About Me and The Blog

Dragon Age: Origins
It’s not a strategy game but I thought I should weigh in on what’s been consuming the time of me and my friends. I sprung for Dragon Age: Origins (both versions) and I downloaded the toolset and even bought the Warden’s Keep DLC. So I am obviously hooked into yet another Bioware game. Some observations: 1) The [...]

Histwar: Les Grognards Dropped By Battlefront
I can’t say I blame them. Histwar, an ambitious Napoleonic strategy/wargame, has been in development forever and it says something about the state of independent publishing that Battlefront stuck it out this long. I do hope the game gets finished, of course, and that it is good. But all it would take is one or [...]

Three Moves Ahead Episode 37 – Chris Park and AI War: Fleet Command
Chris Park from Arcen Games joins us this week to talk about independent game development and how his sci-fi RTS AI War: Fleet Command saw the light of day. Park talks about the design process, the challenge of modeling risk and reward and the difficult part of difficulty levels. It’s also one of our longest [...]

The Escapist Goes to War
This week’s issue of The Escapist is dedicated to the idea of war, and the articles are generally interesting. Greg Tito’s “history of wargaming” doesn’t really add anything new or interesting to the already large library on this topic but Shawn Williams article on the impact of video game soldiering to real war is quite [...]

Turn Based vs Real Time
I’ve always thought that the division of strategy games into turn based and real time categories was artificial. How a game tracks time is, in my opinion, less important than what it expects the player to do within that time. Soren Johnson seems to agree with me. He just posted his August Game Developer column on [...]