Halo Wars Demo Download: You can get it here. Narration by Lead Designer Graeme Devine. The demo gives some information on the control system, built from scratch to make RTS come alive on the X360.
http://www.halowars.com/
RTS Console Controls: Our Halo Wars team has put a big effort into the controls for this game because we want playing an RTS on the X360 to be easy and intuitive. We started the research on this project several years ago by actually reprogramming Age of Mythology to be playable with a console controller. When designer/programmer Tim Deen proved he could play Age of Mythology faster with the controller than with a mouse/keyboard, we felt confident we could create a full-blown console RTS.
Asian Dynasties Popular in Leipzig: Our producer on this project, Brian Lemon, says that whenever he checked our Asian Dynasties stations at the Leipzig game show were busy. This show is open to the public so anyone attending could walk up to a machine and start a skirmish game or play one of the early scenarios in the single player campaign. Most of the show feedback will probably be posted on the Internet in German, unfortunately.
Vote Your Prediction for Halo Wars Sales: At a website called the Simexchange site members can vote on the number of sales they predict for Halo Wars and other games. Voters are currently predicting sales of 2.2 million for Halo Wars (and nearly 10 million for Halo Wars 3), for example. The Halo Wars numbers may have gotten a boost from the recent E3 and Leipzig PR campaigns, plus the imminent release of Halo 3. This site is a variation on similar sites used to predict a variety of things, including most famously, political elections. These experiments support the phenomena called the wisdom of crowds and when enough people take part they are often uncannily close to what really happens. Go to this site and search for Halo Wars.
http://www.thesimexchange.com/frontpage.php
Age of Empires R-P-S Combat System: During the German Game Developer’s Conference I got into a number of discussions that recalled the development of the first Age of Empires game, including one about the rocks-paper-scissors combat system. For combat in that first game we used a system where infantry (rocks) beat cavalry (scissors) beat archers (paper) beat infantry. The question we had to resolve then was how badly rocks broke scissors, etc. We felt that if rocks were two or three times better than scissors, for example, that would skew the game more toward hard core gamers, since they would really benefit from understanding the relationships and achieving favorable combat situations in play. In contrast, a very low advantage, say only 25 percent, would make the game easier for casual gamers since they would barely notice that rocks were beating scissors and didn’t have to carefully match their units against opponents.
In the end we decided that the advantage would be around 30 to 50 percent. We felt this would not greatly penalize the casual gamer but was enough of an advantage to pay off for the hard core gamer who could micro-manage his battles. This was a good decision looking back now, as it fell in line with our goal of building a game that had wide appeal. Discussing other RTS games at the conference many people thought that many were too hard for casual gamers and that difficulty limited their success. As the Age of Empires series went forward, we expanded the R-T-S system with counter units but never let the system skew too far toward hard core games only.
Age III Board Game Development Team: I got together with the people mainly responsible for creating the Age of Empires III board game for our first game together since the game shipped. The creative team is in the photo below. Left to right they are Keith Blume (marketing, plus responsible for rule and outside playtests); Glenn Drover (designer of the game and President of Eagle Games until it folded); Paul Niemeyer (artist responsible for most of the art in the game); Jack Provenzale (friend of the company very active in testing and suggesting rules changes). I took three photos and Glenn’s eyes were closed in all three.
The board game continues to rank very high at boardgamegeeks.com and the first print run is close to selling out. ES designer Sandy Petersen tells us that he has been playing the game quite a bit lately with friends and considers it the best of the Eagle games.
100 Best Hobby Games: Green Ronin Publishing released at Gencon their new book listing the best hobby games of all time (board, paper, and card games). Each game is described in an essay written by people from the industry. ES’ers Sandy Petersen, Paul Jaquays, and I contributed essays, Paul’s about Runequest, Sandy’s about Up Front, and mine about Acquire. I was not aware of who else was writing or what games were included until recently. I doubt I have played even half the games on the list, which give me something to look forward to. Check out the list of games included and the authors here.
http://www.greenronin.com/store/grr4001#support
Scouts: August 1 was the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts, started at Brownsea Island, England, by Lord Baden Powell. On a whim I took an informal poll of our studio and learned that nearly 20% of our employees were Cub, Boy, Girl, or Explorer Scouts and some are active in the program as adults. That’s a lot of exposure to outdoor adventure and leadership training for a group that might be expected to have been spending their free time with game consoles and PCs.
We have at least two Eagle Scouts, Artist Pete Parisi and Designer Sandy Petersen, and Sandy’s four sons are Eagle Scouts also. Most respondents have very good memories of their Scouting experiences (for Tim Deen, hiking the Grand Canyon rim to rim in five days, for example).
Bruce Shelley