer experience. I think theres lots of simple things we can do, perhaps looking at iOS games or other examples and find a way to get people engaged and committed to finishing a session in multiplayer. I guess this mostly involve social engineering to incentivize players to keep at it and also improving the UI and communication tools so that its easy to drop in and out of your sessions. Perhaps designing the game so that players can do stuff while its not their turn would also help things out, or simply a refinement of simultaneous turns. As a programmer for a multiplayer game, I had to write an AI for the single player campaign as well as skirmish battles to let players practice in a low-stress environment. The AI I wrote was really simple and only a tiny fraction of the total effort spent on the game's code. However, it can beat even experienced players even though it doesn't understand many basic game mechanics. Since our game is chess-like, simply understanding the concept of where pieces can move and what spaces they threat is 90% of the battle. The AI's main advantage is that the game is an RTS so it can control several units simultaneously and react very quickly. I found that part of making the AI fun to play against involves putting limits on things like reaction time and how many units it control at once. It will probably be user-adjustable eventually so top tier players can challenge themselves but for the average players it makes it less frusterating. In a RTS if the player is good at Macro and the AI is good at micro, you are essentially playing 2 different games. Supreme Commander and Age of Empires tend to annoy me with an AI that behaves like a swarm of insects rather than a coordinated army. Games like Dawn of War that limit the amount of micro to something I can manage tend to be more enjoyable. For my game I would love to spend a month creating a system where the AI chooses strategies, then assigns orders to its units like sniper, guarding, healer, etc to fulfill those strategies. The thing is that the AI is sufficient for our purposes so it can't really be justified spending that much time. The Designer for our game is more concerned that the AI uses all the game mechancis properly and that it is consistent. I would love for the AI to be unpredictable, to lay traps, to try and read the player's strategy with complex formulas. The Designer wants it to be deterministic so that players can defeat the AI by learning its pattern. I think that since our game will have plenty of multiplayer access since a match takes less than 15 minutes and its an online-only game, he is probably right about what our priorities should be. That being said, I really do think it is possible by simply using "high school" programing and a creative mind to design much better AI than we have seen. I am mostly thinking about Tactical Battles in RTS and 4x games, which is my favorite aspect of video games. I am confident that I could write better AI than most games have, it usually has to do with understanding the interactions between various concepts. I think that scripting the AI is a flawed approach and by simply structuring the AI so that it is data-agnostic and simply understands the core rules, it will be very competent. Basically don't hard code the AI and it will probably do better in the long run. On the subject of designing the game around the AI, I think it is a great idea as long as you let the players have the final word. In Fallen Enchantress, heroes that die get resurrected with a simple injury as punishment as well as some mana being lost. Compared to other 4x games with permadeath, this is pretty tame and makes it so that you are killing the AI heroes over and over until they are begging to be put out of their misery with broken legs, missing eyes, mental trauma, and infectious diseases. Several players complained about this but it was put in because the AI sucks at keeping its heroes alive, and heroes are a very important source of military power. In other 4x games its generally easy to snipe enemy heroes and remove them from play, and humans make better use of heroes than AI players do. So I can understand the motivation to make the AI much stronger and save much coding time to prioritize their survival, but in the end I think it makes the game less enjoyable. A balance between design thats easy for AI and fun for players will be hard to reach in some cases. If you made it this far, sorry if I am unloading a years worth of internal dialogue in a public forum, but hopefully its entertaining/insightful. The last topic is the 4x that I have been designing. I am flirting with the idea of having a combat system where the outcome is mostly per-determined before the battle happens. You have officers which are a limited resource that you assign to armies to boost their tactical prowess. Each officer would gain experience and learn new techniques, and you could have them teach each other tactics if you can get them in the same tent. Essentially the AI that controls your units in battle is a limited resource which you must carefully devote to certain battles, knowing that if you are defeated you have a chance of losing that officer forever. So instead of changing the game to suit your AI, by making the AI an intrinsic part of the game I think you can sidestep many of the pitfalls and create a fun and innovative experience. To give players a bit of added control I was thinking they could have a commander unit which gives them direct control of any battles where that one unit is present. This could be interesting because it adds another limited resource, but it also might water down the concept or over-complicate the system. In the end, a simple spell casting system where on important occasions they can intervene with a lightning bolt to a certain enemy or with a sudden storm to give an advantage to certain unit types is probably a better way to give players that tasty morsel of control they will crave.

