Going West
By Frogboy Posted August 17, 2009 16:07:54
Greetings!
I’mgetting ready to get on a plane to go to San Francisco to visit withthe media (gaming and non-gaming). It’s been a crazy week getting allthe different things together. I was hoping to get the second Demigodpreview ready this week. If there’s some down time during the week,I’ll work on putting together the notes on it.
Gas PoweredGames is working on getting me some screenshots and such to beginshowing them as we start to get near PAX (Penny Arcade Expo that’s inSeattle at the beginning of next month). As I’ve been scramblingaround the office, I can say there’s quite a bit of activity both atStardock (where I work) and at Gas Powered Games (the makers ofDemigod) to solve a LUA decompression bug that causes the game to crashin MP. One theory is that it’s related to the concede code somehow butno one is quite sure but that’s one of the reasons why there hasn’tbeen another mini update – both teams feel that this issue needs to beresolved before more features get added. That said, I saw QA testingout the re-match code.
Rematching
Sothe way they’re implementing rematching is a lot like the concede. As agame ends, players can propose a rematch. If everyone agrees, the gamestarts again. It’s working pretty decently in LAN mode but there’s abit of extra work for online MP because of the stats and there’s moretiming robustness needed because of latency.
Other stuff going on
I’m not privy to everything Gas Powered Games is doing of course butbesides working on 2 new Demigods, rematches, replays, balance andother goodies for Demigod players, they’re working on Supreme Commander2 which is being published by Square Enix.
Over at Stardock, we’re working on [url=http://www.elementalgame.com/]Elemental[/url] which is a fantasy strategy game that isn’t due out until mid next year.[url=http://www.draginol.com/images/GoingWest_E2CB/image_3.png]<img width="152" height="120" src="http://www.draginol.com/images/GoingWest_E2CB/image_thumb_3.png">[/url]
I know there’s a lot of interest at both developer GPG and publisherStardock to keep enhancing Demigod over the long-term. The view isthat a game like this, being primarily multiplayer, can continue togrow over time. Obviously a big challenge is getting more content outthere whether it be from GPG, Stardock, or modders. That’s where muchof the future development will focus.
Another area we’reworking on is improving the community features of Demigod. We’ll betalking more about that in a couple weeks (one of the reasons I’m goingout West is to show these new community features). But suffice to saythere will be a lot of good news coming in that area as we ramp up toPAX.
If any of you guys are going to be at PAX, please stop bythe Stardock booth. We’ll be showing Demigod, Elemental, Sins of aSolar Empire: Diplomacy, and lots of other cool stuff.
