In Part Two, we talked about the background of Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. Now it was time to actually make the game itself.

The original game had a budget of around $300,000US. With around 75,000 copies sold in North America and a similar number sold overseas we felt we could increase the budget to around $900,000US. In addition, we also decided we would publish the game ourselves and approximately $400,000US would be required up-front to handle that (not counting manufacturing and MDF). When it came time to look at distribution -- i.e. who would actually talk to the retailers, we talked to Take-Two Interactive (Take 2). We had worked with Take 2 on The Corporate Machine which they published and distributed and had a very positive experience. So we were naturally inclined to go with them for distributing Galactic Civilizations II.

The Features
We wanted to concentrate on a number of key features for the sequel:

• Ship Design
• Fleet battles / improved combat
• Better colony management
• 3D Engine
• Resolution Independence

These, by no means, were the only five new features. These just represented where the bulk of the budget would be going.

Implementing
Lead developer Cari and team lead Scott then conspired with the rest of the team to let people create ships in a very fancy way. Put them together like legos and let the 3D engine do the work.

Now users could not just design their own ships from a functional point of view, they could control how they looked. What colors they were down to trim, hull, exhaust, etc. Now some games have ship screenshots that look pretty impressive. But remember, those ships were modeled to be that color, size, and not modifiable visually. The coolness of your ships really depends on the player. But I think they look pretty cool. A totally free form ship creation kit.

But it didn't stop there. The team also implemented a very customizable interface. Everything could be tinted -- by the user. Don't like blue? No problem, make it whatever color you want. The guys made a dialog editor so that each race could have different dialog to say depending on which race you played as. That's a lot of different combinations!

One of our new developers, fresh out of college, Jesse, took our modest battle summary screen and turned it into a real-time cut-scene generator where ships battle it out in a Star Trek battle-type scene for the player's enjoyment (and it can be turned off too).

We also got a big break in the art department. Electronic Arts (EA) bought the National Football League rights which caused Sony to kill off their football game project. We snagged a 3D modeler with 15 years experience who was able to bring our 3D modeling up several notches. We also brought on Akil and Paul Kerchen (different Paul) for Society who we temporarily put onto Galactic Civilizations II and they were able really up the quality of the visuals and programming in a lot of areas.

The Polish Points
Another thing Scott and Paul did was bring up our polish level. Video tutorials, for example:

Or lights on the dark side of populated planets:

No Compromises
This time we finished with a game that we felt we had done everything we could on. Since moaning and complaining was what got me into game development in the first place, I have a list of things in GalCivII still that I want to tweak. But the difference is this time I think the foundation is very solid. That the engine, the story, the mechanics, are all there and ready to be further enhanced with new ideas and tweaks.

Let me give you a full examples of what I mean:

• Resolution Independence. There's a very popular First-Person Shoot (FPS) right now that doesn't support wide-screen monitors. If they don't address that, it will date the game. We decided early on we wanted a game that will look good still in 5 years. So GalCiv II will run at any high resolution. Even on those portrait monitors. 16x9, 4096x2400, whatever. And the ship detail will keep getting better over time because the textures are vector based rather than made in something like Photoshop. So the graphics shouldn't get dated.
• We can keep adding in new campaigns. The campaign is open ended so that we can keep putting in more scenarios, maps, etc.
• The game is incredibly moddable. I realie a lot of games claim this these days so let me just put it like this: The data is all XML files. The bitmaps are all .PNG. The models are .X. and the UI is all .dxpack (DesktopX, a free download). Go nuts.
• The Metaverse is a lot fancier and doesn't interfere with modding.
• Really good governors to keep micro management down through User Interface (UI) instead of Artifical Intelligence (AI).
• Very useful rally point system.
• Strategic overlay mode.
• There's a ton of little touches. Word on the street, unique phrasing by the aliens. Tons of stats. Below are some screenshots to show you what I mean on some of this:

Colony management (we didn't have anything like this in GalCivI):

Lots of new cut scenes thanks to our expanded art team. We've still got Alex, our original first art god, and have built up a lot since then.

