Viridian Games

Just got this comment in a previous post and thought I’d respond here rather than there.

So.

WHAT were you guys thinking, to go around saying it was ready to ship?

Because, y’know, it wasn’t. As just about every review and forum thread is acknowledging, some more heatedly than others. (PC Gamer: “You should not buy it.” Uh, wow. I’ve NEVER seen them be that blunt before.)

Does Stardock have an actual QA department? Is it organizationally independent of development? Are there good lines of communication between QA and the rest of the company? Do they write test plans? Do they run them? How can they test this game and not encounter the problems that were present?

Or is the only testing done by developers in their spare time?

How does something like this happen?

-Rollory

First off, welcome to the site! I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before. I’ve got some free games you can try, and if you’re here for the Name That Game! feature, I’ll be posting a new entry later today.

Second, allow me to answer your questions and respond to your statements in the order they were presented.

So.

Nice to meet you too!

WHAT were you guys thinking, to go around saying it was ready to ship?

Brad’s now infamous statement (which you can read here) was made in anger and exhaustion. Brad explains the situation (and apologizes) here.

Because, y’know, it wasn’t. As just about every review and forum thread is acknowledging, some more heatedly than others. (PC Gamer: “You should not buy it.” Uh, wow. I’ve NEVER seen them be that blunt before.)

PCGamer’s most recent article about elemental states “I’m glad Stardock are patching Elemental so quickly after its disastrous early launch, and I’m relieved to finally have the game in a playable state.”

Does Stardock have an actual QA department?

Yes.

Is it organizationally independent of development?

Yes.

Are there good lines of communication between QA and the rest of the company?

Yes. We use Skype chat channels to stay in constant touch and they use Jing to quickly post screenshots and movies of problems so that we developers can see what they are seeing.

Do they write test plans? Do they run them?

Yes and yes.

How can they test this game and not encounter the problems that were present?

And now you have raised my ire. As a former tester I can tell you that testers find bugs; they do not fix them. If bugs exist in a final product they are not the fault of the testers; they are the fault of the developers. Of course they saw the issues. They are not idiots, and I resent your suggestion that they are.

Or is the only testing done by developers in their spare time?

No. Although most of us developers do play the Impulse version in our spare time and keep track of any problems we find.

How does something like this happen?

At last, you have asked a truly salient question (although I’m sure you intended it to be rhetorical.)

“This” happened because it was the lesser evil. Stardock simply does not have the clout to release a retail game during Christmas. Our choices were to launch on August 24th or push the game back to February of next year. Pushing back would have had disastrous consequences for Stardock because of the partnerships we had made and the forfeiture of our retail space.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “Well, releasing an incomplete, buggy game is also going to have disastrous consequences!” And thus you’ve hit the crux. We were in a bind, and chose the lesser evil – to release on time and then work like the dickens to get the game to the state we and the players want (instead of, you know, sleeping like most people who have just shipped a game do). Yes, a lot of people have already had a negative initial reaction to the game. There’s nothing we can do about that. But Stardock has a reputation for continually improving their games over the months and years after its release, and we’re continuing that tradition by improving Elemental as quickly as we can and turning it into the game it deserves to be.

-Rollory

Again, welcome to the site, and I’m sure we’ll have lots of spirited debates in the future!

If, like me, Supreme Commander just made you wish you could play Total Annihilation again, your wish is granted. And it’s been updated to ensure it runs on all versions of Windows, supports higher resolutions than the original game…and is still both LAN and internet-playable.

The number of older games that are now available for digital download in one form or another is increasing. Publishers are learning that there is still value in these older games, which makes me happy, as a lot of my discs are getting really, really scratched.

Guess what broke about a week ago. ‘Sright, my computer. All my attempts to resuscitate it have been met with failure. My attempts to commandeer my daughter’s computer this weekend were met with pleading and begging and tears (real, actual tears!)…so I decided not to do that.

Which left me with my laptop. Which, if you’ll recall is really just a netbook (a Gateway LT31, in fact). It’s got two gigs of RAM and a dedicated ATI Radeon X1270 graphics processor, unlike most netbooks which just use an Intel 950 Integrated Graphics Processor, which are cheap and work fine for web browsing but are nigh-unusable for games.

So I hooked my monitor, mouse, keyboard and speakers up to my laptop so I could at least compute in comfort.

Then I got out some games to see how well the rig would run them. The results:

Oblivion: Ran, but was unplayable even on the lowest graphical settings. This wasn’t a big surprise or disappointment. I knew I’d have to drop back a generation or two to get some results.

