It’s not explicitly stated by the interveiwees, but some of the statements by both the lead on Elemental War of Magic and now APB’s Josh Howard lead me to believe that they tried to adopt scrum or some form of Agile to their development process and,it added up to fail. I just happened upon this interview and noted the line: “‘we don’t need specs’ and ‘we don’t need this, we’re just going to move” which is a classic scrumn00b statement. The only game company I know 100% uses scrum is Blizzard, but I suspect Torchlight followed an agile model. However, just like any method of project management, it takes training, practice and diligence. Jumping on the ‘no specs!’ bandwagon is easy when sitting in meetings at the beginning of projects, and you get a lot of head nods from people who hate it, but even with the most document-lean methods of Agile, you still needs something to capture and report what the hell the software is supposed to do.
GSB: Galactic Conquest Beta- Initial Ruminations
This is not a review and I’m playing just the beta (though it’s quite polished). I haven’t finished the game yet because it’s thankfully a challenge! Hence, this is just a list of five good things and five bad things. My benchmarks for any space 4x are: Master of Orion and Ultracorps. For general 4X it’s Dominions 3 and Empire Total War. That said, I think this little indy game from an English dude is the most important game in 4X space strategy that we have seen since Master of Orion 3 marred the genre.
Things I like:
- Beautiful and extremely easy to use interface: it is just flat out awesomeness incarnate. Dragging stuff, sliders, the works.
- Turn button works very fast and is almost always always accessible: when I get sick of mucking around with stuff, I can just click and it’s next turn from almost anywhere
- Sliders all over the place: this is what 4X space games are all about. If you don’t have sliders just go home and let the space piss cascade on you.
- Combine fleets interface: manual drag and drop and an auto combine to bring units up to full strength from smaller units
- Retreating: now you have an option in battle. Though this hoses any possibility of playable multiplayer for Gratuitous Space Battles, it’s growing on me for single player.
Things I don’t like
- Random fleet attacks from random races: the user-created enemy fleets idea is cool and all, but it’s really not a replacement for having enemy empires
- No random map
- Unlocks from the battle game only: there’s no way to get unlocks from playing the campaign. With the campaign, I no longer care to ever play the battle game again, as the battle game is wholly complete within the campaign version
- No campaign enemy races, empires, technology, no diplomacy: fleets just show up at your door and can be any race
- Movement is one planet to the next: each move takes one turn, this isn’t the worst, I just don’t like it being this simple
- You can’t auto-resolve battles until you’ve set up your fleet and started the battle.
It’s 7$ to buy the beta and if you already have GSB– this is a no brainer. Full review once I win.
Doom 3 – Hexenmod!
MauriceBastard and Higherheels take the zyel (normal level) diablo down quite boringly but with much cursing
Gratuitous Space Battles campaign now out in "purchasable" beta
Purchasable in quotes is because when you try to play, you get a required space to put a registration number– a number that’s not provided to you when you buy the game. I’m sure this will get fixed eventually, but I would wait until release to pick it up if you’re planning on it.
NOTE; steam users– you have to dig down into your steam folder to install the beta files. It should currently reside in VALVE/STEAM/STEAMAPPS/Gratuitous Space Battles/ Remember to CUT the last part of the path string the default setting gives you as it will try to create a new /Gratuitous Space Battles/ folder within your current Gratuitous Space Battles/ folder if you don’t.
Talisman Sacred Pool – There can be only one!
We finally got a 5-man game with the new Fantasy Flight expansion to Talisman 4th edition: the Sacred Pool. Starting characters were Rogue (Scott), Highlander (moi), Valkyrie (Cain), Vampiress (Jeff) and Gypsy (Chris). None of the new characters were selected even though the Magus and Dark Knight were drawn.
I was the Highlander and pretty much everything went my way during the game, however, tactically (and I know some may roll their eyes at this because it’s all just random rolls right?), my goals were to get at least one strength increase from the main board before hitting the Highlands, then, if possible, clip a few magic items off the craft ladies (Rogue, Vampiress or Gypsy) on my way to the Dungeon, barring death, then head up to the Middle and Center region FTW. I was able to slip through the Highlands and crush the Eagle King: getting the one-shot teleport item as a reward. I then hit the Vampiress and grabbed a +2 craft Sword off of her, which really helped during my decent into the dungeon (highlander ain’t the smartest bloke to start). The hapless Highlander wasn’t able to beat the Lord of Darkness on the first try– but that just gave him an excuse to rush right back into the dungeon for more beatings.
During this time, both the Gypsy and the Vampiress fell prey to the Highland ICE BRIDGE space in comical fashion and were replaced by the Prophetess and the Ghoul. The stack of cards sitting on the ice bridge space was a veritable mountain of goodness, but no one else attempted it during the game. This brings up a key point with Highlands and Dungeon–I very much prefer to play the game with the published variant stating that once you start to go into one of the side boards, you have to declare that you are leaving to go the other direction– and then you cannot switch to go back through the board until you have exited the board itself. Without this rule, no one would ever land on the Ice Bridge space on purpose. Since the Highlands are relatively easy for weak characters, there should be some danger in getting to the relatively weak Eagle King.
