Flash of Steel header image 4

Entries from November 3rd, 2009

Three Moves Ahead Episode 37 – Chris Park and AI War: Fleet Command

November 3rd, 2009 · 23 Comments · Indie Games, Interview, Podcast, Sci Fi, Three Moves Ahead

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 […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

The Escapist Goes to War

November 3rd, 2009 · 2 Comments · Escapist

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 […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Turn Based vs Real Time

November 3rd, 2009 · 1 Comment · Blogs, Design

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 […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Egypt: Engineering an Empire

November 1st, 2009 · 1 Comment · Ancients, Slitherine

I just finished teaching about this stuff. Egypt is the first in a series a turn based grand strategy games with important economic and military aspects linked to the History TV channel series Engineering an Empire. You must engineer an empire from its roots to the height of its power. You take the role of […]

[Read more →]

Tags:

Now What?

November 1st, 2009 · 10 Comments · Me

With the teaching done and buried for now, it’s time to get back to the blogging thing. But I’m finding my strategy coffers a little empty at the moment. Part of that is because there are so many non-strategy games to catch up on. I still have to play Arkham’s Asylum and Brutal Legend, both […]

[Read more →]

Tags: