Seems that  I’ve run into a series of “delays” over the course of this month.

Between two total reinstalls of Vista and now my video card up and dying on me, even though it’s only 2.5 years old, I’ve been trying to finish a game.

It’s been somewhat frustrating not being able to finally nail Juggerdome. It has given me the chance to get further into planning the next Last Stand. I can safely say that it’ll be the biggest project I’ve ever worked on and I’m busting to get started.

Here’s to hoping the next week or so goes smoothly once my new graphics card arrives.

Below is a song done by the composer who has produced all the music for pretty much every game I’ve ever made. It’s made on his new toy, the monome. It’s a hand built, highly customisable crazy music machine. Enjoy the clip, Canon in :D.

So the game has been out for just over a week now. It’s getting good press and the reviews on Armor Games have been good if not all too often incoherent.

I have to admit, I loathe the first few days after a release. I’m generally exhausted having been up until 5am a few nights in the week prior, only to be confronted with thousands of people filling my comments pages with bugs and ‘glitches’ (I hate that word). Then follows the week of fixing, more late nights, the constant urge to keep checking the score, plays, comments.

As it stands though, the rating is 9.2 and it’s had over 1 million plays during this first week, but it’s raised a few concerns about the future. Why? Well there’s a few reasons…

Expectation.
It’s a curse. A lot of initial reactions were that the first game was better, too many bugs, didn’t live up to what was shown off. I’m not really sure how to handle expectation at the moment, especially with a third Last Stand game on the horizon. In Warfare’s case I think that it had a bit of an impact because it was only a sidestep from the original, so the two were comparable but not identical.

Complexity.
Really, Warfare 1944 is pretty basic as far as Real Time Strategy goes, but it seems it went waaaaay over the heads of a lot of people. I’ll admit there is a fair chunk of assumed knowledge in there, short of delaying the play of someone for 10 minutes while you explain it all, I’m not sure how much more I could have laid it out.

On top of that, the game does force you to actually play it though, unlike 1917 and it’s passive sit back and spam away tactics. It’s more challenging and makes you think, unlike 1917 where you didn’t have to consider resources or micromanage units. As far as I can tell from the polar nature of internet comments, some enjoyed it, some hated / were confused by it.

What I’ve learned.
I need to address all of my audience and cater to them. Some of them are a hell of a lot younger than I had counted on. I think I can safely say that a majority of my future games will have difficulty settings, different play modes and other functionality to broaden the play opportunities for everyone.

- Con