“The best music game ever made”

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Well, this op-ed is certainly flattering. I personally enjoyed reading the article quite a bit as working on the music side of the game was probably my favorite part of the project. Along with helping our great composers (Christopher Tin, Jeff Briggs, Mark Cromer, and Michael Curran) put together the new music, I got the privilege to select the historical pieces that comprised the background music from the Renaissance to the Modern era, giving me a great excuse to examine and expand my music library. I learned that many of the pieces that first spring to mind – say Beethoven’s Ninth – don’t work very well as soundtrack because they draw too much attention to themselves. Orchestral dances and middle movements, with more constant tempos and fewer climaxes, tended to work much better. (I couldn’t resist, however, adding Bach’s Violin Concerto because the climax is just that good…)

As for the John Adams, I always felt that he made a good choice for matching the inherent compromises and inconsistencies of the 20th Century as – though he is fully versed in the developments of Modernism, especially with regards to Minimalism – he remains a Romantic at heart. For Adams, Minimalist techniques are simply another tool as opposed to an end in and of themselves, giving his music a broad, expansive feel unique to the period. I did have to edit many of his pieces significantly as his dynamic range is enormous. Another piece I wanted to include for its impossibly beautiful and haunting tone – “Christian Zeal and Activity” – has a moving spoken word section which I had no choice but to leave out. Filling the entire Modern era with just one composer was, I admit, a fairly idiosyncratic decision, but I like games which evoke the feeling of having a unique designer on the other end.

Having said all that, I definitely want to thank Jeff Briggs and 2K Games for going out on a limb for me with this somewhat pricy decision. It was one of many things I asked for with Civ4 (such as releasing the AI SDK) without actually expecting to get them!

GD Column 1: Seven Deadly Sins for Strategy Games

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The following was published in the April 2008 issue of Game Developer magazine…

Amongst computer games, the strategy genre is one of the oldest and proudest, with a strong tradition, running from M.U.L.E. to Civilization to Starcraft and beyond. Nonetheless, certain design mistakes keep being made over and over again. Here are seven of the most common:

1. Too much scripting

Strategy games have a direct lineage from board games, and the fun of playing the latter comes from understanding the rules and mechanics of the game world and then making decisions that have consequence within that world. Computerized strategy games allow a single player to experience this same world on his or her own. At some point, however, strategy developers began to create lengthy, scripted scenarios as the single-player portion of their games. (In fact, the recent World in Conflict shipped without a single-player skirmish mode altogether.) These scenarios have a peculiar feeling – they use some of the same rules as the core game while often violating others. The AI takes action depending not on its own development rate or strategic priorities but on whether the human has hit certain triggers. In many scenarios, in fact, the human cannot even lose because – when defeat approaches – the script will freeze the AI and starting pumping in free units for the player. Further, these scenarios are often built around specific “objectives” to achieve, such as destroying a specific structure or capturing a single point. This artificial environment takes decision-making away from the player. Not only is there only one path to victory, but the player’s performance along that path may not even matter. Games without interesting decisions get boring quickly. Fortunately, some recent strategy games, such as Sins of a Solar Empire and Armageddon Empires, have returned to open-world, random-map gameplay – without pre-set objectives or artificial triggers – and are reminding us of the joy of cohesive and consistent strategy games.

2. Too much stuff

The temptation to pile extra units and buildings and whatnot onto to an already complete design is strong. Indeed, I have seen many developers describe games as simply a collection of stuff (“18 Weapons! 68 Monsters! 29 Levels!”) This approach is wrong-headed. A game design is a collection of interesting decisions, and the “stuff” in the game is there not just to fill space but to let you execute decisions. Games can provide too few options for the player but – more commonly – games provide too many. How many is just right? Obviously, there is no magic number, but it is possible to come up with a good rule-of-thumb for how many different options a player can keep in his or her mind before everything turns to mush. Blizzard uses the number 12 to make sure their RTS’s don’t get too complex. StarCraft averaged 12 units per side. So did WarCraft 3 (not counting Heroes). And you can bet that StarCraft 2 is going to be in that neighborhood as well. In fact, Blizzard has already announced that, for the sequel, they will be removing some of the old units to make room for the new ones. Players must be able to mentally track their in-game options at one time, and putting too many choices on the table makes it impossible to understand the possibility space.