The governors really help a lot!

Becoming a Publisher
In our view, being an effective publisher is about two things: Money and clout. If you have enough money to do the advertising, support retail market development funding, pay for manufacturing, and other such things, you're half way there.

The other half of publishing is marketing and distribution clout. That's something we were weaker on. We can't get front page coverage in a PC Gamer. Heck, we couldn't even get preview coverage in Computer Gaming World despite stalking editor-in-chief Jeff Green around northern California for months (or maybe because of the stalking, we forget). Retail presence is the other half. Next time you're in the store and you see a gazillion copies of Oblivion or some other game on the shelf, that's what retail clout is. The lack of retail clout would ensure that we'd never break any top 10 sales lists. We may do great on a per store basis, but we'd simply not be in enough channels to sell huge numbers.

On the other hand, unless you're getting published by an EA or UbiSoft or Take 2 or Atari or one of the other major publishers, no minor publisher is going to be able to do any better than we could do. Our non-game software such as Object Desktop had put us in a financial position of being able to mount a decent marketing campaign. And getting paid by smaller publishers had proven difficult in the past so we didn't see much benefit of not just doing it ourselves.

Full page ads in the major game magazines cost between $10,000 to $15,000 per month depending on how many you commit to and the magazine in question. The actual cost comes out to be something like a dime for reader per magazine. I think the jury is still out on how effective magazine advertising is. I think the real benefit of magazine advertising has to do with building marketing clout with retailers and the media than it does in terms of actually getting gamers to buy your game. And that helps justify the expense.

The Game is Released
Like many reviewers and game developers, I'm not terribly fond of game ratings. But I also recognize that they matter a lot to gamers in helping guide purchasing decisions. Some magazines matter more than others to different people. Sales-wise, the difference has been night and day. We shipped out more copies of Galactic Civilizations II in the first 10 days than GalCivI shipped total. By the middle of March, we'd sold more electronic copies of GalCivII than we had of GalCivI in the entire 3 year history of it. Sales-wise, there was no question that things had gone well.

But what about reviews? Here's a sampling:

Magazine/Webzine	Galactic Civilizations II	Galactic Civilizations I
GameSpot	9.0	8.4
GameSpot Player Reviews	8.9	8.2
IGN	8.7	8.2
GameRankings Average	88%	83%
GameRankings Readers Average	8.7	7.3

So far, no reviews have been lower than the original game. So that's a definite good sign.

Unexpected Factors
One of the decisions that got a lot of attention that we weren't expecting was that the game has no CD copy protection. That is, you can install it onto as many machines as you want that you own as long as only one copy is being played at a time. You can even toss out the CD entirely. Once you've registered the game on-line, you can re-download the entire game, even years later.

This turned out to be something that we think has generated an unexpectedly high number of sales. Simply put, people are getting tired of no longer being able to play their games as a result of losing a CD. It's hard to keep track of CDs.

What's Next
The post release schedule for the game is:

• Galactic Civilizations II 1.0X in March. This version will incorporate bonus features and content and have some tweaks. If there are any reported bugs, this version will also address that.
• Galactic Civilizations II 1.1 in April. This version will have a great deal of new features based on player feedback. Feature set To Be Determined (TBD) by players. Advanced Modding.
• Galactic Civilizations II 1.2 in May.
• Galactic Civilizations II 1.3 in June.
• Additional development TBD.

At some point there will be an expansion pack that will continue the story and has many few features planned such as add hot-seat multiplayer, add advanced covert options for espionage (agents), per-race tech trees (each race have its own tech tree), user-created opponents, Lots more options, Scenario Editor, Map Editor.

A second expansion pack may be created that adds multiplayer if there's sufficient demand. Beyond that we will have to see.

Stardock is also working on a Massively Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy Game (MMORTS) called Society. That won't be out for quite awhile still.

Brad Wardell
Founder, Chief Executive Officer
STARDOCK SYSTEMS

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