Morrowind: Ran fine; but I had to turn the graphics detail and the draw distance all the way down to get above 15 FPS outside. So it looks like Vvardenfell is constantly shrouded in fog. Interiors, on the other hand, run great – and dungeons are interiors so dungeon running is fine. Overall, playable.

World of Warcraft: Again, detail at the lowest settings. Large cities with lots of people like Dalaran are complete lag zones, but questing out in the wild greatly improves the frame rate. Overall, playable, if slightly annoying.

Deus Ex: The game defaults to 16-bit color mode, which I haven’t changed. Frame rate is good, if a little choppy in some places. Definitely playable.

Warcraft III: Perfectly playable on medium detail. I can even play on Battle.net and watch replays.

Starcraft: Perfectly playable. Again, playing on Battle.net and watching replays is no problem.

Half Life: Runs great, no changes needed.

System Shock 2: The big surprise of my experiments, this game runs perfectly without any need for tweaks (other than the minor ones necessary to get it running).

Fallout: Runs fine.

Tonight I’ll be trying Baldur’s Gate 2 and I might even be able to get away with Neverwinter Nights.

Oh, and Zeta development works fine, yadda yadda yadda.

During the 2004 run-up to the launch of the Playstation Portable, one of the promises made by Hirai & Co was that I would be able to carry around a playable copy of Final Fantasy VII at all times.

Now, five years later, that promise is finally kept.

So maybe now I’ll get one.

(Yes, I know, I could’ve already done it with homebrew, yadda yadda yadda.)

All right, here it is. Click here to download the beta.

Ya’ll be gentle with her, now. She’s sensitive.

Readme follows:

This is a work-in-progress demo of my game Planitia.

Current version is .73.

NOTE: IF YOU GET A MESSAGE SAYING THAT D3D9_**.DLL IS MISSING THEN YOU NEED TO UPDATE YOUR DIRECTX.

Planitia is a real-time strategy game that allows you to both build an army and use god powers to crush your enemies.

In this demo you play Green. In the main window you will see the game world, your general (the large guy with the green cape) and your village.

———————
BASIC CAMERA CONTROLS
———————

Planitia is meant to be played with one hand on the mouse and one hand on the WASD cluster on your keyboard. (Sorry left-handers – I’ll get controls in for you soon!) You use the mouse to interact with the interface. You can also move the camera by pushing the mouse to an edge of the screen, but it’s much easier to move the camera with the WASD cluster. You can rotate the camera using the Q and E keys. You can also click on the minimap to jump the camera to that location.

———-
GOD POWERS
———-

On the right side you will see a GUI display with a minimap. The blue bar below the minimap is your mana. Below that are buttons for the god powers. Only some of the god powers work now, inactive god powers have their buttons greyed out. The working god powers are:

Flatten Land (looks like up/down arrows): Costs 3 mana per second.

Allows you to raise or lower land to village height. Click and hold in the world window on any terrain to affect it. Flattening the land around your village will allow it to grow, and the more villagers you have the faster your mana will regenerate. Villages only grow at certain populations, so your village may not grow immediately even if you’ve flattened the land properly. Just be patient. You may also need to use this tool to create land bridges so that you can attack your enemy.

Earthquake (looks like concentric circles): Costs 25 mana.

Drops an earthquake wherever you click in the world window. Be careful not to cast it on your own village. The earthquake prevents enemy villages from growing and forces their gods to use more mana fixing what you’ve done.

Lightning Bolt (looks like…um…a lightning bolt): Costs 10 mana.

Casts a lightning bolt wherever you click. The lightning bolt damages units and throws them into the air. You can even knock them off the game world this way.

All god powers have a shared 1.5 second cooldown.

————–
MILITARY UNITS
————–

You can left-click on your general to select him and move him by right-clicking on the terrain. You cannot select your villagers.

If you click on the second tab on the GUI (looks like a red general) you will see the military buttons. You will see buttons for archers, barbarians and warriors, along with a display of how many you currently have of each.

Clicking the archer, barbarian or warrior buttons converts a villager into a military unit of that type and adds it to your army. Your army will always follow your general so you don’t have to worry about controlling units individually. You can attack enemy armies or villages simply by moving near them – once your units get within combat range they will attack automatically.

One thing to keep in mind is that once you convert a villager to a military unit it no longer gives you mana.

——-
OPTIONS
——-

If you click on the third tab on the GUI (which is currently blank) you’ll see the exit button. You can also exit the demo by pressing ESC.

If you wish to give me feedback on this demo, you can do so at anthony.salter@gmail.com, or comment on my blog at www.viridiangames.com.

Copyright 2006, 2007, 2008 by Anthony Salter. All rights reserved.