3. Limited play variety

No matter how good your game, it is going to get stale after awhile. It’s unfortunate when a great game doesn’t take the few steps necessary so that players can change the settings to create alternate play experiences. Company of Heroes is an incredible tactical RTS, a watershed moment for the genre – but the game allows neither Axis vs. Axis battles nor matches with more than two teams. This design choice may fit the fiction of WWII, but it significantly reduced the game’s play variety. An example of an RTS that got this right is the Age of Empires series. Not only could you mix-and-match any combination of civilizations and players and teams, but you could also design your own map scripts. I remember one interesting Age of Kings map that had almost no wood but tons of stone and gold, which turned the game’s economy upside-down. The game even allowed multiple players to control the same single civilization (one could control the military, the other the economy, for example). Thus, I’ve played 2-vs-3 games of AoK where the sides with 2 civs was actually controlled by 4 players (and, in fact, handily won the game!) These simple variations probably doubled the life-span of AoK amongst my group of friends. Significantly, these options should be orthogonal to the game’s core mechanics – they need to add variety without adding complexity.

4. Black box mechanics

Sometime during the late-90’s, around when Black & White was being developed, the concept of an interface-less game came into vogue. The idea was that interfaces were holding games back from larger, more mainstream audiences. Ever since then, I have noticed a discernible trend to hide game mechanics from the player. Age of Kings shipped in 1999 with an incredible reference card listing every cost, value, and modifier in the game. For modern RTS’s, however, it’s unusual if the manual actually contains numbers. I want to emphasize that the answer here is not to bathe the players in complicated mathematics in the name of transparency. Instead, designers should think of their interfaces as having two levels: a teaching level and a reference level. The teaching level focuses on first-time players who need to know the basics, like how to build a tank and go kill the bad guys. The reference level should answer any question the player can think of about how a game mechanic works. It is perfectly fine, by the way, to put this info inside of a separate in-game resource, like the Civilopedia. Rise of Legends implemented an interesting version of this two-interfaces idea. Most of the popup help in the game had an “advanced” mode that you could unlock by holding down a key, giving you significantly more details about the game’s underlying mechanics.

5. Locked code/data

Protecting your code and data is a very natural instinct – after all, you may have spent years working on the project, developing unique features, pushing the boundaries of the genre. Giving away the innards of your game is a hard step for many developers, especially executives, to take. Nonetheless, we released the game/AI source code for Civ 4 shortly after shipping, and – so far – the results have been fantastic. Three fan-made mods were included in the game’s second expansion pack – Derek Paxton’s Fall from Heaven: Age of Ice, Gabriele Trovato’s Rhye’s and Fall of Civilization, and Dale Kent’s WWII: The Road to War – and so far, these scenarios have been heralded as one of Beyond the Sword’s strongest features. These mods would have been nowhere near as deep or compelling (or even possible) if we had not released our source code. For many PC developers, I’m preaching to the choir, so I’d like to be very clear that the problem is worst amongst strategy games. For whatever reason (perhaps the lack of a pioneering developer like id Software?), strategy developers have been much more closed off to modding than their shooter and RPG brethren. There are exceptions, like Blizzard’s fantastic scenario editor for WarCraft 3, but by and large, strategy modders do not have many places to turn for platforms on which to work, which was one reason we felt compelled to focus on modding for Civ 4. Giving stuff away can feel good. It should also feel smart.

6. Anti-piracy paranoia

The damage that piracy does to our industry is impossible to calculate but also impossible to ignore. Few company heads can be as brave as Stardock’s Brad Wardell, who chose to leave out copy protection altogether for the Galactic Civilization series. (They encourage paying customers by providing on-line updates to players with legitimate serial numbers.) Having some sort of mechanism to stop casual piracy is a given in the industry, but what is not a given is the hoops companies will make their customers jump through just to be able to start the game. The most important question to ask is “will this added security layer actually increase our sales?” A good place to be lenient, for example, is with local multi-player games – in other words, can players without the CD join a multi-player game hosted by a legitimate copy. Starcraft let you “spawn” extra copies of the game that could only join local multi-player games. Allowing unlimited LAN play was our unofficial policy for Civ 4 as well. The game does a disk check when opening the executable but not when you actually launch the game; thus, a group of 4 friends could just pass one disk around for local multiplayer games. We do not believe players are willing to buy extra discs just for LAN parties, which are rare events. However, we would love for new players to be introduced to Civ in these environments, encouraged by their friends who are already fans. At some point, they are going to want to try single-player – in which case, it is time for a trip down to the local retailer to buy their own copy.