I thought of a few different things related to this topic before listening: 1) One way to do espionage is to make it an extra resource that you acquire, but keep it self contained. You can spend it on certain actions, such as sabotage, scouting, stealing tech, stealing resources, or slowing down enemy troops. Then the enemy can spend a certain amount of resources to block your espionage attempt, possibly with a penalty (it costs 150 points to negate an attack worth 100 points). While this adds strategy, since you can put in lots of cool ways to gain the espionage points, and it is also really simple and easy to understand, it seems pretty boring overall. I think its a dead end to go down this route. 2) A common problem with espionage is that its chance based. I think this is fairly accurate to real life, many times plots are uncovered by accident or agents make silly mistakes and expose themselves. The problem is that spending resources to get a mere "die roll" that has a chance to do something cool is unsatisfying. In the Total War series, assassins have a small chance to kill enemy generals. This is very useful when it works, but that is unlikely. It bogs down the game training these units, moving them around, and then repeatedly failing to accomplish much. 3) A way to integrate espionage into existing game mechanics might be to simply combine it with units. So you could have a saboteur unit that has a combat ability that does extra damage to defensive buildings, but can also be used on the strategic map to destroy part of an enemy city before you attack. This feels more like special abilities for units than espionage, but it would probably flow better than having dedicated espionage units. 4) My best idea, which was mentioned in the podcast, was to have a tech tree for espionage. Have it so you generate espionage from buildings, diplomacy, and researching special technology. Ideally you would choose between developing other resources and espionage. The way you spend it is kind of special, since there is a tree of options that branch out. First you might start by spying on their economy. Then maybe you could decide to start sabotaging their supply lines, stealing resources, or mapping out their troop movements. As you go further down it requires more and more resources invested. Then the enemy player could spend resources on his defense tree in espionage. This would slow down the progress of your spies and allow him to reverse to the effects if he outspends you. This kind of tree for espionage would only work if you could design interesting choices and trade offs all the way through, and have good interactions with all the main aspects of gameplay without disrupting the game flow. My initial impression was that lots of passive bonuses/penalties and a few abilities with cool downs on how often you can use them. Or maybe some parts of the tech tree are lost when you use them and you have to buy them again. I think there is an opportunity to add cool decisions to make, such as spending money on secret police for defense or spreading propaganda to encourage citizens to turn in traitors. If its a complex trade off between military strength, citizen happiness, and keeping state secrets, it could be an interesting mechanic. In the end I think visibility is a key aspect, as mentioned in the podcast. If you can see all the espionage that happens against you, it can be very annoying for the human players. It feels like a war of attrition or perhaps whack a mole, especially when its random. I am curious if it would be possible to lie to the player about his economy. Generally you can see and calculate every penny that passes through your kingdom, so if it doesn't add up it should be immediately obvious. Then again, if the UI is a little cluttered it may be easy to overlook the fact that you are losing out on 10% of your gold production. What do you guys think, should a game ever hide the fact that someone is stealing from you, should they allow you to figure it out if you are paying attention to details, or should they make it very clear and obvious? Random events work for this purpose, but they are fairly limited in occurrence. Usually they only happen once every 5-10 turns. If you had a random event every turn because 5 AI players were messing with you, wouldn't it be overkill? I suppose it could be balanced out, and it could prevent players from ganging up on one player, but I'm not sure it is the most elegant solution.

Customization is very important to me. I can have fun playing games with little or none of it such as Age of Wonders, Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic... but the more the better. I think that Master of Orion 2's system was really fun to play around with. Fallen Enchantress's system is pretty bland in comparison. The key is perks. This is a new overarching philosophy of mine, but good strategic gameplay in any game, of any genre, needs well designed perks. +5% damage vs +5% armor is a stupid decision to offer a human. You offer a human exploding fireballs or bouncing lightning. Make there be only a few perks so its easy to balance, maybe 10 or 20, let them choose 3 at a time, but make every combination have its own unique personality that is memorable and changes the experience. In the end, its probably easier to design static units than let players build dynamic ones. There is no lore justification for customizable units, historically it takes a long time to develop new techniques and equipment, usually the war will be over before significant changes can be made. Maybe there can be an exception for a mechwarrior type universe. In my spare time I am designing a fantasy 4x game and I originally wanted to have customizable units. I then realized that it opens up a huge can of worms for balance, in addition to watering down your worldbuilding and storytelling. What does it matter if you pick an egyptian inspired race if you are using guerrilla warefare and blitzkrieg tactics. If you want to make the player feel the inspiration in your design, you have to restrict them to play a certain way. You can still have a detailed unit customization system, but you have to limit their tools for creation so that they can't build the same thing every time. You have 3 areas to differentiate: Faction choice, Technology Tree, and Exploiting resources on the map. So if you combine that advice, I think you can make something really good, but to play it safe, I will be sticking to pre-made units for my first 4x game. P.S. I tried out GSB, and while it is interesting I prefer to have direct control of my units. Star Wars: Empire at War is more my style.