When I started working on Planitia full-bore again after the holidays were over I mentioned that I’m going to release a new beta by the end of January. I want this beta to have actual gameplay in it, and for that I need three things.

* I need to get the villages spawning new villages. They’ve been expanding for months, but once they hit the pop cap they are supposed to spawn another village nearby.

* I need to put combat back in. I ripped it out for debugging purposes – and I know it’s at least partially broken. That needs to be reactivated and debugged.

* I need to get more god powers implemented. Right now the only two that do exactly what they are supposed to are Flatten and Lightning Bolt.

I got the first two requirements done over the weekend and an amazing thing happened…

It’s a game now.

It’s got a definite beginning, requirements for success, and those requirements can be fulfilled – the game can even tell when you (or someone else) has won. The first time I crushed the AI player and had the game actually feed back to me that I’d won…well, that was a great moment for me personally.

So finally, fourteen months after I started this project (and eight months after it was supposed to have been finished), Planitia is a playable game! It’s not a very good game, but I wasn’t expecting it to be – this game is a perfect candidate for the iterative game design process.

And this means I still have two weeks to polish it up and add features before I post it. I’ve even started adding – GASP! – sound!

After a whole lot of work last weekend (and a lot of help from Ryan) I finally managed to get Planitia’s frame rate up and keep it up even when terrain morphing.

As much as I would have liked to put terrain.cpp to bed, I wanted to do two more things – make the terrain look less tiled, and make the water look more interesting.

So I did.

And I updated the demo so that anyone who wants to try it out can. Performance should be greatly improved, but there’s no new functionality (yet).

Now I need A* on the General. After that, no added features should really impact the frame rate. In theory.

I still feel I’m on track to have the first playable alpha version out by the end of August.

Okay. For your edification, I am going to post my current “Things To Do On Planitia” list. I’ve been maintaining this list since I started the project. According to SVN, I created this file on Monday, December 11, 2006, so I guess I can say that’s when I started working on Planitia.

Everything starred is done. Everything not starred is not done.

Tasks to be done on Planitia

*  Create a heightfield.  Texture it with our grass texture.

*  Create a camera object and implement our moving, rotating, zooming camera. Do
*  nothing else until this works.

*  We'll start with billboarded sprites as our objects.  Rip graphics from
*  another game.

*  Make it so units move smoothly across the landscape at any angle.

*  Create the walker unit.

*  Create the archer unit.

*  Create the fighter unit.

*  Create the barbarian (for now) unit.

*  Add combat stats to all units.

*  Fix the weird mipmapping on the units.

*  Add code to ensure that two units can never stop in the same grid square.

*  Fix problems with the picking input and box drawing.

*  Create the arrow unit.

*  Change the unit selection and orders to match a more traditional UI style.  In
*  other words, make it so that right-click gives orders.  Also change it so that
*  left clicking on a new unit dumps the current unit selection.

*  When you don't have a selection, left-clicking on the ground does nothing.
*  Left-clicking on a unit selects it.  Drawing a box with the left mouse button
*  selects all units in that box.

*  When you have a selection, left-clicking on the ground removes your selection.
*  Left-clicking on a unit removes your current selection and selects the unit.
*  Drawing a box with the left mouse button removes your current selection and selects
*  all units in that box.

*  When you don't have a selection, right-clicking on the ground does nothing.
*  Right-clicking on a unit does nothing.  Drawing a box with the right mouse
*  button does nothing.  (Boy, that was easy.)

*  When you have a selection, right-clicking on the ground moves all selected units
*  to that spot on the ground.

*  Right-clicking units not on the current team tells all selected units to attack
*  that unit.

*  Make sure that every time you delete a unit off the stack, you check the entire
*  list to see if anyone has a target to that unit and set them all to NULL.

*  Drawing a box with the right mouse button does nothing.

*  Jigger the numbers on unit creation so that attacks are staggered.

*  Add simple "find Quinn's ass and beat it" AI.

*  Create three teams of units and see what happens when the AI has them fight each other.

*  Moving the mouse to an edge of the screen should scroll the screen in that direction.

*  Get the hit point bars off the arrows.

*  Moving the mousewheel should zoom in/out.

*  Double-left-clicking a unit should dump any current selection and select all units
*  of that type.

*  Unit movement is time-dependent, which is correct, but camera movement is frame
*  dependent, which is wrong.  Fix it.

*  Have the zoom and the pan move faster the farther out you are.

*  Fix the box so that it works in any direction.

*  Add line to the help screen that tells people to exit the game by pressing ESC.

*  Make it so that you can pan, zoom and rotate all at the same time.

*  Add braking to all camera movement so that it doesn't feel so "hard".

Need pop states

NEED STORY STUFF NOW or we run the risk of Planitia having no story elements.