7. Putting story in the wrong places

Story and games have a checkered history. Too many have suffered from boring cut-scenes, stereotyped characters, and plots that take control away from the player. Especially problematic are games which don’t let the player fast-forwarding through cringe-worthy dialogue. The worst offense, however, is when a story gets stuck somewhere it really doesn’t belong. Like in a strategy game. After all, strategy games are the original games. Humans first discovered gameplay with backgammon and chess and go; it’s a noble tradition. The “story” in a strategy game is the game itself. Picking a specific example, how much better of a game would Rise of Legends have been if Big Huge Games had given up on creating a story-based campaign and instead iterated on the excellent turn-based Conquer the World strategy layer from Rise of Nations? Ironically, the campaign mode was my favorite way to play RoL. I loved that you could only acquire technologies and advanced units on the strategic map between missions, which helped simplify the core RTS game. However, I enjoyed the campaign in spite of the story, not because of it. The key point here is that, for the sake of chasing a story, Big Huge Games missed a big opportunity to match a great core RTS game with a simple, overarching strategy layer that could be infinitely replayable. They are not alone; almost every other RTS developer seems to be falling into the same trap, and it is time for this trend to stop.

Colonization Returns

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Firaxis has just released a new version of the Brian Reynolds classic Colonization, built upon the Civ 4 engine. I’m excited to give the game a try as I never actually played the original back in1994. I remember seeing it on store shelves and being somewhat confused – was this game a smaller subset of Civilization or something? I only found out more about the game – and how it was quite different from the standard Civ formula – after joining Firaxis many years later. (Ironically, Alpha Centauri has more in common with vanilla Civ than Colonization does.) If you want a detailed primer on Colonization, check out Tom Chick’s currently running Game Diary as he goes into great detail.

Congratulations to the team, as well! The game is racking up great reviews.

A One Man Board Game Buyer’s Guide (Part I)

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Settlers of Catan

Settlers is in an odd place nowadays. It was the game that first broke German-style gaming in America, and it has been successful enough to reach a certain level of critical mass. I have even began seeing Catan at the houses of friends who normally would only have Monopoly and Scrabble in their game closets and have certainly never heard of the term “German” gaming. Nonetheless, Settlers has a surprisingly low BGG ranking, and I have the sense that much of the hard-core crowd has moved on from Settlers to more complex games like Puerto Rico and Caylus. It may now be a victim of its own success, which is a shame because Settlers of Catan is a brilliant, brilliant game, superior to all but a handful of games on this list. Three elements of the design stick out in my mind. First, the pure simplicity of the mechanics, which almost anyone can grasp within a few minutes. No hidden modifiers exist that need to be remembered, and almost all the rules are spelled out on the board and cards in an intuitive way. Second, the embrace of randomness, both for the map layout and during the game itself. Having a random map greatly extends replayability, and random resource generation nicely avoids the “perfect information” problem from which many Germany games suffer. Finally, trading has always been a rich game mechanic, and Settlers is built for trading. Isolationists will almost never win, making Settlers one of the most socially interactive German games. No game collection should be without it.
Grade: A (BGG: 7.73)

Carcassonne

The joy of playing Carcassonne is not altogether different from the joy of finishing a puzzle. Finding the perfect spot for your piece is a great game mechanic, not to mention an accessible one. However, Carcassonne does not have intuitive scoring rules. The danger is not the complexity – it’s that the game looks simpler than it actually is, which inevitably leads to a disappointing experience when a new player trips over the tricky farmer rules. Another game for every collection, but I wish the designers had pushed themselves harder to keep the scoring simpler.
Grade: B+ (BGG: 7.57)

Caylus

The last game of Caylus I played was six hours long, which was about five too many. Caylus is the worst example of a trend in German games to minimize hidden information and random elements. These traits are valued highly among the most hard-core of board gamers – the ones who would like to win 10 games out of 10 versus newbies based on their own superior skill. Unsurprisingly, Caylus is a popular game among this crowd. To me, it feels like slow-motion arm wrestling. Between two players, that dynamic is actually not so bad. Among bigger group, it’s a pretty painful slog.
Grade: C (BGG: 8.09)

Bang!

