Tales of the Rampant Coyote
Ye Olde Archives. Visit the new blog at http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/ - and use the following feed: http://rampantgames.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
Ye Olde Archives. Visit the new blog at http://www.rampantgames.com/blog/ - and use the following feed: http://rampantgames.com/blog/wp-rss2.php
Thursday, November 16, 2006
I'm not a real game developer. I'm a gamer who learned how to program
The title above is a quote by Brad Wardell in his interview at GamaSutra that's well worth reading.
Brad's company, Stardock, is a fairly unusual indie game developer. In order to finance making games (I think), they got into doing "serious" utilities for businesses. So there are two halves of the company, but they've managed to come up with some really great games.
I haven't played Galactic Civilizations 2 yet (I may wait for the expansion), but I loved the first game and the expansion. It felt more like the classic "Master of Orion" games than... well, more than Master of Orion 3, that's for sure! But by the same token, GalCiv had a feel all of its own. I did miss the tactical combat of MoO 1 and MoO 2, though. (MoO 3's combat.... well, the most powerful weapon was the mind-numbing BOREDOM combined with the complexity of micromanagement... I really should work harder at repressing).
Anyway, here are a couple of choice quotes from Brad's interview:
"...the game industry is so stratified right now that it takes a guy like Will Wright, who's been around for five thousand years, to come up with something like Spore. Everyone says "Oh wow, that's so cool!" In the old days, we had a game as innovative as Spore coming out every year. Nowadays, they're so few and far between that we're starving for innovation. Something like Xbox Live Arcade can open up the doors for the next generation of game developers who will come up with clever stuff."And concerning Microsoft's XNA initiative:
"I love it. I'm not a real game developer; I'm a gamer who learned how to program so that I could make the games that I wanted to play. I figure the more they open it up for more people to make games, the better off we all are."My kind of indie! You can read the entire interview at the link below, where Brad talks about MMORPGs, what happened with the Master of Magic license, how they'd like to do an RPG, and his views on copy protection.
Master of the Galaxy: Stardock's Brad Wardell
(Vaguely) related verbal doodling:
* Game Moment #1: Master of Orion
* A Pirate Story
* Game Design: Speed of Game
* Profit or Passion?
* Interview with Amanda Fitch, Indie RPG and Casual Game Designer
* The Five A.M. Hall of Fame
Labels: Indie Evangelism, Interviews
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 3:44 PM (Permalink)
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I've played Galactic Civilizations 1 and 2. While 2 is nice, I've got to say that overall I still prefer MOO2.
Too bad MOO3 was such a disaster.
I still play MOO2 infrequently - it works fine in Windows XP. On one of my computers (for whatever reason - they are nearly identical), it slows down everything else to an annoying level, so I just play it in VMWare.
Too bad MOO3 was such a disaster.
I still play MOO2 infrequently - it works fine in Windows XP. On one of my computers (for whatever reason - they are nearly identical), it slows down everything else to an annoying level, so I just play it in VMWare.
MOO3 sucked way too bad for words to express. Unfortunately, Gal Civ came out at the same time as MOO3 (approximately), so I ignored it in favor of the newest addition to the classic franchise.
Collossal mistake. I played I think two full games of MOO3 - both were incredibly painful, long affairs. I think I tried it the second time out of the mistaken belief that the game might be better after I'd gotten used to it. Now that I knew how to build fleets, etc.
Nope. Still sucked. I realized that these were hours of my life I was never getting back, and so I was filled with resentment towards the game. I uninstalled it and never even thought of trying it again.
It was a couple years later I got around to picking up Galactic Civilizations. Yeah, it's not MOO. It's its own game, but definitely the same category. But it is a lot of fun. Brad & Company did an outstanding job on it.
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Collossal mistake. I played I think two full games of MOO3 - both were incredibly painful, long affairs. I think I tried it the second time out of the mistaken belief that the game might be better after I'd gotten used to it. Now that I knew how to build fleets, etc.
Nope. Still sucked. I realized that these were hours of my life I was never getting back, and so I was filled with resentment towards the game. I uninstalled it and never even thought of trying it again.
It was a couple years later I got around to picking up Galactic Civilizations. Yeah, it's not MOO. It's its own game, but definitely the same category. But it is a lot of fun. Brad & Company did an outstanding job on it.
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