Sins of a Solar Empire Post-Mortem now up!

Gamasutra has it! Check it out!

By Frogboy Posted April 28, 2008 17:45:45

Gamasutra has posted the in-depth post-mortem on Sins of a Solar Empire. For gamers as well as developers who want to see how a hit game was made that was done almost completely differently than the typical publisher/developer system, you'll definitely want to check this out.

It also has screenshots of very very early builds of Sins that you'll probably get a kick out of.

View: Sins of a Solar Empire Post-Mortem

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Hope I get to work with SD and IC some day!

very cool

That review really brings up something special about the gaming industry; when developer and publisher go hand-in-hand to get a really awesome product going. If only the rest of the industry could take heed to this monumental success, then we could get some polished games that really work well!

I love game post-mortems and this is a great one

Interesting story about developing process and afterwards events.

I still take objection with the article blaming beta testers on stuff getting removed, because the example they give is a lie

But it was a fun read other than that

i enjoyed it thx

I still take objection with the article blaming beta testers on stuff getting removed, because the example they give is a lie But it was a fun read other than that

Yeah! I was dissapointed to see that comment in there as well, but it was a good article.

And a Great game.

Cheers.

The caption on the picture at page 3 is a bit poorly worded (or at least longly worded). Can anyone explain what is making a comeback in version 1.1? Is it the ability to buy and sell research on the Black Market?

-HM

I think they meant the ability to buy/sell stuff off the main UI without having to open up the black market screen.

Meh, boring. It would be much cooler if we could buy and sell research items on the Black Market. A la swapping techs with the races in GalCiv.

-HM

That was shot down a long time ago.. doubt we'd see it. Would require quite a bit of reworking, since right now all the majority of techs are unique in what they modify, so they wouldn't apply to the other races. There aren't many generic research items that would work, and most of them are civic

Not to mention that it'd open up a huge balancing can of worms.

Oh, I fully realize it's a bit out there in things to hope for category, but I got a little hopeful the way I read the caption. It would be cool to straight out buy my way to trade ports. Ah well.

-HM

More concept pics??

Enjoyable post-mortem! The more I think about it, the more I realize that Sins' release date was probably pretty important. It really would have been swamped out (not deservedly, but swamped nonetheless) if it had been released during the AAA-deluge of late last year.

2. Vocal public beta testers were able to convince us to change features that would have been better left untouched.

For example, the beta allowed the AI to take over for dropped players in multiplayer. However, beta testers complained that with the save/restore option, players could just restart the game and having an AI player get involved interfered with the experience.

As a result, the feature of allowing computer players to pick up after dropped players was removed in the retail release (it was added back in 1.03).

Huh? i was a very active beta tester from beta 1 to beta 4, and i read almost every post and never saw any talk that suggested the removal of the AI taking over for dropped players...

"beta testers were able to convince us to change features that would have been better left untouched"
I dunno about the other beta testers, but i for some reason feel abit offended by that, since we gave alot of good suggestions and among some which they didnt change and now after release people are complaining about it. So id like to know what else we convinced them to change that was "better left untouched"

Who wrote this postmortem? It's not attributed to anyone.

-HM

That's exactly what I said, Multi

I was surprised by the TSR game reference since I was sure the game came from the Stellar Conquest board game (which I still own). Its remarkably similar.

"Post-mortem" doesn't seem like quite the right word. Most "post-mortems" I've read are some guy who made a mediocre game bellyaching about software piracy.

Who wrote this postmortem? It's not attributed to anyone.-HM

If you look in the upper-left corner, you'll see it was written by Brad Wardell and Blair Fraser.

You beta tester guys might be missing a key word there.

Vocal

What I interpreted the stress on this word to mean is that the "squeaky wheel" got too much of the grease that was available, and Sins' creators spent too much effort listening to some of the beta testers who were LOUD about specific features, rather than really intelligent about them. In other words, it was a Sins team failing because they didn't filter out the occasional input from the beta that really didn't count.

It does come across as a bit of blame transference because of the way it's stated, but I don't think its meant to deride the contributions of most of the beta participants. The way I look at it, the game would quite simply be not nearly as polished and compelling without the many betas that it went through.

-- Retro

Retro, no, we didn't miss it because for the most part, we were part of the vocal group

We participated in pretty much every valid discussion, from "Losing your flagship (level 3 back then) hurts too much" to "Infinite economy is bad" to "Current fleet system makes it completely impossible for smaller empires/random maps due to hard fp cap".

I think the thing that really puzzles me about the example they give is not really that they blame beta testers for it, I'd take responsibility as part of the beta group for something I argued for changing. The thing is that.. there was no big/loud discussion about how the AI should not take over because it's easy to save/load. There were a lot of "AI sucks" and such threads saying an AI that replaces a human in MP is worthless, but we argued and proposed many AI tweaks to make it good, we never said to take it out completely. So to me it sounds like whoever wrote that article is pulling that out somewhere where the sun doesn't shine.

No mention of the dreaded MP crash bug...?

Very nice, I got a kick out of the pics. Referring to the above, ya for some reason I randomly get kicked by that bug in online play. Will there be a future patch to fix this problem?