For those of you who don’t recognize my name
here's some background. You’ll be seeing me in these forums more often. My list of excuses why it’s taken until now is long: moving my family to a new city, setting up Stardock’s third office (located outside Austin, Texas), helping Stardock build its IT teams, working on Project Tachyon, and trying to live up to the proud legacy left behind by one of the
earliest Stardockians.
When I started at Stardock last year I joined a talented team of developers and engineers. Many were Stardock veterans and we've hired several smart folks as well. Hard as it is to believe, the team has been hard at work for almost a year now. The first small example of our efforts is ready for you to enjoy. It seems an appropriate time to talk more about what you’ll see from Stardock in the future.
“Project Tachyon” is the internal code name for a collection of “metagame” features Brad envisioned for Stardock’s games. Since we’ve added many awesome game studios to our family it doesn’t make sense for each developer to re-invent the wheel. So the team here is building these metagame services as a single platform for all Stardock's upcoming titles. We’ve named this the “Stardock Games” platform.
Not every game will use every feature of course. A single player only game such as
Sorcerer King needs no online. But competing to be the best Guardian Sovereign player in the world sure is fun! Seeing who’s playing on Insane difficulty is great too. Best of all, you can show off your ladder rank to your friends and rivals via a beautiful custom web site. A sample set of these leaderboards is now
live for
Galactic Civilizations III Beta 6!
One of the goals of Stardock Games is to keep you gaming. For example, Steam provides authentication already. We’re using that information to simply log you in automatically after a one-time email registration (coming soon). That email enables us to link you to your multiplayer stats and provide Stardock technical support. Most importantly if Stardock Games is unavailable due to connectivity or maintenance your single player game won’t be impacted.
Multiplayer will require a connection of course. Brad’s AI skills aren’t quite up to simulating human consciousness... yet. We do have fantastic matchmaking systems available for our developers.
Servo, now available to
Founders, is the first game using Stardock Games matchmaking. It’s been great working with the BonusXP team for Multiplayer and there’s so much more to come!
Which brings up an important point… we’re crafting tools for the developers at Stardock and our partners to use as they see fit. We talk regularly about features and design ideas. We work together to ensure the game developers’ vision shines.
Admittedly this effort requires some sacrifice... of sleep. We have a great operations team dedicated to keeping Stardock Games running smoothly. When an alert goes off at 3 A.M. one of us (yes, I’m on call too) wakes up to resolve the problem. And the Stardock Games platform is built in the cloud. This enables us to scale quickly to meet demand when a new game or update launches.
We have several more great features planned for the future. Those of you who participate in our Founders and Early Access programs will see these added as new builds arrive. And we’ll be posting updates here as cool new things are ready for you.
It’s a great time to play Stardock games!
-Adrian