Bang! is a blast! Essentially a souped-up version of the old college dorm ice-breaker, Mafia, the game revolves around hidden identities. Play sessions tend to be lively and memorable – I’m still smarting from the game I came an inch away from winning as a Renegade by convincing the Sheriff I was the Deputy until I got killed by the Dynamite! Aaargh! As a deeply asymmetrical game, the balance is a little dubious, but Bang! certainly proves that pure fun is more important!
Grade: B+! (BGG: 6.92)

Bohnanza

If Settlers is a trading game, then Bohnanza is a trading game on steroids. Every rule in the game exists for the sole purpose of encouraging trading, and they work perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, that the rulebook has to specify that it is ok to refuse gifts! (Imagine needing a rule like this in Settlers…) The only downside to Bohnanza is that there is so much trading that there is an unfortunate potential for hurt feelings with regards to who trades the most with whom. If your game group is sensitive to these types of problems, the game may not be right for you.
Grade: B (BGG: 7.25)

Citadels

Quite a few games have the mechanic of I-know-that-you-want-to-choose-X, but since you-know-that-I-know-that-you-want-to-choose-X-you-won’t-choose-X, but as you-know-that-I-know-that-you-won’t-choose-X-then-maybe-you-will-choose-X-after-all, and so on. Citadels, however, is built entirely around this tension, via the secret selection of roles at the beginning of each turn. Of course, the tortured logic train never leads to a definite answer, so the guesses have to be based on pure personality, making Citadels a great game to be played among old friends. Who is the greediest? The sneakiest? The most aggressive? The most conservative? Well, it’s a lot more fun than the Myers-Brigg.
Grade: A- (BGG: 7.37)

Pandemic

Jonathan Blow, designer of Braid, gave an interesting talk this summer on the common disconnect between narrative and gameplay in video games. A good example is the choice made in Bioshock between harvesting and rescuing Little Sisters. The narrative tells the player that the choice matters, but gameplay tells the player it doesn’t matter. Board games also have a similar problem when the theme does not match the mechanics. Although theme can often be a secondary concern for board games – consider how similar the gameplay is between San Juan and Race for the Galaxy yet how completely different the setting is – the best games often find a way to pair the two. Pandemic is one such game. The players are disease specialists who work closely together to control outbreaks across the globe. More importantly, the players feel like they are racing to find creative, cooperative solutions to a challenge where the deck is literally stacked against them. (The innovative deck re-shuffling mechanic, in which previously drawn cards are placed on top, is especially worthy of note.) This pairing contrasts with another fun cooperative game, Shadows over Camelot, in which players are supposed to be Knights of the Round Table, but they feel more like they are playing whack-a-mole by assembling the best poker hands. The pairing of mechanics and theme is what makes Shadows just a good game and Pandemic a great one.
Grade: A (BGG: 7.92)

Ticket to Ride

I have written before on the bizarre “backstory” behind Ticket to Ride. Fortunately, the game itself is excellent. Further, Ticket to Ride is extremely easy to teach and also moves at a brisk pace, making an ideal introduction into the larger board gaming world for new players. Ticket to Ride is also at the vanguard of a trend which I believe will become increasingly dominant in the near future, what I will term “competitive solitaire”. The goal of the game is to build a network of tracks which connects a random selection of cities. Other players can occasionally affect your plans by grabbing a route you need, but overall, the feeling of the game is of trying to make as many of your own connections work as possible, not of trying to screw over your opponent. The big advantage of competitive solitaire is that when a player loses, they tend to blame their own play instead of their opponents’ decisions, which usually encourages players to try again to “get it right” the next time.
Grade: A- (BGG: 7.62)