I've been designing a Fantasy 4x myself. I could probably write all the code for it pretty quickly but the graphics is the hard part. So I am just holding off for now and occasional going in and fleshing out the design document.

I don't like Civ. My earliest experience was with Civ 2 and I had already played Master of Magic by that point. I didn't fully understand the game, it was a little complicated for a 7 or 8 year old, but I remember cheating and giving myself some tanks and hot air balloons (planes run out of fuel sadly). I encountered an enemy phalanx unit, which was fortified on a mountain tile. I knew that they had a defensive bonus when fortified but when I attacked with a tank and lost, I was incredulous. I don't care if these are the guys from 300, theres no way they are prying open the hatch and killing the people inside, who are likely armed with assault rifles. They shouldn't even be able to get close enough to put a rock in the barrel Indiana Jones style (which is also ridiculous in retrospect). I bought Civ 4 on sale for my dad mostly but I played a game and it was okay. I wasn't really drawn in, I didn't feel like I was progressing like in Empire Earth and the decisions I was making weren't too interesting. Civ 5 really helped since the 1UPT made it feel more like a wargame. My main problem with Civ 5 was pacing, I am used to games like Moo2 and Master of Magic where everything is on an assembly line when perfectly tuned. Civ 5 felt like I had to constantly compromise and I could never rush down the tech tree, but maybe I am just too inexperienced. So in the end, Warlock scratched the itch for me in a way that Civ never could, though i've heard so many great things about Fall from Heaven its kinda tempting to check that out.

This was a great episode and I found it an interesting discussion even though I haven't played Endless Space. My favorite games are Master of Magic, X-Com, and Master of Orion 2, and I think that those games are a good example of how I relate to worldbuilding. I don't need a narrative or a story really, I just need cool toys to play with and an immersive atmosphere. I guess its sort of like playing with action figures or Legos. I should point out that I don't like other people's stories anyways, I usually skip through dialogue and cut scenes when I play games. So good game design really helps if you want to give ingredients for a memorable and vivid experience. I personally am appalled at the plague of genericitis in video games these days. Whenever I see something like +5% damage or +10% gold production I cringe and wish that people were more creative. Specifically for 4x games, I think factions have a big part of the personality in the game. Ideally the factions would behave differently in a diplomatic role, just look at the Gandhi complaints for Civ 5. Most games don't really tread that area though, as AI is generally crappy. Faction perks/traits though are an easy way to inject life into your world. Moo2 had a few traits that really stood out like Lithervore, Telepathic, and Creative. Unfortunately, most of the stats you picked were pretty bland. Ship customization had a similar problem, where all the really cool features and weapons basically boil down to Attack, Defense, and Hitpoints. So to really make a game stand out, the designer needs to throw out all the generic stats, bonuses, and perks and replace them with unique meaningful ones. Make one faction so aggressive that they always have to be at war with one nation. Another faction can be cannibalistic, where they get food and happiness from defeating foes in battle. One faction can be Nomadic, where every 50 turns they have to get up and leave, looking for a new home. Space ships could have similar changes, where instead of Missle level 1, missile level 2, you can have Homing Missiles which never miss unless shot down, scatter missles which unless you shoot it really early they can't be shot down and are hard to evade, EMP missiles which shutdown systems but don't do damage, and Bio-weapon missiles which actually penetrate the hull and shoot poison gas to kill the crew inside. Uniqueness is important too, like one faction's ships can cloak, and nobody else can cloak. Maybe there could be a faction that is just an Artificial Intelligence and instead of sending marines to capture an enemy ship it just checks to see who's computers technology is the most advanced. So having all this interesting stuff helps with the worldbuilding, but also I think the interactions are important. You have to design it so that there are conflicts, like one faction wanting a planet for its minerals and another person wanting it because its atmosphere is habitable. That sort of conflict forces a story to happen, either you try to make friends and offer a deal, or you go into war over the issue. However, if every planet is habitable, and every planet provides minerals... then its not a big deal. If the enemy got there first, and you don't want a conflict, you can go find a less desirable planet. Now, if you make each planet have a unique resource that can be exploited, suddenly things get interesting. Since its not a decision made at the start screen but an evolving struggle to get things you need before someone else does, you start personifying the AI and imprinting your problems upon your people. Thats my experience anyways. I can come up with this kind of stuff all day (actually its a hobby). I realize that it probably is much harder to make a game where everything is awesome and every choice you make has an impact on the gameplay, but I think that makes for a much richer gameplay experience as well as a deeper strategy game. I suppose there is a fear that its overkill, and that you want some bland or generic items to make the player feel comfortable and make the cool stuff seem special by comparison. I think thats B.S. though, and how many games have failed because they were too rich and varied?

