Greetings!

Memory is remembered

Last week we discussed that we really wanted Legendary Heroes to support 32-bit for the new "Huge" size maps but the current FE/LH builds couldn't do it.  So I agreed to spend the weekend going through the code to see what I could optimize.

I'm pleased to say that enough optimization was done that LH users will be able to play on the new huge maps. But if you play it on a 32-bit machine, it'll pop up a warning since it's going to be very very tight still.

Soren Stuff

My mention that Soren had joined us got a lot more attention than I thought.  I saw some people suggest that he'd be working on Legendary Heroes.  I wish I could say that is the case but the things that game designers work on today won't show up until far into the future. For example, Jon spent about 2 years full-time before becoming a consultant working on things that won't see light of day until mid 2014.  In Soren's case, he's consulting with us to help on the design of several projects which won't see the light of day for some time.

When I talk to people who want to get into the games industry, I often have to warn them that it can be a long journey. When I am working on the game-stuff here, it's mostly on stuff that won't be released until (Best case) 1Q2015 and that's assuming no delays.  

Gotta Team up Good People

This is probably an odd thing to say, particularly publicly, but Elemental was probably the single best thing that has ever happened to Stardock's games unit.  It certainly didn't seem that way at the time. But War of Magic exposed so many deep issues in the way we were approaching game development that it forced us to change.  To be honest, we should have changed the way we were making games after Galactic Civilizations II (2006) when we had moved beyond having tiny game teams.  

If you load up a Stardock developed or published game in 2012 and compare it with what had come out before, it's night and day. The quality of our games is so much better now thanks largely to bringing in people like Derek Paxton, Chris Bray, Jon Shafer and others.  They have positions at Stardock that literally didn't exist until after 2010.  The quality of Fallen Enchantress and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion (which was a coding/design team-up between Ironclad and Stardock) is just something we're very proud of.  Suffice to say, we have a real appreciation to what dedicated game designers can do for a game.

Fallen Enchantress going forward

If you've played FE 1.3, you may have noticed some of the new features such as champion recruitment cost changes and the Majesty spell. These represent a true fork in the road in support between it and Legendary Heroes where champion recruitment is fame based and city growth based on food supply.  The point being, as long as there's strong demand for FE updates, we plan to keep doing so (strong demand to be understood as not 1 guy on the forums 4 years ago demanding us to update it to support their holographic iWatch display but rather a significant number of people playing the game).

So FE will continue to evolve down its own road for the foreseeable future and Legendary Heroes will go down its path.

Legendary Heroes first looks

I'm going to try to get some videos up this week. We have a pretty huge Windows 8 app coming out this week that's eating up a lot of our time.  But the first thing you'll notice about LH, I think is that it is drastically better looking. 

Stay tuned!