The demo for Caesar 4 came out this week, and is looking quite sharp.  From my limited demo playtime, it seems like a much more solid city building game than Children of the Nile, Tilted Mill's first effort.

I found it quite interesting that the game using C# as a scripting language -- in fact, you can even find the raw source code for the demo scripts in the demo install.  We've been playing around with using C# more in our games here so it is quite interesting to see an example of that in the field.  I'm also always quite curious when I can peek behind the covers a bit more at how other games are tackling some of the same kinds of problems we always run into.

One of my favorite tech / management blogs, Joel on Software, has an excellent multi-part piece up about the motivations of programmers and how that relates to various managerial approaches.  Ok, maybe you have to be a dev and process geek like I am to get excited about this sort of stuff, but I found his writeup extremely interesting.  Basically he talks a lot about why management techniques that work in other fields (like the military, car sales, or retail) just don't work with technical people, but advocates an approach he terms "Identity Management" for doing so, the crux of which is that you have to get everyone invested personally in sharing the goals and ideology of the project and then everything else will fall out from there.

Game development is certainly a highly technical field, but even for the more creative aspects I think his comments are hold true for games.  I've had the opportunity to see a lot of different management approaches and when you are working with talented people, especially creative ones, expecting traditional top-down techniques is a waste of resources at best.  I like to see my job when leading a team of programmers as far less about management and more about coordination -- everyone is going to generally do their best to do great stuff, I just need to make sure all of person X's great stuff is going to work well with what person Y is doing.

Apparently a bug was introduced in today's World of Warcraft patch that can cause permanent enchantments to items to be overwritten by temporary ones.  So you when you add a cheapo bonus enchant to your expensive high powered one, suddenly you're out of luck.  Oops!

I really feel for Blizzard in this case.  The possible actions and interactions in a game of WoW's scope are just mind-boggling, and for a "small" patch the odds are that stuff like this is going to slip through.  Hopefully it's just as easily re-patched but it's a good lesson learned of why any change can be dangerous... it's not the problems you know about that get you, but the ones you don't know about...

One of the very best perks of working at a place like Ensemble is just working with extremely smart individuals.  I had a tech design meeting today where we discussed and brainstormed a lot of potential solutions to a very difficult problem.  In the end we came up with some exciting solutions (even if the whole thing is a lot of work) and everyone came out with a much better understanding of the issues. 

Plus, everyone just had a great attitude about solving these hard problems and finding the "sweet spot" between complexity, difficulty, speed, and functionality.  Being able to learn from one's peers in a good environment is just hard to beat.

Sorry for such a rah-rah post, but it was a very solid day and I'm feeling good about it.  :)

Dead Rising really is in many ways the ultimate zombie game.  It captures the "trapped in a mall with zombies" vibe perfectly.  I mean, it really, really nails it.  My window of time to play it each evening has been small -- after the kids go bed only, for obvious reasons, and they've had rough sleep schedules this week so far.  But I savor my time in the Willamette Mall so far... chopping zombies up with a chainsaw, throwing CDs at them, putting weird lego-head masks on them, or even knocking them over with a bowling ball... it's all good.  The sheer variety of weapons in Dead Rising really does add a kind of freeform gameplay that is refreshing.

It is unfortunate that they made a bit of a hash out of the save system.  Saving is a right, not a privilege, and if you're going to play the "one save only to increase the tension" card, IMO it is incumbent to also provide a one-reload-only "suspend" save to account for the fact that sometimes real life interferes.  But so far I'm just enjoying the sheer zombie carnage and atmosphere so much in Dead Rising that the awful save system is a small price to pay. 

Since you can start over the game and keep your leveled-up stats, I'm kind of treating it more like Robotron, or perhaps Majora's Mask, than a usual action adventure game.  Only now that I've done about 3-4 plays through the first day am I really getting serious about advancing the plot -- at which point perhaps my annoyance with the save system will increase...

The pieces of my new machine are arriving!  The case arrived today, making a complete set of everything I've ordered... almost.  Unfortunately I'm having a devil of a time tracking down the CPU I want -- the Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 basically seems to be unavailable for another week or two.  So now I have all the parts of a badass gaming machine except the actual "computer" part. 

It will be a good time to have a new machine.  Not only can I revisit a few games that my current PC couldn't quite hack the framerate on (Children of the Nile, Stronghold 2, Civ City Rome, and oh, I dunno, most first person shooters) but there are some great games headed out soon -- Dark Messiah, Company of Heroes, and Sid Meier's Railroads, all of which should look great with details maxed out on the new rig...