Puerto Rico

The reigning BGG champion, Puerto Rico definitely sums up what is great and not so great about German gaming. Plenty of interesting strategic decisions combined with elegant mechanics – such as simply adding a gold coin every turn to unselected roles as a reward – earn the game much respect. However, the lack of hidden information and (almost) no random elements make the game difficult to enjoy when playing with optimizers, who tend to be the ones most drawn to deep board games in the first place. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I don’t want to play Puerto Rico with anyone else who wants to play Puerto Rico.
Grade: C+ (BGG: 8.38)

Race for the Galaxy

Inspired by Puerto Rico (not to mention San Juan), the card game Race for the Galaxy centers on building up a collection of planets and developments for points or for production, which can later be converted to points via trade. The big difference between Race and Puerto Rico is that the players’ build options are hidden in their hands and that the action phases are played simultaneously. These distinctions make Race significantly more accessible because player have to make intuitive guesses, instead of over-analyzing the set turn order and complete information of Puerto Rico. Games of Race can be played very quickly, probably having the most interesting decisions per minute of any game, ever. Like Ticket to Ride, Race could also be described as competitive solitaire, which makes the game – despite its complexity – relatively accessible.
Grade: A (BGG: 8.05)

Set

Why do people walk tightropes? Why do they skydive? Why do they run marathons? For the same reason the play Set – to test their limits. More of a time-sensitive puzzle than a game, Set is not to be undertaken lightly. The challenge is to find specific three-card patterns before your opponents can, and the experience is nerve-racking. Many people will hate Set because the game can literally give you a headache, but if you want to push your brain as hard as you can, Set is the game for you.
Grade: B- (BGG: 6.53)

Lost Cities

One of the biggest advantages physical games have over digital games is that all one needs to become a game designer is a stack of cards, some stickers, a few markers, and maybe a die or two. In some cases, just a single deck will do. Lost Cities bears the obvious marks of deriving directly from a standard pack of playing cards. The game has five “suits”, with cards ranked from 2 to 10 and three face cards, er, I mean, investment cards. The gameplay itself uses a classic risk/reward mechanic that encourages multiple, early investments but penalizes players who cannot complete all their goals. The discard mechanic is interesting as well, putting game length squarely under player control. My only wish is that designer Reiner Knizia had pushed himself a little harder to simplify the scoring rules as they don’t match the simplicity of the rest of the game.
Grade: B (BGG: 7.34)

Mamma Mia!

An interesting memory game, Mamma Mia! is also nearly impossible to explain to players in words. Players submit pizza ingredients and orders into a collective stack, hoping that when the stack is replayed, the ingredients will match their orders to score points. The trick, however, is that ingredients are communal – if you remember that I submitted a bunch of mushrooms earlier, you can steal them for your own mushroom pizza order if you submit it before me. One game in, however, and most players are hooked. Most importantly, Mamma Mia! does an excellent job of keeping the amount a player needs to remember in that sweet spot between trivially easy and hopelessly difficult.
Grade: B+ (BGG: 6.62)

Age of Renaissance

Some games simply have gone a rule system too far. Ostensibly a sequel to the old classic Civilization, Age of Renaissance has an absolutely gorgeous map of Medieval Europe as well as a promising trade model which encourages monopolizing resources spread across the whole world. Nonetheless, the game is virtually unplayable because of the cumbersome technology system, encompassing 26 techs, all of which can be learned in a single game and each of which changes how the game plays for the owner. Keeping track of all those bonuses and special rules would be fairly trivial for a computer, but the experience is a slog for a human. Only cutting technologies (or, at least, taking away their unique bonuses) from Age of Renaissance could have saved this frustrating, yet enticing, game.
Grade: C (BGG: 7.17)

History of the World

As I discussed with Pandemic, theme is a tricky problem – especially as many board games can easily be converted from one theme to another without damaging the core play experience. Further, quite a few games that try to differentiate themselves on theme often do not actually deliver on that promise. How many world history games devolve into rich-get-richer scenarios which bear no resemblance to actual world events. (Indeed, I’m guilty as charged too! The Civ community calls this the Eternal China Syndrome.) History of the World is not one of these games. The designers solved this problem by building the fall of empires into the core gameplay – and not as some obscure option that players would learn to avoid. Each turn in HotW, players are forced to leave their old civilization behind and start a new one. The audacity with which the designers violated such a basic assumption – that players get to build off of their gains – is remarkable. That in doing so they built a game which looks like real world history and is also fun to play is an astonishing achievement. The scoring mechanism itself, which increases the total points available each turn to keep all players in the running, is worthy of note too. The game may certainly be a little long for some, but I can think of few other games that deliver on their theme’s promise as well.
Grade: A+ (BGG: 7.17)