We didn’t get too into the newest mechanic from Sacred Pool, the quest reward deck. I think only myself and one other person were able to pull from the deck during this game. That said, I love it. It’s simple and builds on the importance of the Middle Region. Next time we play, I want to combine the Quest Cards with the Warlock’s Quest ending card and see how it works with a deluge of quest reward cards hitting the table.
Anyway, the Highlander made it to the middle and a Battle Royale was drawn which pulls all characters to the middle for a throw down if they have a Talisman on them. This eliminated all but the Valkyrie who was summoned to the Crown of Command space only to be struck down by the highlander (after some spell chicanery that might have let her win with a little luck).
Gratuitous Space Battles Campaign trailer action
Trailer is up for GSB: Galactic Conquest. I’m trying to weigh my expectations (which are high and are all based around waiting for SOMEONE to make a good Master of Orion + Dominions 3 game) and the reality that while this may not be that game, it will still be damn fun and not a cascade of space piss into our open mouths like MOO3 was. Here is a link to the trailer:
Blood Bowl Dice predictor
http://morgnth.org/. This won’t work for long, but shockingly it does now…
Artemis Bridge Simulator and true Space nerdery
I got in on a LAN over the weekend with THIS going on. It was a ton of fun, and quite challenging. We had just the right number of people for the roles: captain, engineering, helm, weapons with science and communications combined and the ideal set up: a main screen plus each of the station screens. We each got better at our individual roles, but most important, we got better as a team. I dug the engineering the most as you are constantly shifting power around the ship for a myriad of reasons and you’re never sitting around waiting as you can always make some tweaks or prep for upcoming power needs if you are idle. Weapons is my second favorite. While firing the weapons themselves is sort of boring, you have a ton of information on screen you are trying to relay to the team. You also control the main screen view for the captain.
I really dug the fact that this is a LAN game– at this point it cannot be played over the interweb tubes at all, but I assume that will happen eventually if there is $ in it for the developers. In the time of extreme anti-LAN (even fake LAN’s over hamachi) from the major publishers, this is really refreshing to see.
Gratuitous Space Battles review
Gratuitous Space Battles is game where you select a race, edit 2-d ship templates by placing some icons of equipment into blank boxes, drag a fleet based on scenario limitations to a 2-d map. After deployment is over you press play and sit and watch explosions, listen to various noises and then get a score if your fleet wins. You can’t control the ships themselves like Rome Total War or Warcraft 3: you just watch. If you watch your fleet win you get some points to spend on unlocks (new ship hulls, equipment and races).
GSB does all these things very well, but without a campaign wrapper I found myself setting up the battle, tweaking ships a bit and then walking away to go do something else while it ran through the explosions. That said, the explosions and sounds are fantastic and it’s really fun to watch, the ship designs are gorgeous huge 2-d sprites, but it gets sort of old and you just want the results after awhile.
My main tactic that worked pretty much all the time was to take rockets and put my ships all squeezed as tightly as possible into one corner of the map, so that the enemy fleet (usually spread out across the board) had to attack my huge lump of ships piecemeal and be thus destroyed piecemeal. Since my fleet mass cannot be flanked (the space map has a ‘corner’) this worked really well and I won almost all the scenarios on normal on the first go without tweaking or even buying much new equipment other than better rockets.
If you’ve ever played Dominions 3, Evernight or Ultracorps, you can see very clearly that this battle method would work perfectly as a component to a multi-player friendly 4X strategy game: you set up your armies/fleets, you give them orders, then you complete your turn and at a certain time each day (or when all the players turns are complete) the turn ‘ticks’ and all battles are resolved. Since the players have no in battle interaction, you aren’t waiting around for players to fight out their battles making the entire multi-player experience far to long to actually complete a game ever (ala MOO2). Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen of the strategic portion in development for GSB, you will have one choice during battles (rather than none or setting orders for your fleet BEFORE the battle) and that is to retreat. While not a design flaw for a single player 4X game, this is a fundamental flaw if the developers of GSB want to move into the multiplayer realm with this game– it will have the same issues as MOO2– the game takes too long (and by too long I mean MONTHS too long) because players have to fight out their battles by hand rather than just watching (if they choose too) after a turn ticks.
Where Dwarf Fortress has tons of stuff to do and explore, but is so incomplete, graphically challenged, poorly documented and with a monumentally bad user interface (even for a Nethack style game), Gratuitous Space Battles has a fantastic interface, looks just stunningly beautiful and is really well documented– however, there’s just not very much to do in the game but wait around for some sort of campaign mode to be completed. That said, I do like the game and bought it immediately when the strategic portion was announced. If you’re thinking of picking this up, I would wait until they implement the 4X campaign.