Releases March 17, 2026
Journals
Dev Journal
The Stardock Game Roadmap 2011
This week I’ve been presenting internally our company business plan for 2011. Part of this is the Stardock Customer Report 2011 (which we’ll be making available publicly soon) along with our road map on the studio games (this doesn’t count future titles from our partner Ironclad who developed Sins of a Solar Empire nor does it address next steps in the Demigod franchise. This journal entry will likely only be of interest to either techies or biz types. So if you’re looking for interesting g... [read more]
Dev Journal
The trick of game design is to find the balance between ambition and execution. Fall to far on the ambition side of the equation and your game has potential, but is full of flaws. Fall to far on the execution side of the equation and your game make work perfectly, but doesn't stand out. Another way of looking at this is that there are finite resources for any project. That tends to be somewhat jaded (in my opinion), but it's the same point. But limited resources aren't... [read more]
Dev Journal
One of the challenges we’ve had in War of Magic has been making the world interesting. On the one hand, you want a world that looks ruined. But on the other hand, you don’t want a world that looks boring. During the betas of War of Magic, we had rivers in the world. Unfortunately, they looked horrendous because they couldn’t easily change the way they looked based on the morphing terrain system. For those of you not familiar with Elemental, in War of Magic, the terrain is t... [read more]
Dev Journal
How do you make a great game? Take everyone's great ideas, put them together and it will be great! Wouldn't it be wonderful if it worked like that. But it doesn't, it's not even close. I like to think of it like cooking. You can't cook by putting all the things together that you like. Putting all the things everyone likes together would be even worse. One guy wants cake, another wants pizza, another wants a steak. Throw them in a blender and.... Ev... [read more]
Dev Journal
You hear about executive producers sending “notes” down to the director or producer of a movie. That’s what I’m doing these days. “Maybe we should have robots in this scene instead of a dragon?” I’m leaving the dream. I assume a lot of people read these journals because they like seeing what happens at a game company that they would normally not get to find out about because most game companies these days are publicly held and thus there’s a strict PR leash on everyone. So today I’m... [read more]
News
PC Games Examiner Interview with Brad Wardell
The Salt Lake City PC Games Examiner posted an interview today with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell where they discuss Impulse, Digital Distribution, and of course PC Gaming. “Adam: When you launched Component Manager in 1998, did you have an idea of how big digital distribution would eventually become? Brad: We believed that digital distribution would eventually take over. But we thought that every developer and publisher would have their own thing. We di... [read more]
Dev Journal
With the changes over the past few months I thought you folks might like to know everyone’s roles on Fallen Enchantress. Names and roles are listed below in no particular order. This list isn’t comprehensive, there are a lot of hard working people in the marketing, business dev, audio, IT and publishing areas that aren’t covered. It also isn’t intended to be taken too seriously. Many of the people also work on other tasks and aren’t as strict... [read more]