Taj Mahal

I fell in love with Taj Mahal right away. The rules are so simple, yet so rich for multiplayer competition – indeed, Taj Mahal is one of the most cutthroat games I have ever played. The central strategy is knowing exactly when to push for victories and when to hold back as the rules naturally prevent rich-get-richer situations. Further, the penalty for overreaching is severe, perhaps too severe for more casual gamers. Nonetheless, Taj Mahal is a fascinating game, with some nice random elements and a scoring system (similar to History of the World) which encourages comebacks by giving out more points in the latter turns.
Grade: A- (BGG: 7.67)

Did Microsoft Grant My Wish?

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A number of months ago, I wrote about my hopes for Microsoft’s Xbox Live Community initiative to grant my wish for an automated online market for developers to sell their games. I wrote that:

I fear that Microsoft will never allow the XNA developers to charge for their games, treating the Live Community like the minor leagues, from which they will “promote” popular titles to official status.

Turns out my fears were unfounded as Microsoft is, in fact, allowing XNA developers to charge for their games. Of course, the devil is still in the details – why is there a price cap and a fluctuating royalty rate? – but, for the moment, I want to commend Microsoft for doing the right thing. This somewhat imperfect initiative will still change the face of gaming. Bravo.

Dear Paul Barnett

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I am curious which parts of Civ4 you would describe as “cuckoo-land“? In fact, our overriding goal was not to go down the standard sequel path and overwhelm the player with too many choices. Civ4 actually has fewer technologies in the base game than Civ2 does. We even had a rule-of-thumb – if you put something new in, take something old out. On the other hand, if you haven’t played Civ4, you should give it a go. You might be surprised.

Spooky

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Gamasutra posted a Spore-centric interview with me recently. Three days earlier, GameSetWatch put up an excellent interview with Tilted Mill founder Chris Beatrice, in which he talked about his company’s interesting decision to buy the right of their Egyptian city-builder Children of the Nile from the original publisher. We also both talked about the games industry in general, and I was struck by how similar our responses were. See if you can guess who said what…

On AAA games:

However, I do think triple-A 3D RTS PC games are exactly where not to be right now.

I would not want to be in one of the classic triple-A franchise battles right now. I think that’s just a very bad place to be, whether that’s fighting games, RTSes, FPSes.

On semantics:

Will RTS as it exists right now be here in 20 years? The classic “Build a base, build some barracks, go attack the other guy…” Part of me wonders if this is just a temporary dead-end, because RTSes could be everything from Railroad Tycoon, SimCity, MULE, Populous… those are all RTSes.

So RTS really means, “real-time war game” to me. It’s funny because the Caesar series was always a “real-time strategy game” long before those others came into existence and eventually dominated both strategy and PC games overall, but it wasn’t called that because the distinction was unimportant for that type of game.

On RTS gameplay:

Unlike the RTS category in general, which has become more and more focused on targeting a core group of players with the skills and experience – and machines – to play what has become a highly evolved, and in my opinion exclusionary, genre.

The RTS genre in general has a big problem, in that it’s one of the most ghettoized. I think there are a lot of players who will play almost any type of game except for RTSes, because people just have the sense of, “There’s a thousand things to do. I’ll never be able to get them all. I’ll never be able to handle it all.” I think your classic triple-A RTS game is going to become less and less meaningful to most gamers, and when we look back in fifteen or twenty years in the future, aren’t going to be the games that helped move the strategy genre forward.

On managing expectations:

Stardock, for example, has made a lot of money with Gal Civ… Just knowing, “Okay, we’re not going to sell a million units, but we’re going to sell 250 or 300,000 copies of it.” It’s not hard to make money. You can make a lot of money doing that if you set your budgets. If you set a realistic expectation for your project, you can definitely make money. You just need to set your budget correctly. But those kinds of returns just don’t interest a lot of major publishers.