Need a dirt-simple text-based scripting system for story scenes.

*  MOVECAMERATO (location)  (time the move should take in MS)
*  ROTATECAMERATO (angle) (time the rotate should take in MS)
WAIT (time to wait in MS)
*  BARK (location) (text) (time to display in MS)
DROPUNIT (type) (unit) (position)
MOVEUNIT (unit) (position) (time the move should take in MS)
*  BOUNCEUNIT (unit) - Causes unit to "bounce" as if it jumped
TURNUNIT (unit) - Causes the unit to rotate 180 degrees

*  Need parts of a talk bubble that can be put together to form any size talk
*  bubble so that we can print text on it.  Based on script input.

NEED LEVEL INI FILE FORMAT NOW

It should include:

Targa file to use as heightfield data
Location of trees
Location of rocks
Initial location of buildings
Initial location of units
Initial location/rotation of camera
Level goal requirements
Script to run for intro
Script to run for outro

Need god powers.  Start with lightning/meteor as a test.
Need to flesh out design so we can figure out which ones we
want.  Reference Populous 1/2, Powermonger, Age of Mythology,
Black & White.

Need ten playable levels, plus intro outro scripts for each level.

Need skirmish against computer.

Need multiplayer, up to four people (can come after initial release).

Need 3D buildings, trees and rocks.

Want 3D units (may not be necessary but it would be very nice).

Fix terrain picking to use a real ray-plane test (sphere doesn't work that well).

Sort units back to front before rendering.

Do a cleanup pass; the code is getting kind of murky.

At this point it’s really feeling like every single thing I finish adds two more things to the list. But I’m hoping to have the game feature-complete by the end of March so that I can spend all of April creating content for it.

I’ve been thinking about Planitia lately. And every time I do, the theme music to Sacrifice starts playing in my head.

Sacrifice was a game released by Shiny back in 2000. It was notable for several things.

First off, it was gorgeous. See?

When I first saw screenshots of World of Warcraft my first thought was, “Wow, that almost looks as good as Sacrifice.”

Second, it had fantastic voice acting. Shiny was a company that understood that good voice acting is cheap compared to how much better it makes your game.

And finally, it was notable for being completely unplayable, which is why it failed in the marketplace.

Okay, I’m being slightly unfair with that last one. But Sacrifice had a thoroughly odd design; it was effectively a real-time strategy game and a third-person shooter game at the same time, with an interface that wasn’t suited for either genre. Imagine playing Warcraft III while having to look over the shoulder of your hero at all times and you’ll get a feeling for what playing Sacrifice was like. The clumsy interface combined with a rather steep difficulty curve (the last level is famously difficult) and you get a game that entices players in, but can’t keep them. I came damn close to buying Sacrifice based on the demo but was saved when a friend of mine picked it up, got frustrated with it and then let me borrow it. Which prevented me from buying it.

But the ideas behind Sacrifice were fascinating, and I certainly have never forgotten the game. Those ideas include:

* A world made of islands floating in an etherial void

* A bickering, petty pantheon of gods

* Very obvious display of the power of the gods – there are no atheists in the world of Sacrifice

* A set of standard unit types – scout, brawler, archer, flyer, etc – of which each god has their own unique type

If I were going to try to “fix” Sacrifice, I’d probably pull it back into a more normal real-time strategy mode. I might still have hero characters, but I certainly would not force players to control the game through that one character. Not sure yet if I’d require buildings and resource management, or if I’d keep the game simpler and more free-form.

This will require more thought, but at least I’m back to thinking about it.

Another update that doesn’t involve prettier screenshots. Sorry.

Of the Big List of Stuff To Do, I’ve managed to bang out the following:

• Saving
• Map links
• Combat
• Inventory
• Equipping of weapons and armor
• Using items
• Selling items
• Spells (except Smite)
• Levelling up

So, lots of difficult stuff sorted now. Here’s what’s left:

• Buying
• Loading
• Dying (death is currently non-fatal)
• Implement a fullscreen/windowed button (very low priority)
• Fix the Smite spell
• Fix getting objects (currently you can get anything anywhere on the screen)
• Put a “hit” marker on the player or NPCs when they get hit
• Use a “missile” marker to show bow or Smite attacks
• Make the two remaining town maps
• Make the eight dungeon maps
• Make the final boss castle map

And that should be it. I’m budgeting four hours to finish the infrastructure stuff – hopefully it will take less. And then the final five or so hours will be to create the actual maps of the game.

It’s getting really tight, but I already know that I’m going to ship something playable. It may not be fun or complete, but it’ll be playable, and that’s all that is required for me to consider this project a success.