Yes the portals are a big dissapointment. I usually play with only 1 or 2 even on a large map because by the time you are strong enough to clear one out you can kill the AI ten times over. It would be cool if they made the alternate worlds very alien with strange terrain, resources that offer unique bonuses, and maybe even monster cities. I think they just didn't have enough development resources to do something on that scale.

The problem with customizing your units in a competitive game is that it usually makes it hard to easily pick out the units and understand whats going on in the battle. Even its just simple reskins that don't dramatically alter the unit, it still takes extra brain power to look at the shape of the unit and figure out what it is. The obvious solution of course is that you can turn off customizations on a per player basis so that you can play with all of your cool skins but ignore everyone elses.

I thought this episode was really interesting. I think that Starcraft 1 pro games were much more interesting than Starcraft 2... i don't know why exactly. It has to do with the changes to the engine and the units I suppose. The whole ball of units thing makes battles boring and they had to nerf AOE damage as a result, which reduces the fireworks. In any case, I just wanted to point out that I started following Blood Bowl recently. Its basically warhammer meets football, I don't watch real football but adding a pretty deep TBS game on top of it makes it very engaging. I don't know if there is a big competitive community but they do have online tournaments and watching this youtube series was really fun and interesting.

I bought this game on day 1, I had been following it since it was announced on the paradox forums. I was really satisfied with it, i don't like civ games very much but Warlock is great because of its fantasy theme and focus on combat. I find the game is pretty simple to min/max, I play humans because gold is the best resource, and I only keep a few off race cities for food/mana production. It is kind of nice that the monsters put alot of pressure against you if you expand to quickly but the AI is hardly a challenge. I guess I should play on the hardest difficulty but I hate fighting against a cheating AI since its more of a grind and less of a strategic victory. I guess the main appeal is that the battles are often puzzle-like when you are trying to min/max. You want to rotate your soldiers, keep your soft archers out of harms way but also in range to attack the tough enemies. You have to decide which spell to use, healing, damage, or maybe a freeze spell to buy you some time. Its very easy to attack an enemy you can destory, only to realize that theres some vampires or perhaps a fire elemental sitting in the fog of war thats gonna toast you next turn. Usually this means your unit is dead, but sometimes careful planning and lucky rolls can save the day. The main complaint I have with the game is that your casting potential never grows during the game except for one spell thats really powerful. I wish it was something like you can spend 10% of your mana pool per turn so that having 5000 mana is actually useful.

I looked up Slaan... apparently they also appear in NWN 2, though its not part of official D&D/Forgotten Realms lore. Also Slann are technically based off frogs not lizards, if that makes any difference. There is a separate race called Lizardmen. Neither seem to be based on any real mythology... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_reptilian_humanoids In general I think its fairly normal to borrow from other IP when creating new ones. Very little stuff is truely original anyways. Anyways, I am interested in trying Kohan 2 after listening to this podcast, but I am not sure if its my cup of tea really. One of the things I hated about warcraft 3 was how slow it was and how many hitpoints the units have. There also doesn't seem to be enough mechanics to really keep me interested. I do like the lack of peon micromanagement, thats my biggest peeve with age of empires.