Of course we still want our games to look great, but let’s be honest, the last five to eight years or so have really shown the diminishing returns in chasing the screenshot, if you know what I mean. In PC games there’s a ton of opportunity, potential for originality and innovation. And I think there’s also plenty of money in the “middle” – that is, in games that sell 30,000 to 300,000 copies, rather than millions.

3 Million Copies

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A Spore-related interview with Jeff Green went up recently on 1UP.com. Here’s a quote about my history in the games industry:

1UP: You started in the game industry around 2000?

SJ:Yeah, I went from Stanford to EA, where I did a couple of internships, and then Firaxis was my first real job in 2000.

1UP: So does it feel like a lot has changed since then in the game-development community?

SJ: Yes. When I came on, it was like right after very, very high times for PCs. StarCraft was a few years old at that point, but you had stuff like Age of Empires selling boatloads of copies. It still was the age of the PC shooter — it hadn’t made the transition to console yet. Halo was still on the horizon.

1UP: Half-Life was ’98.

SJ: It was definitely high times for PC developers. By the time of Civ 4 [in 2005], it was very frustrating. Civ 3 [2001] worked out, but we really learned a lot from it and felt we really knew what we were doing and were going to make a great product with Civ 4. But the Civ franchise was owned by Atari, and Atari needed cash, so they sold it to Take 2. But they talked about selling it to a number of publishers, and a lot of them just were not interested — and that kinda blew my mind.

1UP: Didn’t Civ 4 end up selling pretty well?

SJ: Yeah, I’m pretty sure it sold at least a couple million copies. [According to Take 2, Civ 4 sold 3 million copies as of March 2008 — Ed.]. A lot of triple-A games have a $20 million development budget, but that was definitely not the budget for Civ 4. We were always strapped for resources. We had two artists until a year before we shipped, but we were able to pull that off. So it blew my mind that we have this game that’s not going to cost a lot of money, which is a really big upside. It’s very low risk. But it’s like with every version of Civ — we had to prove it to the publishers all over again. It’s weird, because it’s not like you have to twist publishers’ arms to make sequels to million dollar-selling franchises….

1UP: So let’s say you were just getting into the business now, but you had the same education and interests. Do you still see yourself pursuing this path on the PC?

SJ: Yeah, because I’m still very much a strategy guy. If computers weren’t around, I probably would have tried to design board games. That still, for me, feels like the place to be. If I was 21 now [and] in school, I’m sure I would have some sort of wonky strategy game site doing some sort of hex-based war game or something.

Here’s the interesting thing about this interview – reading the Editor’s Note was the first time I found out that Civ4 sold 3 million copies. Which is great, of course. Our target was 2.5 million as each version of the franchise sold about half a million more than the previous version. Nonetheless, it is an odd feeling not to know – or have any official recourse to find out – how many copies of the game I worked on so long actually sold. Certainly, in other industries, the idea that a director or musician not have access to this information would be very strange.

Mod Mods

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Apolyton’s PolyCast has started an excellent new Podcast dedicated to Civilization modding called ModCast. Episode 11, in particular, is worth listening to as it details the development history of the excellent and ambitious Fall from Heaven mod, easily the most popular Civ4 mod yet. Project leader Derek “Kael” Paxton details how the mod evolved (and continues to evolves), and I was especially interested to hear how they rewrote the entire code base from scratch for the second expansion, Beyond the Sword, in order to remove all hard-coding (which means direct references to specific units or buildings or spells within the code) from the mod. By taking this step – which is an extremely unusual one for an “amateur” team – they enabled other modders to use Fall from Heaven as a base to build upon for their own mods. This change actually mirrors the development practices within the “professional” Civ4 team – we viewed the product not as a single game but as a generic turn-based strategy engine.

The impact of this change should not be understated – Fall from Heaven is now a platform in its own right, which should give it legs for years and years to come. Accordingly, CivFanatics has given FfH “mod mods” their own sub-forum for modders to share their work. One interesting mod mod, Dungeon Adventure (shots below), turns FfH into a Rougelike! Watching this sub-community grow over time will be interesting…