To briefly hardware geek out, here are my new specs, assuming I can ever get a CPU:

SPCR P180 Case

Seasonic S12 600W Power Supply

ASUS P5N32-SLI Motherboard

SB0610 Audigy 4 Audio Internal

OCZ Series 2GB (2x1) DDR2 667 Memory

Western Digital SE16 500 GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s

Sony 16x DWDRW DWQ120AB2

MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE 1GB PCI Express x16 Dual CPU

Intel Core 2 Duo 6700 CPU

According to what I can tell from sites like Tom's Hardware, I should be able to get 100fps+ easily on most modern FPS games even at full 1680x1050...

I'm quite excited about the imminent release of Dead Rising.  I'm a huge fan of zombie movies and games, and this looks like the new contender for the best of the bunch.

In that usual way, I call around to the local EB this afternoon, and they tell me they have it in stock!  Hooray!  And then they tell me that they won't sell it until tomorrow morning.  Boo!

Really, if you're just going to taunt your customers, probably better to tell a little white lie and just claim you're getting it in tomorrow.  Of course, I find the whole process a bit bizarre.  Why not sell them if you have them in?  I can understand (a little) for heavily promoted street dates, but Dead Rising doesn't seem to qualify in that regard...

Ah well.  Tomorrow hopefully I'll track down a copy -- I foolishly didn't pre-order one.  Between this and Saint's Row in 3 weeks it's a fine, fine time to be a Xbox 360 gamer.

I see that the info is starting to come out on the World of Warcraft collectible card game.  I'm a sucker for these games and I'm sure they will burn through the office for at least a few weeks (or even months), so I can see my hard-earned shekels going towards a box or two already.  My copy of the World of Warcraft board game arrived over the weekend, and Elise and I spent a few hours punching out pieces and playing around with it (while defending our board from the true Scourge, little 2 yr old grabby hands).

Both are fun, and the fanboy in me just likes seeing some common RPG mechanics being dressed up in WoW paint.  Heck, we did an Age 2 cardgame and boardgames for both AOM and Age 3, so I can't really complain.  In fact, I find it kind of neat the way these worlds can cross over not into other traditional "IP" media like books (and I hear a World of Warcraft movie is on the way) but also into other kinds of games. 

I have a few ideas for some "meta IP" game concepts where there would be interlocking board and video games (as well as more traditional cross-media things you see fairly often today with game / movie / TV presence).  It's probably not the most mass market idea and would take a lot to pull off, but who knows? 

I'm an avid reader of Mark Rosewater's column over at the main Magic the Gathering site, and I often find the parallels between the design problems they face in the CCG space a close parallel to the problems we face (like how to keep a franchise fresh without changing what makes it distinct, how to balance creativity with learnability, etc.).  Mark is a fantastic writer so his columns are always a good read, but this week's "column" is a visual tour of the Wizards / Magic R&D offices.  Check it out here.

I shouldn't be surprised, but I thought it was interesting how similar the physical work environment there is to what we have at Ensemble.  A mix of shared open spaces and conference rooms, lots of geek paraphenalia everywhere, big collections of game art adorning the walls.  I always like getting these sorts of little peeks into the culture of game production in other fields.

Back when Ensemble was primarily working on just one game at a time, or playtest mechanism was pretty straightforward -- everyone in the company played the game at least once a week.  This is one of the best assets we have, in my opinion.  Getting developers to play their own game wouldn't seem like a radical notion but you'd be amazed how many times I hear from my peers at other companies that such a concept is totally foreign to their processes.  Of course not everyone can articulate their feedback to the same degree but with a decent design apparatus you can collect that feedback and distill it down into something useful.

That process is still basically what we use for the next game in the pipe (in our current case, the War Chiefs expansion for Age of Empires 3, which, by the way, is shaping up quite nicely).  However now we are grappling with how to extend that process to get gameplay feedback on our other projects that are earlier in the production pipeline.  One solution we are trying out is having each game, on a monthly or bi-monthly basis, open playtest to the entire Studios.  This way everyone keeps visibility and can provide feedback on the games, but we don't have to deal with individuals losing 2-5 afternoons each week to playtests.

Today was one of those days for my project (and believe me, I can't wait until I can talk about it in more specifics).  We ran playtests for the entire company all throughout the day.  As expected, we learned a ton about our game and the response to it, as well as getting a chance to expose our code to some more real world conditions (and all the bug finding and fixing that goes along with it).  For example, I discovered at the last minute the night before that the monitors in our playtest area had recently been upgraded to widescreens, prompting a sudden rush of late night coding to take advantage of them. 

Playtesting (either other people's game or my own) is one of my favorite things about my job, so I find days like today particularly satisfying.